How Big To Accurately Id?

[Waterlogged]

This may seem like an odd question relating to an odd bunch of fish species, but hopefully someone can help me. I am looking into getting more involved in keeping fish, but as I am only new to it I don’t want to get ripped off. Can anyone tell me at what size (in cms or inches) you can accurately ID the following species:

Butterfly Pleco
Checkerboard Cichlid
Bumblebee Catfish
Paradise fish
Licorice Gourami
African Cichlid
Golden Barb
Sawbwa Barb

These are the species that I have been warned can be swapped for something else if they are too small, so I need to know what sizes I should look for.

Any help is appreciated

[Plaamoo]

Hi Waterlogged. My first bit of advice would be to learn the true names of the fish you’re talking about. “licorice gourami” for instance is a common name for the parosphromenus sp. in my experience. P deissneri is the most common but there are many. It’s a daunting task to learn the “scientific” names as opposed to the common names, but common names vary from distributor to shop, different areas. I’ve seen the same fish in my LFS in two different tanks with 2 different names more than once!

[Waterlogged]

QUOTE (Waterlogged @ Jan 19 2011, 11:58 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

This may seem like an odd question relating to an odd bunch of fish species, but hopefully someone can help me. I am looking into getting more involved in keeping fish, but as I am only new to it I don’t want to get ripped off. Can anyone tell me at what size (in cms or inches) you can accurately ID the following species:

Butterfly Pleco
Checkerboard Cichlid
Bumblebee Catfish
Paradise fish
Licorice Gourami
African Cichlid
Golden Barb
Sawbwa Barb

These are the species that I have been warned can be swapped for something else if they are too small, so I need to know what sizes I should look for.

Any help is appreciated

[Waterlogged]

I do know all the scientific names, but didn’t know that that is the best way to refer to them. The scientific names are as follows:

Dekeyseria pulcher
Dicrossus maculatus
Pseudomystus siamensis
Lamprologus ocellatus
Macropodus opercularis
Myloplus rubripinnis
Neolamprologus meeli
Parosphromenus deissneri
Puntis semifasciolatus
Sawbwa resplendens

Only just starting to realise that there are various common names used for the same species!

[Mark Duffill]

Whereabouts are you located ?

The reason I ask is that half the battle is to find a good retailer that know what they are selling, a lot of fish shops have staff that have no knowledge of the fish they are selling.

[MatsP]

This question is a bit complicated, I believe. It depends, to some extent on “what are you comparing with – what are the alternatives”… Say for example you want to distinguish Pseudomystus siamensis vs. some of it’s south-american counterparts, it’s pretty easy – the asian form has 8 barbels, the south-american one has 6 barbels. So, bring a magnifying glass if they are tiny, but they should be at least an inch or two in the shop, so probably not necessary. It gets more difficult if you wanted to split apart the dozen or so with 6-barbels into the right species…

#320871

[Matt]

If you want to identify Dicrossus down to species level you’d need to look at subadults I’d say.

[Author]

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