Research Notes - Keeping Rheoheros lentiginosus

The R. lentiginosus page on cichlidae.com is now open for access! So now all the information there, the ones I used in my research, can be used by everyone too.

I was starting to think about potential tankmates for the R. lentiginosus and had a look at some articles.

This article stood out as being of particular interest, detailing distribution of fish in Chiapas.

I parsed out only species that are found in the same localities as R. lentiginosus in Table 2 from the article, with results here. The 'count' column is how many of the six localities that R. lentiginosus was found in in this study, other species were also found in.

My plan is to look at stocklists from sellers and see what matches this list, preferably closer to the top. Note that I have not vetted whether the species here are all supposedly native to the region or if they are invasive. I have yet to decide how I want it to be done, to be honest. But that's for my journal, for research this is currently good enough.

So I was looking at TUIC and did not see anything that was found in Chiapas. I then went to TWS and did find two species currently for sale, Poecilia schenops and Xiphophorus hellerii.

Well, both P. schenops and X. hellerii seems to be native/indigenous to Mexico.

Now that my tank is cycling and getting close to being ready, I decided to do some more research on where to get R. lentiginosus. I contacted The Wet Spot (TWS) and Tangled Up in Cichlids (TUIC) and so far TWS has responded, saying they source their R. lentiginosus from Indonesia...

That is certainly a red flag. I did not go through all this trouble potentially obtaining fish of unclear lineage. Other times I may not care, but this time I do.

Props to TWS though, they were fully honest with me, disclosing not only where they got the fish from, but also what are the better options - i.e. TUIC and a place I had not checked before, or even known about, Cichlids of the Americas (CotA).

So I emailed CotA and they responded with something interesting - their R. lentiginosus was F1 (i.e. the progeny of wild-caught fish) and were originally from Rio Puyacatengo. Really cool!

Goes to show research can be never-ending and there is so many hidden resources out there, just gotta keep searching. Because now I can get fish originally sourced from two localities.

I spent some time yesterday watching some videos of R. lentiginosus on cichlidae.com and must say, learnt some more about these cichlids. They seem to like to overturn rocks and leaves in search of prey. Good to know.

From here on, the details surrounding obtaining and keeping R. lentiginosus will be kept track of here.

Further research will continue to be added to this thread.

A bit more about the bark/filter floss for the wavemaker/internal filter, and even my choice of them and the sponge filter, I posted in two different forums why, see here and here.

Okay, so let's look at the setup. What I need to get are as follows:

• Aquarium

• Lid/hood

• Light

• Stand

• Nitrifiers (can take from existing tank)

• Biomedia (more MarinePure?)

• Heater