#misunderstood fish

[aquariuminfobureau]

Today I was aware someone had imported a cobitid they were trading as a moosefaced loach. The species in question is more traditionally called the gongota loach, Canthophrys or Somileptes gongota, from shallow and slow-moving streams in northern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Reports of its natural presence in the state of Orissa, in eastern India, seem to be false. This species is best documented from piedmontane hill streams. They can also be called a moosehead, or even a jaguar loach.

This species grows to about 13 centimeters, or 5 inches, and is thus a nice size for many home tanks. It is considered quite an uncommon loach in its range, and the extent of its natural distribution is disputed among ichthyologists. Gongota loaches have a reputation among aquarists, as a very difficult species to maintain alive. However a minority of loach keepers have reported that this species, when it's needs are provided for correctly, can be undemanding.

According to the literature, mooseface or gongota loaches are reportedly present indiscriminately on muddy, sandy, and gravelly bottoms in the wild, although they are of benthic habits as would be expected of a loach species. However these loaches definitely feed by sifting through fine substrates, and thus they require a sand substrate in order for them to behave safely and normally. When they are in our aquariums, they definitely fare far better when they have access to fine silver sand substrates, which facilitate certain of their natural behaviors.

These include their habit of self-concealment by burrowing activities, and for this reason their eyes are positioned quite dorsally and elevated. Such a configuration of the face allows them to spy above the level of the sand, whilst they are otherwise buried safely out of the view of predators. Decor is therefore not essential to them as hiding places, as long as they can burrow into the sand to hide, which is exactly as they would do when in the wild. These are a very demersal fish indeed.

Some aquarium literature claims that this species requires cooler water, for example a temperature of 18 to 22 or 16 to 24 degrees centigrade Such matches recommendations and norms for sympatric species, as the small carps Danio rerio and Pethia ticto. However its natural range extends a bit further south than some people seem to assume, and it appears not to be strictly a piedmontane fish, as some people maintain.

With this species, perhaps, their location of origin should be used to determine the proper temperature for these fishes, if this may be possible. In fact in southern parts of their range, the temperature of the water averages at 25 to 26 degrees centigrade, and seasonally may drop closer to 20, ànd rise nearer to 30 degrees. In these waters, which are always flowing but not too powerfully, the pH is between 7 and 8, and thus circumneutral whilst leaning towards the alkaline side. This is contrary to some online opinion, that this species requires very soft and acidic water.

The feeding habits of gongota loaches are to sift morsels such as insect larvae from a fine substrate, expelling the non-food ingesta via their gills and retaining edible particles for digestion. Therefore the most appropriate diet for these fish, would be small, defrosted foods of suitable nature, or sinking dry foods if they will accept them. Although newly imported gongata loaches have a reputation for being difficult to feed, and generally for dying after importation, they can fortunately adapt to eating dry preparations.

With their own species, gongota loaches gregarious, and they are properly housed together in groups. Although they are very tolerant and peaceful by nature, their feeding habits can complicate their care in the ordinary community tank. This is because many other fishes are eager to snatch the same first of food items, that the gongota loach needs to eat, and their nature is to feed only at the bottom of the aquarium. More active fishes that are present in the same aquarium as gongota loaches, might eat the available food before the nocturnal sifters can access it.

Otherwise feeding these loaches is unproblematic, assuming that they have already been acclimatized - provided that the food particles they are offered are sufficiently small in size. They can even take to eating flakes once they have become waterlogged and sunk to the substrate. Gongota loaches seem to be a fish that perishes too often through the importation process, but are not in principle difficult, as long as certain special needs they have, are anticipated and provided for.

[sp0np]

Drew angelina jolie fish and the other one as girlfriends because fuck oscar.

The only reason she’s a gold digger is cuz she likes girls and angie deserves better so i’m giving her a hot girlfriend thank you for coming to my ted talk

[anzuhan]

Hey do you like the blue and purple?

like. the colors ???

sumi loves all colors and tries to utilize them all as best as possible to show the world there are no ugly colors; in fact, sumi has a story up on insta back in 2021 asking people ab what color or color combo they thought is the ugliest and sumi went on to make a couple drawings with them :)

well these are old and sumi could absolutely show their beauty more now ! but the point remains the same

sumi feels right now purple is an easy color to default to due to it being a good combo with lots and almost all of them ! so a lot more drawings end up being purpley </3 but in case of the very thing sumi is drawing has more predominant warm colors or something else, sumi does try to utilize different ones for this reason ! its not fully a matter of preference of purples and blues

sumi also doesnt have a favorite color, but if you really need an answer itd be like a chromatic pale purple to gray, like dvds ! they dont hold just one color to them, and even then their purply gray shade in general is awesome too !!

[neonfretra]

i realize keeping fish is not very universal so here are some fish behaviors that i think are funny ^_^

when they figure out the feeding schedule and start swimming around the surface around meal time

when they get in a fight for a single flake of food and chase each other around and snatch it out of each others mouth. while another flake sinks. right next to them. little stupid <3

when they see me outside of the expected feeding time and scatter. fake fans :(

in the exact opposite direction, when they see me and come out because they know i have food :)

when they swim weird and give me a heart attack but theyre just trying to eat algae off the tank decor

or food that sinks

used to have bigger fish that liked to dig and scare me with the areas they would hide in. but it was cute :) had one that had this little hole he would slide in and out of by going horizontal . i didnt know they could do that .

when they hide and peek their head out a little bit! hello there i dont see you!

when there are active fish! most similar to people watching IMO. old man (albino cory catfish) moves up and down a lot this is normal behavior ^_^ im serious hes healthy hes just doing exercise in the park

you can see more active behavior in territorial fish too BUT they will require a bigger tank (and other things..! depends on the species) . for the territory you see .they chase each other sometimes . usually when they are establishing territories and dominance when there are new fish or a water change/redeccorration from knocking stuff over and putting it back up . they had different favorites!

when they school ^_^ its really pretty to watch them i <3 schooling fish

[javierduffy]

kieran and javier finding moments or even seconds of domestic bliss in canon pls

my friend i have scoured, deep sea dived, deep cleaned, poker all-inned and i have never once in my rdr2 career ever been able to find a positive interaction between them in canon. i didn’t think they even had ANY for the longest time until someone found one and its literally javier threatening kieran … which i would personally not categorize as “domestic bliss”. i think our best bet for canon content is crossing our fingers and praying that the ai for them in camp has them sit next to each other momentarily

[rutadales]

This is a PSA!! If ur writing shark hybrid c!foolish, first off: I love you. Second off: don't just write him as a dog!!

He wouldn't growl! sharks lack organs capable of making sounds! (mute!foolish time baby!) Have him eat raw fish, that's always super fun! Oh, since there are turtles in Minecraft, great whites will bite the flippers to immobilize them, take this detail and run. They also hunt most often in the morning, morning person foolish real?? Oh oh since there are also dolphins in game, great whites will swim under or behind dolphins to avoid their echo location, please take this information and do with it what you will.

Great whites don't really fight with each other to resolve conflicts and GUESS WHO THAT SOUNDS LIKE!! Make him super curious!! He just. Bites shit when he doesn't know what it is. Have him just bite other dsmp members to try and figure out what they are upon first meeting. Draw or write him spy-hopping! just PLEASE give him actual shark traits please I'm begging I'm actively begging

[pharawee]

You're getting too close, nong. What are you doing?

LATER:

[frogfishwastaken]

Fish are smart and social and have memories and feel pain and people calling them stupid and using that as an excuse to treat them less humanely than other animals makes me so sad :(

For context, a biologist named Culum Brown has been doing fish research for years and has found that they are simply deeply misunderstood because the way they’re adapted to their aquatic environment is different from how terrestrial animals are adapted to land environments. People just see fish doing thing and don’t understand that it’s useful for survival in the deep sea. They don’t bother to observe them enough because of preconceived biases constructed by society’s portrayal of fish and our experiences on land.

(This has connections to the Bible and the hierarchy of animals established in it as well. I don’t think we realize the extent to which Western culture and Christianity have consciously and unconsciously shaped science.)

Despite the widespread and deeply pervasive myth that fish are dumb they actually have been proven to have the ability to remember how to evade traps even years after first learning how to do it and they can observe and learn from other fish and they have cultural transmission and friendships with fish they recognize and I’m going to cry

There’s also very little concern for fish welfare, since they aren’t beloved flagship species like dolphins or whales or seals, and generally they’ve been so poorly understood that people basically think of them as having the same level of sentience as plants. That is NOT TRUE and the conditions fish are subjected to before they die are FUCKING AWFUL and nobody’s out here protesting against that when there have been so many efforts to reduce the suffering of farm animals. Nobody ever really labels a can of tuna “free range’ but they’ll label it “dolphin safe” bc we’ve always cared more about the species that are similar to us.

And! Hot take! Maybe we shouldn’t associate intelligence with value in the first place! That has historically had some pretty awful implications for how we treat other humans based on how they are perceived or presented by people in power!

All this definitely has some sociological ties and implications.

[autodiscipline]

Whats your fave band from the KEY PARTY label? I ask because i feel like everyone has very similar answers…

aliene ma'riage of course. they are my #1, I'm a huge fan of kyouka's kitten vocals & attitude. his solo album is one of my all times as well

[spearxwind]

you what’s a really funny about me following you for and massively enjoying Challenger Deep?

i am Extremely Not Down with the open ocean and ocean creatures larger than a school bus. worst thing in the world to me. Bad Vibes. far too scary by far‚ i was scared

That's really valid! The truth is though that most creatures larger than a school bus won't really hurt you (on purpose at least), most creatures that can hurt you arent really larger than a school bus at all (sharks and orcas, mostly) and the grand majority of things that can hurt are usually the size of a football at most. Sperm whales however (bigger than a school bus) will kill you just with the loudness of their clicks in close proximity alone

Jokes aside though I do think it's worth learning about the ocean to find it a little less scary, the same way you can do with bugs to make them feel less scary. We fear the unknown a lot, and the ocean is very feared for this reason, so what better way to combat the fear than to learn about it? That is actually a huge part of why I try to share so much about the sea, Challenger Deep included

Yes, I do want it to be scary when necessary and bc ooooo scary sea monsters and sailor legends are cool as hell, but I don't want it to come at the cost of people fearing our ACTUAL oceans!

If you ever have the time, and ever feel like fearing the ocean a little less, I recommend maybe watching a few videos from the EV nautilus channel where they find cool creatures in the deep and excitedly talk about them! And you can see most of them literally just Chill Out at the bottom most of the time. Or even check out the really cool and educational posts by @mbari-blog where they showcase cool creatures and biomes :]

In the end the ocean isnt actually some hell dimension to fear, its just another ecosystem filled with life that's evolved differently <3

And I will refer to this very cool post I reblogged recently as proof

[misunderstoodera]

Girls day again for my daughters April and Aniyah . Seafood Shack ❤️

[aquariuminfobureau]

Some other coldwater freshwater fishes appear irregularly in the pond and aquarium trade, beyond domesticated goldfish and koi varieties. Whilst many of these lack color, they may have bags of character, and interesting behaviors. One such fish is the miller's thumb or European sculpin, Cottus gobio. This fish normally grows only to 10 centimeters or 4 inches, and sometimes quite larger, to 18 centimeters,or a little over 7 inches. Even this is not huge, so they do not require raised indoor ponds or other massive aquariums. From the perspective of European aquarists, this is a true native fish, having a natural distribution over a swathe of Europe, including its presence on Great Britain.

Their habitat preference is for well oxygenated streams and rivers, with coarse beds featuring large stones. Although these sculpins are found in rapids, they have a preference for moderate flow. It is their behavioral selection for useful slack water refuges, and obstacles to uncomfortably high flow velocity, that enables their presence in faster flowing, upland headwaters. Younger fish prefer shallow, stony riffles, whereas the adults have broader habitat preferences, and can be found present in the wild around submerged wood and vegetation, in lakes and in slower flowing waters with softer bottoms.

Sculpins are a part of an important radiation of fishes known as cottoids, that also includes the lumpsuckers and greenlings, among some others. Traditionally the cottoids were regarded as a subclade of the scorpaeniform fishes, but the characteristics supporting that 'order' or 'suborder', were few and problematic, for example, their spiny cheeks. Cottoid fishes have turned out to be more closely related to the sticklebacks and eelpouts, than they are to the core scorpaeniforms, or the true scorpionfishes and their allies, which sculpins can certainly resemble.

Cottoids or sculpins are benthic fishes of marine to freshwaters, that lack a swim bladder, which is not unusual for fishes that live on the bottom, because it is a floatation device. C. gobio tolerates broader water requirements, than is often said to be the case. The pH of the waters they inhabit in the uplands is around neutral, but they can migrate down to lowland chalk streams, where the pH is 9, so these are fish of hard and base freshwaters. Although this species can be found in the low salinities of the eastern Baltic Sea, no elevation of specific gravity is necessary in the aquarium, and they are basically freshwater sculpins with a limited tolerance for low end brackish conditions.

Much is said online about the supposed demands of these sculpins for very cool water, and I have read the curious assertion that thejuveniles are more heat tolerant than the adults. Contrarywise, juvenile C. gobio are in fact less tolerant of higher temperatures, than are the adults of their species that have migrated away from riffles, and they become thermally stressed even below 20 degrees. The range of water temperatures at which mature C. gobio feed is as low as 5 degrees and also as high as 26 degrees centigrade.

C. gobio basically have a staple diet of arthropods. Older sources overstate the extent of their predation on fish eggs and fry, though with that said, they actually do consume such items opportunistically. Sculpins such as C. gobio are able to ingest large food items, and smaller ornamental fishes may end up as prey. C. gobio are territorial and aggressive among themselves, and prone to conflict with other bottom living fishes. Conflicts can be minimized by providing these fishes with a complex aquascape, in which lines of sight are easily broken. Stones, gravel, wood, and live water plants, are all appropriate for this species Sculpins are normally ignorant of dissimilar fishes with different patterns of spatial use.

[thelien-art]

First i must apologize I have a tendency to forget that tumblr - even when we're all 'on' - is not live interaction and additionally you can't actually read my mind 😅

This was in reaction to seeing your ... delightful?? .. new frog. In such a state. And I got nervous 😋🦀💖

Annon... I´m gonna cry... I love you♡♡♡ you´re making me do happy jumps♡

And I understand fully what you mean about "reading minds" if you can call it that, we´re all there at times!

I hope this is you trying to get me to talk about my wonderful frog Kaj because that´s what I´m gonna do know XD

-

This is Kaj - named after my second favorite show as a child - he´s 25 cm long, and he´s a treefrog, there didn´t stand which one but my best guess is a red eyed tree frog, he just doesn't have the blue stripes, he could also be a Agalychnis moreletii (Morelet's tree frog) but he doesn't have black eyes and Morelet´s are known for their black eyes (a nickname of theirs is black eyed frog).

He could also be an American green tree frog, but his feet are a bit too pigmented, and back a bit to light for that, although the eyes would match there.

Actually he´s a woman as he has an ovary and oviduct (the blue stuff you can see below his urostyle) but I didn´t know that until I unpacked him, where I already had named him

Going with the idea he´s a Morelet (as that´s what he looks most like) he would be around 60mm (f-54 m-60/64)

Red eyed tree frog gets around 6/7 cm (f-7,5 m-5)

All in conclusion he´s a tree frog. Which kind of one? Karl.

And no, the crabs need not fear, he´s much too small to be of any danger in the wild, and my Kaj is made of plastic so he doesn't really jump or eat, unfortunately.

Although some crabs might want to watch out for the Goliath frog... (world's biggest frog at around 32 cm and 3.3 kilograms)

[desultorydenouement]

listen. bad people can make good art. do you really read classic books and just listen to what they’re trying to tell you? that’s not what art is about! art is about what they’re not trying to say! art is a porthole into other people’s worlds! it’s a camera into other people’s minds! it’s how they see the world! navigate their lives! and if they’re bad people, and their view of the world inevitably fucked up, READ IT ANYWAY, and see how all their hatreds and fears and selfishness taint the way they view the world, and learn it. see the way it slants. and next time you look at the world around you and find it leaning just a little bit further into hatred and despair and bigotry, you will know enough about perspective to keep yours steady.

[cream-stew]

hi hi, this is the anon who sent the diluc/zhongli threesome request :3 thank you so much for writing it, you did it wonderfully! (as always) 🩵

thank you for the feedback I'm very glad you liked it <3 <3

[sodrippy]

HI VAL what are your fav dynamics™ that ur ocs have w each other 💞

HI omg i didnt get a notif u sent me this sorrrrry!

help i think all of my OCs in the past few yrs have been collaborative with my friends and tbh my faves are always the dynamics between my characters and my friends' from the same world/story bc its always so fresh and fun and fluid! obviously it plays a lot from the relationship i have w my friends outside of the story but its always so cool to me to see the different ways that plays out -

to that end my dnd oc nyx and @woodzbfgf rory's benji are soooo so precious to me. their dynamic is everything, they are asshole besties and also pirates what more could you want. in particular i really love that benji highlights a side of nyx which isnt seen almost at all without him and they have a depth that only comes from people whove had each other's backs for years.

and ofc @pendraegon ellian's jouka and nyx<3 the way we developed their bond so organically was really special mwah, and sort of inversely to benji and nyx, theyre like work besties who become real life friends yknow ahdhsbx

in terms of entirely my own OCs a fave is def one of my first fully fledged characters, eli, and his kid simon- i think i developed a really nice dynamic between them which personally was an achievement bc i usually find family dynamics really hard (hence practically all my ocs ever are orphans 😭 SORRY i am so predictable) so it was a really fun experience to try and go beyond my own perspective and craft something meaningful there!

kissies thank u for the ask i love my little characters sm<3