African Arowana

Three years ago i went to my LFS when i was kind of new to the hobby. Before then, i've seen the run of the mill odd balls but was still finding new ones to add to the tank. At that time i had a small tank so i was just amazed by the diversity of fish on the market. One day, i walk in and the owner tells me i have to check out this fish, that i probably won't see again because it was impossible to get in, he then tells me that it's the first time he's seen one and he's had a tough time getting it in. He showed me an african arowana that was about 6-7 inches long. I had never seen anything like it before, it almost looked like a gourami mixed with a trout and arapaima. It had no barbels and had a rounded nose. He told me that it was a detrtius feeder and caught small fish because it's mouth was unarowana like. Similar features to a bichir. It's fins were abbreviated and it's behavior was very strange. He had it in an amazon setup with tons of discus, large tetras, upside down catfish, rasboras. This fish reminded me of the irrdescent catfish in the way that it would never stop moving, always swimming like a business man late for a meeting, but it was uber aggressive and chased the discus around relentlessly. I've never seen an arowana so aggressive before, it was on the level of a flowerhorn. The discus it was chasing were much larger than it. This kind of struck me as odd because arowanas usually don't give other fish trouble unless they can eat it. And this one was acting like an aggrevated red devil.

I just thought i would share this experience and would LOVE to see if anyone has this fish as it's very rare in the hobby and people haven't really mentioned too much about it. Some pics and personal experience stories would be fantastic. If that african was that aggressive at 6 inches, imagine what it would be like full grown.

By they way, this is a great site and would love to see more members contributing to the videos portion of the gallery.