Hello everyone, I'm curious to know how common the curved snout, or "duck-bill" deformity is on TSN catfish. When browsing YouTube videos and pictures online I tend to see a pretty large amount of them with the deformity, and my tiger shovelnose I had years ago had it as well. Thanks in advance for any input!
Tiger Shovelnose Curved snout deformity, how common is it?
- Thread starter liberator177
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IME, I'd place it at 1-2 out of 10, conservatively.
One needs to remember that they are farm made and raised and that we, in the "ornamental fish trade", get a tiny fraction of what goes to food markets and we get more runts and genetic hick-ups and culls as the farmers view them as having smaller chances of reaching marketable size in the right time. Hence, instead of tossing them, the farmers get a little bit of return on the "unlucky" ones yet.
A small fraction of them appears to be w/c but IDK how many of those claims can be trusted. Why spend all this energy to get them out of a river when you can walk up to a vat of a myriad of them and scoop up a few hundred in one net sweep? The overhead may be incomparable. But licensing should be factored in too... So, sure w/c happen, but I tend to think it is a far smaller percentage of them than we are made to believe.
One needs to remember that they are farm made and raised and that we, in the "ornamental fish trade", get a tiny fraction of what goes to food markets and we get more runts and genetic hick-ups and culls as the farmers view them as having smaller chances of reaching marketable size in the right time. Hence, instead of tossing them, the farmers get a little bit of return on the "unlucky" ones yet.
A small fraction of them appears to be w/c but IDK how many of those claims can be trusted. Why spend all this energy to get them out of a river when you can walk up to a vat of a myriad of them and scoop up a few hundred in one net sweep? The overhead may be incomparable. But licensing should be factored in too... So, sure w/c happen, but I tend to think it is a far smaller percentage of them than we are made to believe.
Thanks for the replies guys. My guess was around the same estimate as yours thebiggerthebetter, from what I gathered through pics and videos online. I was just looking to get a second opinion on it. I think your spot on with the idea that we, the ornamental fish trade, get sold mainly the runts. I actually found a foreign documentary on youtube of a Tiger Shovelnose farm (for food use) they sort them a few times, and when swapping tanks they separate them by size. The smaller ones are probably the ones they sell to us hobbyists as they would be the least profitable and/or take the longest time to turn a profit. I've been thinking about getting a TSN or two again, but I'm just not a fan of the ones with the curved snouts and would like to try to avoid one with the deformity which seems like it would be pretty hard. Thanks for your time.
Here you go, theres a few videos of the farms I watched, these are the ones I watched all the way. It's a two part series. I tried skipping around to the sorting part but I couldn't find it. Maybe it was in a different video or I just missed it. These are both interesting though, I'll look some more tomorrow night. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epaAFeHGU4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNt0Nxoc4FI
Many thanks. I was riveted. Too bad IDK Portuguese and there are no English subtitles. I am sure they were saying some very useful things for us to know.
Just from the video alone it is hard to say much - I could not tell if the sorting, featured a couple of times, was harvesting and/or culling. Looks like the TSNs are harvested at ~1.5', as, apparently, most larger farmed fish.
Just from the video alone it is hard to say much - I could not tell if the sorting, featured a couple of times, was harvesting and/or culling. Looks like the TSNs are harvested at ~1.5', as, apparently, most larger farmed fish.
