"The first point I would like to make is that I DO NOT like the title of the interview. "Do catfishes need to eat wood?" I would answer that question differently than those that they asked. If you read my articles, you will see that the fish do indeed ingest wood in the wild, and this is very much part of their natural niche. So, I would rather ask the question: Can wood-eating catfishes digest wood? I think that the answer to the question "Do they NEED to EAT wood" may actually be "yes", because that is what they do in nature. What they get nutritionally from the wood is a different question altogether "(see below). .....quoted directly from the article.....
"When looking at the loricariid phylogeny it is parsimonious that the spoon-shaped teeth arose to allow the fish access to a resource (wood detritus) that isn’t accessible to loricariids with villiform teeth. But, it is poor inference to assume that this means that the wood-eating catfishes are “eating” AND “digesting” wood. There is fierce resource competition in any environment. In fact, theory predicts that when competition for surface resources becomes strong enough, then digging for resources becomes a viable strategy (Richards 2002). Most loricariids that are sympatric with wood-eating loricariids are grazers, which scrape and suck the surface detritus from the river bed and from the surface of wood. Meanwhile, detritus is collecting in the interstitial spaces of wood, not to mention that the wood itself is organic and is being degraded, and thus represents an additional resource. With so many loricariids in South America, competition for the surface resources is probably fierce enough to elicit digging as a viable foraging strategy. Hence, we see spoon-shaped teeth emerge twice (independently) in the loricariid phylogeny. Nathan Lujan, Kirk Winemiller, and I have a paper in press at Functional Ecology in which we show isotopic and morphological evidence for niche partitioning among wood grazing lorcariids." See the pubs page for this article (when it becomes available).
I stand corrected as they "ingest" but, according to the article , do not digest wood. Certain species do however feed on the biofilm or "awfuchs" and a certain amount of wood can be "ingested" in the process.
Good read! So maybe it's better to say "awfuchs" or biofilm grazers can benefit from having wood in their tanks? Maybe not necessarily need it per se, ...... Curious only because , while my L204 has no shortage or veggies and or proteins available as I also house a group of L75's, he is constantly shredding wood all night long....
Thoughts as to why? I only ask because I am constantly vacuuming wood remnants from my tank
