Annoyingly finicky shovelnose

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thebiggerthebetter said:
... Shovelnose is doing great. Eating great. NLS pellets, hikari carnivore sinking pellets, tubifex and bloodworms, and loves the scent of krill but doesn't feed at the surface
***Excellent. Some say it's hard to willfully wean them onto dry foods like pellets but some are easy. Hard to predict why and how.

Gonna try to get him or her hand feeding so I can do krill.
***Always a wonderful idea both for the fish and for you.

Seems as though this fish is damn near blind and will only eat what the whiskers touch. This is leading to some of the tankmates getting over fed.
***Not it, probably. They are ambush predators. They don't chase food. They wait patiently in ambush mimicking a floating twig and wait for live food to get lulled into a feeling of safety and come too close. Then snap! I find their eyesight to be pretty decent for a catfish. That's in day light. At night it all becomes 100% driven by barbels / whiskers but they do need to hide from all the larger predators looking for food at night too......... Having said that I must add that they do adjust their positions and often come out slowly approaching food thrown into their tank. Depends on the flow too and where the food is going, whether it sits in a pile or is blown around or something in between...

... would love to get more of them but the tank is quite small already. It's a standard 125 with an oscar, 2 sevs, a chocolate, and 2 Raphael cats with him. The two Raphs are going in my brother in laws 75 as soon as his lazy ass gets the filter for it. Everyone's still pretty small.
***IMHO you can get at least 6 of them in there, with your impeccable care, might even get more. They are elongatus (max 1'), not lima (max 2').

... This is also without running carbon in my filters.
***I never have carbon in my filters. It'd be a waste of space for my purposes. Can never have too much bio filtration. No such thing.

... Just didn't know my lighting was too bright for cats.
***I didn't mean your lighting. Spoke in general. Like you said, plants give shade and comfort and shelter. The light brightness importance is much reduced then, not eliminated though.

... I might remove the powerhead. None of the fish really like it now that u mention the flow...
***Surely you realize you will reduce DO, dissolved oxygen. So it's a game of the right and doable balance.
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I like the sound of that. lots to think about here. thank you very much for the info and input.
 
thebiggerthebetter thebiggerthebetter youre a terrible influence. Just picked up the other shovelnose from my lfs. I'll get pictures as soon as the sun goes down. There's lots of glare in pictures. "B" a lot brighter in color than shovelnose "A". And shovelnose "A" has more black in the fins. It'll be easier to show with pictures they're swimming on top of each other. My lfs quarantines their fish. I should probably still quarantine but I've been getting away with it for a while now. Bad excuse. Guess I'll learn the hard way one day.
 
Cute stuff. 2 down, 4 to go.

It's too early to say how (dis)similar they'd be in terms of coloration. When the "B comer" settles in and will have eaten well for a while, then maybe. Experiment397 Experiment397 's LSN has slowly been taking on a lot darker coloration, for instance. At the moment, we appear clueless why.

But IME, they all look the same sooner or later.

bigsea said:
thebiggerthebetter thebiggerthebetter youre a terrible influence....
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I'll chalk it up to your not paying attention to the spell check on your phone. I am a terrific influence. Or at least give me terrifying. Not terrible. :D

I QT only obviously sick fish and fish from the wild, which I cleanse of parasites in and out too. But I freely admit I am not a keeper but hoarder. I've learned to accept this rare shortcoming of my otherwise terrific self.
 
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thebiggerthebetter thebiggerthebetter mine is back to be being pale bellied and dark striped again. not sure what caused the random darkening last week
 
Experiment397 said:
thebiggerthebetter thebiggerthebetter mine is back to be being pale bellied and dark striped again. not sure what caused the random darkening last week
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Thanks, mate!

Inadvertently or not, this lends support to what I had just said above that sooner or later all of the LSN end up looking the same to my eye.
 
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