How to identify obscura vs. insignis?

[Cohazard]

A friend of mine in the Philippines has a couple parachanna and I've told him they are obscura, and he says they are insignis.

How do you tell the difference?

I've seen the Frank Schaffer pic, and that does nothing for me lol because the parachanna can change dramatically, I need solid identifying traits, honestly, my gut tells me that Frank's ID is wrong.

I was right once before that Polypterus teugelsi does not have solid black fins

 

[tropheus]

the official description state that the diferance between insignis and obscura is as follows :

on obscura the blotches along the flanks alway merge at some point and the blotches on insignis are always seperated.

on insignis there are cheveron shaped bars that run over the back and extand up onto the dorsal fin , these are missing in obscura. head length is also shorter on insignis when compared to obscura .

my personal thoughts on this is that , obscura and insignis is probably shipped in decent amounts out of africa , the thing is the wholesalers will just get a bag of snakeheads from africa , they will then be listed on there stock sheets as african snakehead , the more knowladgable ones know what a africana looks like , knows what a obscura looks like but most will not have heard or know about insignis , so list them as obscura , the shops then buy these and take the wholesalers word as gospal. so i suspect there are quite a few insignis about , just most think there obscura .

it is really hard to tell the diferance visually even for the trained eye , and until recently many argued they where the same species , dna test have now proven that they are in fact to distinct species.

i also noted in franks pic , that the suggested insignis goes against the official descripton and was not 100$ convinced , but then frank had the fish in front of him and he really does know his stuff

cheers col

 

[Cohazard]

Great info Col, I really appreciate your feed back, always concise, factual, and great to read.

I have to mention though that Frank did incorrectly elevate several subspecies of polypterus to species status in his Aqualog book covering the genus.

I asked my buddy to take detailed pics for me to share. I'll post them when I receive them.