TBTB: You appear to belong in the SA jungle or in SE Asia where they do all this
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N: haha I wish. My favorite fish and also lots of cute girls!
TBTB: I thought you said you weren't sure - marmoratus vs pictus? Now you are sure of marmoratus, right?
N: The only problem I have is that I don't have a pictus skeleton for proper comparison. Comparing the marmoratus skeleton it really is striking how much similar the hybrid is to it. IMO I would definitely go with marmoratus. When I relook at the skeletons it's just way too similar. Way more marble in it than RTC from the looks of it. I will have to get some good pics or do a vid explaining the comparison. Unfortunately the skeleton of the hybrid is damaged where chlorine was poured into my pond to kill it. chlorine damages the calcium bonds causing the bones to fall apart over time. I'm very carefully trying to preserve it.
TBTB: 1. Do you think fasciatum is used for the TSN x blochii or for any hybrid involving a TSN?
TBTB: 2. Do you have a guess at which species was the mother and the father for any hybrids?
N: 1. I would say it is more than likely. My previous statement along with comparison of the skeletons suggests so. There have also been pseudoplatystoma x pseudoplatystoma hybrids.
2. According to the hybrid research I have done usually the larger species is the mother, and smaller one is the father. This I believe has more to do with egg production. Females can be used over and over again to produce hybrids, but the males have to be dissected for their testes. They can use ultrasound to determine sex then dose specific amounts of hormones to induce egg and sperm productions then again for the artificial spawning.
TBTB: That's a shocking thought, albeit one must note it is prematurely too sweeping and general, but yes, some cats even from different families have been hybridized, like Doradids and Pims, Pangasiidae and Pims. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, as usual.
N: This is why I was working so hard to get lots of adult catfish raised. My plan when I finished the 4000 gal aquarium was going to be building 6 500 gal tanks that would be used to raise multiple adults of various large species from around the world, then get an ultrasound so that I could sex the fish and seperate them by sex. It would have been pretty small scale for what you would actually hope for, but I am just too curious to leave it up to people looking to make a profit. I was going to sample the offspring every week, then every month, and then yearly for disection and to send to Dr. Lundbergs team for analysis. This way I could control the parameters of what was going on. I could have also sold enough of them to keep going on the research as well. Hopefully I can try to kick this off again in the future.
I was even making a list of species I wanted to test this on. I wanted to see if it is just that pimelodid catfish are good for this or if you could do this with other families of catfish. As in not have a pimlodid as one of the parent species. Maybe try like a goonch x bullhead or something like that. I felt that both bullheads and goonch exist in cool mountain streams so there shouldn't be much in the way of metabolic issues. You get the point lol.
TBTB: As you said, it didn't eat well. I'd not expect it to stop growing or slow so much, unless it was one of those zombie hybrids, as you mentioned, which do not survive to adultood/not viable.[/QUOTE]
N: it's not as if I thought it's appetite was reduced at all just seemed as if this fish ate very little because it didn't need more. Very interesting seeing the skeletal characteristics of this one lol.
