Research Notes - Keeping Rheoheros lentiginosus

The R. lentiginosus page on cichlidae.com is now open for access! So now all the information there, the ones I used in my research, can be used by everyone too.

I was starting to think about potential tankmates for the R. lentiginosus and had a look at some articles.

This article stood out as being of particular interest, detailing distribution of fish in Chiapas.

I parsed out only species that are found in the same localities as R. lentiginosus in Table 2 from the article, with results here. The 'count' column is how many of the six localities that R. lentiginosus was found in in this study, other species were also found in.

My plan is to look at stocklists from sellers and see what matches this list, preferably closer to the top. Note that I have not vetted whether the species here are all supposedly native to the region or if they are invasive. I have yet to decide how I want it to be done, to be honest. But that's for my journal, for research this is currently good enough.

So I was looking at TUIC and did not see anything that was found in Chiapas. I then went to TWS and did find two species currently for sale, Poecilia schenops and Xiphophorus hellerii.

Well, both P. schenops and X. hellerii seems to be native/indigenous to Mexico.

Now that my tank is cycling and getting close to being ready, I decided to do some more research on where to get R. lentiginosus. I contacted The Wet Spot (TWS) and Tangled Up in Cichlids (TUIC) and so far TWS has responded, saying they source their R. lentiginosus from Indonesia...

That is certainly a red flag. I did not go through all this trouble potentially obtaining fish of unclear lineage. Other times I may not care, but this time I do.

Props to TWS though, they were fully honest with me, disclosing not only where they got the fish from, but also what are the better options - i.e. TUIC and a place I had not checked before, or even known about, Cichlids of the Americas (CotA).

So I emailed CotA and they responded with something interesting - their R. lentiginosus was F1 (i.e. the progeny of wild-caught fish) and were originally from Rio Puyacatengo. Really cool!

Goes to show research can be never-ending and there is so many hidden resources out there, just gotta keep searching. Because now I can get fish originally sourced from two localities.

I spent some time yesterday watching some videos of R. lentiginosus on cichlidae.com and must say, learnt some more about these cichlids. They seem to like to overturn rocks and leaves in search of prey. Good to know.

From here on, the details surrounding obtaining and keeping R. lentiginosus will be kept track of here.

Further research will continue to be added to this thread.

A bit more about the bark/filter floss for the wavemaker/internal filter, and even my choice of them and the sponge filter, I posted in two different forums why, see here and here.

Okay, so let's look at the setup. What I need to get are as follows:

• Aquarium

• Lid/hood

• Light

• Stand

• Nitrifiers (can take from existing tank)

• Biomedia (more MarinePure?)

• Heater

• Sponge filter

• Air pump

• Hose

• 2x Wavemaker/internal filter

• Filter floss

• Bark (like, wood)

• String or something to tie the filter floss and bark to the wavemakers/internal filter

• River sand

• Gravel

• Smooth rocks/pebbles

• Larger rocks (preferably smooth)

• Driftwood, specifically smaller branches

• Mineral-heavier rock

• Algae wafer

• Autofeeder

• Cichlid food

Another good source of potential information is in fact... Youtube.

I was searching for 'rheoheros lentiginosus 'rio chacamax'' there and got videos like this, showing the fish' natural habitat. From the video, they do indeed seem to enjoy open areas. The rocks also do tend to have a lot of aufwuch growing on them, which may be a source of nutrition for the fish here. Some further digging is probably needed to find that out, which can better help with my setup.

With all that, it is time to plan out an aquarium.

Given they are only 'moderately aggressive', which by cichlid standards is very mild, I am considering getting eight. Whether from TUIC or TWS, they are listed as 1.5-2", so not too big to begin with. My plan is to upgrade in the future, so a relatively smaller tank right now should suffice.

With that said, I would not go any lower than 30 gallons in my mind, and if that's the case I'd go for something long and wide, but not high. 40 gallons may be more preferable at this point. Final tank size, I have yet to imagine, but I'd probably try for 150 gallons or more, depending on how things go and how many I have then.

My idea is to create a generally higher flow rate across the tank, perhaps from one side to another, though that's harder to create without a sump or canister filter. An AIO may work. I could also have a wavemaker, just need to make sure to wrap it up with filter floss to prevent anything from being sucked in.

I would want an air pump to aerate the tank, and probably will try to keep the tank at around 25 C or so.

For the substrate, I'd mix about 90-95% river sand and 5-10% small pebbles/gravel. I want to have some nice pieces of driftwood with holes/hovels in them to one side where there is lower flow so that they can nest. Perhaps two sections if space permit, just to give more choice. Then just heaps of branches of various sizes to offer more spaces to explore. The rest I'd keep it rather open and filled more with rocks.

Setting up the environment will take some time. I am thinking of letting a lot of algae grow, then hoping for a lot of invertebrates too. I would probably try to purposefully introduce snails, and probably some cheap feeder shrimps. Aquatic insects would probably be too hard.

That's the gist of the idea for now.

So where am I now? Well to be honest, I found a lot more information on cichlidae.com, specifically here.

I don't want to give all the information available there on here for free, because well the site is great and they need all the money they can get to sustain their activities. So instead, I'd recommend you subscribe to them if you are particularly interested in cichlids. It is absolutely worth it! I got a nifty book from them too. No sponsorship here by the way, just to be clear.

Some additional information of importance from cichlidae.com:

• Females are about 5cm shorter than males.

• Males grow a small hump, females tend to be more colorful.

• They often inhabit clear, cool rivers.

• Temperature range in the wild is 22 to 34 C.

• River beds typically consists of boulders, rocks, shale, gravel, sand, silt, logs, marl, and a few times mud. Regularly there is no vegetation.

• Forages in moderately fast flowing current, stay away from very strong current, not often found in stagnant current.

• pH range is 7 to 8.5.

• Not aggressive during feeding.

• Tends to nest in slower flow areas, with holes in wood or caves raised above the riverbed preferred.

• Mating involves females at their nest site entrances, and males patrolling. Females will always pick a male bigger than themself as a mate.

• Eggs take two days to hatch, and wriggler phase is four days.

• Juveniles forage in faster current, as with parents.

• During the whole breeding process parent colors change too - can potentially signal different points that an aquarist can look out for.

• They are generally moderately aggressive.

• In the aquarium. Water chemistry in the aquarium seems to be better if mimics natural conditions. Readily feeds on commercial food. Do not deal well with lower oxygen conditions. Do not deal well with higher temperatures.

A lot of good information!

Again, cichlidae.com is a wealth of information, and from my own perspective, is very trustworthy. So yeah, highly recommended to fork out the money to subscribe to them. Even the information above is not all that was available. It's just what I picked out that was directly relevant to me right now.

A source of information that is often high quality, but less accessible - both in terms of the number of articles behind a paywall, and the difficulty of reading the writing, is Google Scholar.

The first thing I do is to just search for the species name, with no other keywords, just to see how many hits there are. In this case, there is 14, so not that many, though luckily it seems like they are all free to read. No need to try to be more specific with keywords here.

Not much to do here but to go through each article in turn to see if any is interesting. I often just search for keywords, either the genus name (Rheoheros) or species name (lentiginosus), but not both. The full species name is abbreviated after the first instance (i.e. in this case 'Rheoheros lentiginosus' --> 'R. lentiginosus'). I also sometimes search for only part of the species name, i.e. 'lentigi' or similar, because sometimes there are variations - for example some sources have 'lentiginosum' instead.

Here's additional information that I found that I am currently interested in:

That's it. Unfortunately this is the extent of the additional information that I was able to pull from the 14 articles, mainly because the majority of them were not written in a language I understood. There were some other information there, such as localities, but were not as of interest to me at this point.

So what can we learn from all this? Well, the first article confirms they eat invertebrates, more specifically molluscs. They also ate aquatic insects. Well, this indicates that perhaps it is not the best idea to keep snails in the tank (unless we don't mind the snails being eaten), something quite important given how common we like to keep pet snails.

The second article assigned the designation 'SF', or 'Secondary Freshwater', to them. A Google search says that 'secondary freshwater' meant that a fish was able to tolerate brackish water and potentially even cross narrow saltwater environments. This suggests that it is safe to add salt to the aquarium and R. lentiginosus would be fine. Potentially good to know for treatment regimens and such. Such as by ectoparasitic flatworms as in the third article. I could not find treatment regimens for this specific parasite, but I have found information for treatment of its relatives, such as here or here. In case you were wondering, yes I found these articles on Google Scholar. I searched first for 'Sciadicleithrum bravohollisa', which yielded nothing, so I searched for 'Sciadicleithrum' just to make sure information was available, then shifted to searching for ''Sciadicleithrum treatment'.

Next up is some research on the fish itself! We know they are available, so that's great - but how about how to actually keep them?

It's easy to imagine that we can just set up a tank like for any other fish, and toss them in and they should be good. Honestly with cichlids in general, that is not really a terrible idea given they are generally pretty hard.

But let's check just in case. Especially since I personally do, at least this time, want to create a habitat that may be to more their liking.

So cichlidae.com is generally the best resource for cichlid-keeping, at least to start with. How did I found out? Same as with other resources - asking around.

However cichlidae.com also requires a subscription to access species pages. I have access so yay for me, but let's consider other options. After all, it is good to get multiple perspectives too. The first and easiest thing to do is to literally google the cichlid - and so I did just that, googled 'Rheoheros lentiginosus'. Immediately I got a lot of info, including other names it is referred to. In this case, it is also known as the 'freckled cichlid'. Good to know, as not all sources list a scientific name for a fish.

Just be careful however when searching by a common name. Sometimes multiple species may have similar common names. For example, 'texas cichlid' refers to Herichthys cyanoguttatum (or cyanoguttatus, depending on who you talk to), 'green texas cichlid' refers to Herichthys carpintis, 'blue texas cichlid' has been commonly used to refer to both, while 'red texas cichlid' refers to a hybrid species of cichlid. Very confusing.

Anyways, it is indeed easy to get great threads like this on Monster Fish Keepers, but not guaranteed, and of course, always remember - in forums, there are a lot of opinions by both experts and amateurs alike, and misinformation can be common.

The better method is to google for a fish name + 'care', i.e. 'Rheoheros lentiginosus care' or 'freckled cichlid care'. Bam, heaps of results! But which one to trust?

Generally I'd go for a consensus. So I'd compile all the information in a excel spreadsheet. The method is quite simple - I start with one source and fill out rows of characteristics that the source documents. Then I move to the next and do the same, adding more rows if it provides new info a previous source did not. At the end of the day - remember this: how do you know what source is trustworthy or not at a glance? You can't. Anyone can start a site and name it anything. One can even pay to have their site appear higher, or fake reviews. So one can't decide what is more trustworthy than others based on these metrics. It just comes down to experience at the end of the day. The more a site gets right, the more trustworthy they are.

There we go!

... Not much information on this particular species, but overall there are trends that are clear. Max size is consistent (10 inches is approximately 25cm), as is temperature range, at least of its natural environment (78 and 86 F is around 25.5 and 30 C respectively). Lives in riverine environments, likes fast flow. Probably likes to feed on invertebrates and like water with high mineral content.

Alright! So first off, a bit of research on their availability. Googling 'Rheoheros lentiginosus sale' yielded quite a lot of results, but immediately it is evident that quite a few options are defunct, such as this top hit where the fish is out of stock, and this third hit which is an ended auction. Clearly a bit of narrowing down is needed.

Google has a nifty option under 'Tools' to narrow down the selection to something more recent. Generally I start with selecting 'Past month', and then narrow it to 'Past week' if there is too many choices.

This time however it did not help as it did not yield any results at all. Of course, if the listing is something pretty old.

So next up is to check for sites that may sell them. Googling 'aquarium stores' may work, but it is better to be specific - and check with others for what they'd recommend.

For example, googling 'cichlid sale' or 'cichlid sale online' did not result in the most reputable stores immediately, like Tangled Up in Cichlids or The Wet Spot. What gives?

Because a lot of the best stores dedicated to cichlids well, have a rather narrow stock list, so it can be harder for them to be on the front pages.

Instead, the better option is to ask around - specifically on Reddit and fish forums. This takes a bit of experience, but generally the more specific a focus of a forum/subreddit/etc. you find is, the better it is - even if answers may take more time.

For Reddit check out r/cichlid.

I found good sources of advice, at least when it comes to general fishkeeping and where to get species, to be FishLore, cichlid-forum, Aquarium Advice, and Monster Fish Keepers. Bare in mind that just because a forum is good for some advice does not mean it is good for others, so keep that in mind.

From these sources, I was able to figure out the best options to buy good quality fish, especially when/if you want to certify purity of breed or other such factors, are Tangled Up in Cichlids (TUIC) and The Wet Spot Tropical Fish (TWS).

Checking up on both sites found that R. lentiginosus were available at both! Yay! TUIC has them listed at $20ea or $18 for 5 or more, TWS has them for $15ea.

TUIC does not have information on their typical shipping rates, while TWS does - $29.99 to Oregon and Washington, $39.99 to elsewhere. Guess we are going with TWS then! XD