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Eurwentala β Fish don't have Expressions
Published: 2011-10-27 19:25:21 +0000 UTC; Views: 1402; Favourites: 23; Downloads: 2
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Description
These are spotted climbing perches (Ctenopoma acutirostre). They are not really perches and they can't climb, but don't they look smart?I know, not really. But they are surprisingly smart. When I walk in the room, they follow me around the tank. All four of them gather to the nearest spot to make faces at me. Apparently it means "Food! Now!" All these pictures are variations of the "Food!" expressions. Sometimes when my boyfriend watches a movie, they stay where they can see the screen and stare. Apparently they know how to watch tv.
The spotted climbing perch belongs to the family Anabantidae distributed to the Old World tropics. A few species of this family can actually crawl on land an even climb for some distances with their strong, spiny fins, thus the name climbing perch. They actually belong to the labyrinth fish, and like their gourami cousins, can also breathe air through a labyrinth-like organ in their head.
These are predatory fish (as the mouth size should show!) that are supposed to be slow stalkers and easily starved with greedy fish. At the moment, I'm actually having trouble getting any food past them, since they quickly developed a habit of immediately attacking anything that falls to the surface. And they are too smart to be easily evaded.
The climbing perches of genus Ctenopoma show a remarkable dergee of convergent evolution with the South African leaffishes (Nandidae), which are more closely related to marine perciforms.
The spotted climbing perch is one of my small collection of West African fish. The others are Senegal bichirs (Polypterus senegalus), reedfish (Erpetoichthys calabaricus), flat head eel catfish (Gymnallabes typus), Congo tetras (Phenacogrammus interruptus), jewel cichlid (Hemichromis guttatus), upsize down catfish (Synodontis nigriventris) and a few larger Synodontis species (S. euptera, S. robbianus and S. decora).
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Comments: 39
I kept these once. Fun times trying to get them to not eat all the food...
Might keep them in the future
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Yeah, they're so greedy it's comical. I still have three of these guys - two have died of old age - and they sure know how to beg for food. They are also obviously aware what kind of cans their favourite foods come in. Luckily, my other fish are also either very good eaters, or nocturnal. Feeding after the lights have gone out slows down the climbing perches and gives a better chance for, say, the knifefish to eat.
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Mine actually kept this up at night, though not as much
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All arthropods, cephalopods, and vertebrates have intelligence.
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I could agree with ALL cephalopods.
However, I don't think ALL vertebrates are smart. Take amphibians, as well as someΒ (not all, probably like 20%) small fish, herbivorous mammals and birds, and owls.
Also, didn't the only arthropods with documented intelligence include all hymenopterans, as well as 50% of all spiders?
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Stomatopods are considered to rival cephalopods in intellect.Β
I doubt owls are that stupid despite their tiny brains; all other raptorial predators are smart so why shouldn't owls follow the rules?
agreed on herbivores.
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1: Great, another reason to fear them...
2: You know what? You may be right. Probably just some cynical editors.
3: Thank you.
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*chuckles* I am familiar with the hungry pleading expression only a Ctenopoma can make. Freaky smart and friendly to boot I have five of these smarty pants on a 35 gallon tank. However I am having the damnedest time sexing them. general tips are looking at the spines on the gill covers as the males are more pronounced than the females. Any thoughts? they love it when they get live guppies
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I haven't had any luck sexing them either. There apparently are some differences in the spines, but at least I can't see any. Well, maybe they decide to spawn one day and I can see who lays eggs and who doesn't.
Where I live, feeding live vertebrates to other animals is illegal if it's not essential for the animals' well being. They do get live earthworms and insects during the summer, though.
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I didn't, actually. Thanks. Poor thing.
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What a nice fact that other paleoartists have also aquariums.
Beautiful Ctenopoma by the way.
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Thank you!
Maybe the love for unusual animals is universal. 
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The capacity for fish to turn their mouths into vaccum cleaner/harpoon gun hybrids will always continue to amaze and frighten me. Excellent photography. I love the third picture.
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Thanks!
The quality of the pictures is not that good since I only have a cheap-ish digital camera and the light conditions in an aquarium are difficult to say the least. But I like them anyway.
For awesome slow-motion videos of fish mouths, see the work of Wainwright Lab here: [link]
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These are awesome. I've kept another variety of climbing perches, the Indian Climbing Perch. Its locally available as a food fish but its colorful and its also 'surprisingly smart' for a fish.
Also, the ones I had made croaking noises, especially at feeding time. ahhh...good old days with pisces friends
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Interesting. I haven't heard my climbing perches make any noise except rather unsettling crunches when they are eating something with a hard exoskeleton.
Is the Indian species Anabas testudineus? If it's from the genus Anabas, it should be the actual climbing kind.
It seems like vocalization has evolved among labyrinth fish at least twice: in climbing perches and in the small Trichopsis gouramies.
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Yes the Indian species is called Anabas testudineus. Mine looked like these:
[link]
except that they were more colorful because of the pigment enhancing food I gave them.
The noises they made sounded like small stones grinding together and I'm pretty sure they were making the sounds.
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I've got mollies and a few platys, and they have exactly two expressions: hungry and horny.
XD Actually, they're impressively alert. Learned my routine and know exactly when they're going to be fed (when I hold up the can of food they start frantically kissing the glass). They also seem to have learned that the cats aren't going to feed them - they'll casually check the cats out when they hop up for a look, but they don't get anywhere near as excited as when they see me.
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Molles and platys are surprisingly smart too, especially so since they are not thought to be smart even by fish standards. Their social life is also much more complex than one might expect. Recently, I run into a study about the social network of guppies. Apparenly a school of guppies has a complex system of more and less close friends. Females, the study stated, more often had just one best friend, when males usually have a few.
Here's a link to the study: [link]
Talking about cats - my friend has three cats and two brown hoplos (Hoplosternum littorale). They have apparently learned to play together: a cat on the other side pawing the glass and the hoplos circling playfully just on the other side.
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I had no idea mollies were supposed to be dumb.
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I meant the way small, short-lived animals are generally regarded as less intelligent than large and long-lived. And among fish, schooling species more stupid than the ones living in small groups or couples.
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Aha, I thought you meant, "dumb even for fish". My poor little mollies XD
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I have an anatomy textbook with a graph comparing relative brain size of different vertebrates. Apparently, by this standard, one of the most dim-witted fish (and vertebrates in general) is the poor goldfish.
And even they can be taught to swim in patterns and play underwater basketball, as Youtube videos show.
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Food is the great motivator.
I just read an article on a computer program that modeled how wolf packs hunt. Pack behavior has always been used as a sign of how intelligent wolves supposedly are, but the program managed to replicate the behavior with just two rules. It's not known if these are the actual rules the wolves use to hunt, but it does show an apparently complex behavior can arise from very basic neural programming.
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Very interesting. I saw the headline somewhere but didn't read the thing yet.
I recently argued with a paleontologist who said dinosaurs could not have hunted in packs because their brains were too small. I doubted it then but now I'm starting to be quite sure he was wrong.
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Same, they were probably capable of it . . . after all, the animals they were "outsmarting" had even smaller brains. In fact the firs thing I thought when I read about the wolves was, "Hah, so much for dinosaurs being too dumb to hunt in packs!".
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What exactly DO you feed them then? I LOOOOOOOVE aquariums and have three, but I'm allways looking out for new stuff and would like to gove a West African biotope a try(preferably a paludarium of sorts wich could also contain reedfrogs). I've had to feed one of these fish in one of my internships end that one was of the more classic type of "dont wanna!" when it came to feeding. I would very much like to give this species a go sometimes and information is ever so important. Hereby also my compliments on keeping your fish so beautifully healthy. I also would like to know if you use african plants in your aquarium aswell? I can't really tell from the pictures...
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Thanks!
Nice to hear from a fellow fishkeeper.
I have also dreamed about a paludarium, but our apartment is already so full of my stuff that boyfriend is getting annoyed. I have three aquariums too, and a plant terrarium (vivarium? What's it called?).
Apparently competition makes appetite in these fishes. They have accepted almost everything I've offered them. Live earthworms and crickets are of course their favourite, but frozen shrimp, mussel, fish meat and even green peas (which were meant for the Garra) are readily eaten too. When they are hungry, they also accept dried food, but only large pellets. They try to eat small granules too, but are not very good at it. When they are not hungry, they will just taste dried food and spit it away.
At the moment there are only two African plant species (red water lily and a species of fern), and a few cosmopolitan species. The others are from Asia. I've been planning to change the plants to African species too, but I'm not very good with plants and tend to stick with the ones that agree to live under my care.
Not all the fish are from Africa either. A thorny catfish (Platydoras costatus) and five polka-dot loaches (Botia kubotai) are old fish from the first years of my hobby and will stay in my tanks for the rest of their lives, even if they don't match with the theme. African algae eaters are in a short supply, which is why that role is taken by Garra ceylonensis. Also, when I bought my bigger tank, I got three hoplos (Megalechis personata) with it and haven't yet got around to sell them. They are so greedy they make other bottom-dwellers difficult to feed and sometimes get bitten my the bichirs.
To get back to the climbing perches, one important thing seems to be that they need company. It makes them easier to feed, but they are also very social fish that spend most of their time together. They will also get fairly large (mine are reaching 17 cm in total length) and don't fit in a small tank even though they are not very active. And they will eat small fish or die trying. My group of four was originally a group of six, but a former owner managed to kill two of them by housing them with young bristlenose plecos.
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Anything meant to keep live animals or plants can be called a vivarium 
Just thought you might be interested in the design.
Thank you very much for your information!
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Sounds beautiful. How big is your paludarium? My plants seem to be always outgrowing their 180-litre terrarium, especially the ferns.
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That's the thing: the little tank is 50cm by 50cm by 50cm, so there's not much room for big animals in it. Hyperolius frogs however are puny, so they'll fit perfectly. The plant's I've chosen for this do not grow very big. In my Colombian biotope aquarium many plants do grow big, so I trim them every now and then in according fashion(removing older leaves of my Echinodorus plants and taking the tops of other plants and putting those back in the soil to rewroot).
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Aquatic plants are relatively easy to prune (and one has to do it all the time anyway), but I meant the terrestrial ones in the peat wall. How do you keep them in a reasonable size?
Hyperolius frogs do look like they fit perfectly. Tiny and pretty. They seem to spawn on plants, but do the tadpoles live in the water? I'd suppose they would get eaten by the killifish.
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That is indeed a liability, but I don't expect the frogs to spawn so quickly and my fish are seasonal, Γ nd are about to move to a bigger aquarium I'll decorate for small West African fish and Dwarf clawed frogs(can't resist the little buggers). My terrestrial plants simply don't grow that big, and if the do I wouldn't mind if the tank looks like an overgrown jungle. That's where they probably feel most at home. Also, most of my terrestrial plants are in fact aquariumplants.
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Ok, having land-growing aquarium plants sure helps. My aquatic ferns are creeping out of the tank on their own. It looks nice when they merge with potted plants to form one big jungle.
At least in Finnish aquarium hobby circles they say combining clawed frogs with basically any kind of fish in an incredibly bad idea.
The frogs will eat all the fish they can fit in their mouths (which means surprisingly big fish too), their faeces pollute the water very quickly compared to fish and bigger fish often are either so greedy the frog starves to death or actually bite the frog's toes and fingers off.
I haven't tried myself and it might be that some species combinations work, but I'd be very careful or, preferably, give the frogs their own tank if I were you.
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Dwarf clawed frogs(Hymonochirus boettgeri) are surprisingly combinable compared to regular Clawed frogs(Xenopus laevis) and I have good experiences in keeping these fish and frogs together. They also don't poop as much, since they are only a couple of centimeters long instead of 10 cm.
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I really like how much information this has!
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