There are few catfish more adorable than the ‘hoplos’ of South and Central America. Gabor Horvath provides the lowdown on keeping and breeding these fabulous characters.
GABOR HORVATH Master breeder Gabor has an enviable, modern fish house at his home in Wales.
THERE’S A CATFISH out there for everyone, but you need to do your research before buying any cuties. For example, the red tail catfish, Phractocephalus hemioliopterus, looks adorable when small but will quickly outgrow any home tank. Other cats might look dinky and innocuous, but only after some mysterious disappearances of smaller tankmates will you realise that they have sizeable mouths. Knowing the adult size and feeding habits of any catfish should be the bare minimum before you purchase.
The reason for I’m stating this early on is that the subject of this article—the hoplo catfish, Megalechis thoracata—can surprise the unprepared aquarist. When young they sport an eye-catching dark and light chequered and striped pattern, and seeing a shoal of long whiskered juveniles zooming around the tank is whole a level of cuteness that’s hard to resist. But if you buy some on the spot without thinking, you can be in trouble quite soon. It’s not that they’ll eat your other fish or harass them to death, they will simply outgrow an average sized tank in no time and become the bulls in the proverbial china shop. Hoplos have no malice in them but act like small bulldozers, and in a confined space they can cause some serious havoc.
So, what do you need to keep them properly?
Setting up
As they can reach a quite significant 15cm in length (and are thickset with it), a suitably large aquarium of over 120cm is needed. The footprint of the tank is more important than the height as hoplos spend most of the time grubbing for food at the substrate level.
That said, they’re not afraid of coming up to the surface for various reasons. One of the reasons is their ability to use atmospheric oxygen to complement their intake through their gills. Similarly to other armoured catfish species you’ll often see a hoplo gulping in air and swallowing it, so the oxygen can be absorbed through their intestines. This ‘intestinal breathing’ means that they can survive periods with poor water conditions. It works, too—I know of a case where a holiday feeding block caused mass deaths, and the only fish that stayed alive in the tank were the M. thoracata. That doesn’t mean that you can neglect tank maintenance, as they still prefer to live in well oxygenated and clean water, but they are at least slightly forgi
