I just discovered I've never kept a Corydoras

[GaryE]

I was just on Corydoras World looking at the reclassification of Corydoras, and I discovered I have never kept a real Corydoras. The first fish I bought under the name was when I was 10, and he (well, I now know it was she) lived 12 years. I named it Scruffy.

I thought it was a Cory, and to the hobby it was. Corydoras was like a box new discoveries were thrown into until someone got around to sorting them. Now, the work has been done, and if we want to understand who is related to whom, we have some new names to take in. Scruffy was an Osteogaster aenea.

My next Cory was a julii, one of the oldest naming mistakes in the hobby as very few people have seen, let alone kept julii. Someone goofed 75 years ago, put the wrong name on the fish and now we even have "false julii", a head shaker. We do cling to mistakes in this hobby, largely because most of us don't care about the natural history of the fish we keep. I can't say now what I had, with no photos and 50 years since I got the fish, but it was certainly a Hoplisoma, probably trilineatum.

So here we are, with a pageant of names - Corydoras, Scleromystax, Hoplisoma, Osteogaster, Brochis, Aspidoras, Gastrodermus... each name carries info for those who care to dig. If you are digging through info to learn about your Cory (that popular name should stay around, I hope) get the Latin name and you'll find much better info. It always works that way with fish. Latin is no one's spoken first language, but it is a shared link for researchers of all language backgrounds.

 

[CassCats]

Going by that, yes, I as well have never kept corydoras. I've kept osteogaster, gastrodomus, hoplisoma, and brochis.


I prefer using the scientific names myself, because among the common given names, many are shared among several species and not all are the same at all.

Example, "spotted corydoras" is applied to a few species and they're not the same. Another, more common example of this is also "common pleco" which applies to a good handful of plecos, some of which are too large to keep in most home aquariums, but a few are manageable in size to the right sized tank as well, but it comes down to knowing which one someone has to know the potential size. But most people just slap "common pleco" to it and that's that and deem them all the same. There's many other species this applies to, but it's pretty rampant in the catfish family.

To avoid confusion, I find it more specific to use the scientific name so that information on that species is easier to find and much more accurate.


Because then on the other side of the coin, we get species that have MULTIPLE names for the same fish. Looking at gymnocorymbus ternetzi specifically. Aka, skirt tetras! Skirt tetras, black widow tetras, black skirt, white skirt, Glofish skirt, they're all the same species. And yet I see a lot of people still believing they're separate lol I've seen many ask if they can mix them or not over the years.

Back to "corydoras", regarding hoplisoma trilineatum, it has a couple common names, including false julii. It is also called three stripe corydoras (I think this is a better option over false julii, gives it its own character instead of comparing it to another), and I've occasionally seen it labeled as spotted corydoras as well. That leads to a lot of confusion.

 

[GaryE]

"False julii" sounds a bit too much like a girl I went out with in my teens. At least I could count on Scruffy the Corydoras aeneus who is now Osteogaster aenea to avoid teenaged drama...

English trade names for fish are a pet peeve, although many of the translated from Mandarin names we get now are really painful sounding.

My first language is English, but I grew up in a French speaking place, and French language aquarists have no need for their own names for fish. That's a quirk specific to English culture, and as I kept fish and met people, I slipped into mispronounced (maybe) Latin names for almost all of my fish. It's easy to say ternetzi tetra, and it seems to me that only in English do we have people insisting on all those trade names.

 

[Alice B]

"False julii" sounds a bit too much like a girl I went out with in my teens. At least I could count on Scruffy the Corydoras aeneus who is now Osteogaster aenea to avoid teenaged drama...

English trade names for fish are a pet peeve, although many of the translated from Mandarin names we get now are really painful sounding.

My first language is English, but I grew up in a French speaking place, and French language aquarists have no need for their own names for fish. That's a quirk specific to English culture, and as I kept fish and met people, I slipped into mispronounced (maybe) Latin names for almost all of my fish. It's easy to say ternetzi tetra, and it seems to me that only in English do we have people insisting on all those trade names.

my trilineatus are very cute

 

[WhistlingBadger]

"False julii" sounds a bit too much like a girl I went out with in my teens.

Latin name: Chickus dramaticus.

Seems to me like the common names are just a marketing tool, nothing more. The ones that bug me are the ones that are patently false. I currently keep Penthia padamya, often known as "Odessa barb," a species that hails from Myanmar, nowhere near anywhere called Odessa. Also Celestichthys choprae, commonly known as "glowlight danio," which is quite lovely but does not glow. Not even a bit. And technically, it isn't a danio. So I can see why they called it that.

I refuse to use either of these ridiculous names, instead referring to them as padamya barbs and choprae danios. Thus, nobody knows what on earth I'm talking about, I appear smarter, and my aquarium appears even more exotic and mysterious than it already is. Win-win.

 

[CassCats]

Shall we pick apart tetra genus names as well?

^^ going off of this definition, should we even count nematobrycon and hasmania genus even as characidae since they lack the adipose fin?

Even Wikipedia is raising questions on it lol

 

[Magnum Man]

Awe man... & I'm terrible with Latin names... it's so much easier to just say "Goldfish"

 

[Colin_T]

Give it 10 years and someone will reclassify them and you will have kept Cories again. That's what happens with cichlids so it will probably happen to catfish too.

 

[GaryE]

The Cory one looks solid. They are divisions hobbyists had noted, more or less. Every once in a while, you see one like this that even a non scientist like me thinks was overdue.
There was a division of Pelvicachromis cichlids like this - with the creation of Wallaceochromis for the northern ones. It made zero sense if you had kept them for them all to be lumped together. They looked different, acted different...it just took awhile for someone to take on the task of classifying them.
Some of these ex-Cory names aren't new ones. They were created by past researchers, and then everything was dumped into the one Genus.
It's all part of the process of us trying to figure the world out. As DNA testing gets easier and cheaper, a lot of things are on the move.

The killie world offers something scary for us. Species that to our weak human eyes look identical, but that aren't able to breed together. The genetic differences don't appear in their outward appearance, at least to us. We have to fall back to knowing where they were caught to know what they are, since the apparently identical, cryptic species are always in different waters.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

Unless you are close to my age and also likely attended private schools rather than using the public education system, you never studied Latin. I had to do so in high school. During my years of education prior to college I studies some French and some Spanish. I hated Latin, I did not feel that much better about French. However I spent the summer between high school and college in Bogota Colombia in a program at the University of the AAndes there for helping to teach Spanish to native English speakers. I could speak and understand Spanish close to fluently when I came home at the end of the summer of 66.

I mean I really did not like Latin. I have forgotten many things over the last 76 years, but I am cursed by the fact that I can still recite the lord's prayer in Latin- Pater noster.... I even knew a man with a PhD- involving his expertise in Latin. He could actually converse using it.

So, I truly do get the point of Latin naming for use in genetic identification and classification of species. But, please excuse me when I don't remember the names. I have a mental block on most Latin. Besides, most of the plecos with which I have worked do not have a Latin name having not yet been formally identified. They only had L-numbers.

For most people in the hobby the common names will be fine to use. It is only those who become both hobby and scientifically involved with our fish and tanks who drill down seriously into the formal names. For most hobbyists the more common species are usually what are kept. And then there is the fact that even when you think you know those Latin names, you don't because the redid a lot of them.

Perhaps the most important time for knowing the Latin name for a given species is when we are looking for good information on them. When I use Google to find such info I try to use a Latin name.I hate to think how many sites which offer info on armored catfish have not yet renamed everything according to the new classifications of what we all used to mostly call corys. I guess I can no longer say that, when we keep them, that cory adore us......

 

[GaryE]

The point is - we don't speak Latin. Very very few people do. That's where we're all equal, whether we speak French, English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian... it's no one's first language. That makes this well documented dead language very useful for science.

When I went fish collecting with German, Danish, Fang, French and English speakers, we all understood each other well when we talked fish. We all used a neutral dead language to name things. I find it's the same online.

But that old debate goes on and on - in the meantime, the study of fish does too.

 

[gwand]

Some bullies in my high school Latin class hung our teacher out of the second floor window holding on to his heels. Et tu, Brute? No I didn’t participate in the insurrection. Did I help old Mr. Perino? Piger fui.

 

[anewbie]

Good god who in their foolish way changed the names of all these fishes. I remember just other day i wanted to read about a dwarf cichild and some idiot changed the name of the fish. Can we please stop changing the name of fishes?

Having said that i've kept under this new crazy scheme that will probably change before i fall asleep ostegaster, Gastrodermus, Hoplisoma and who cares what else. I don't think i even care to know what other genus or lack of genus or whatever i've kept.

Anyway the easiest way to resolve is to just say you've kept catfishes ! For god sake they are still catfishes aren't they ?

 

[anewbie]

Btw when someone gets to the apistogramma group every book written about them will be broken

 

[TwoTankAmin]

That is the nature of science. it is the best information we have at any given time. But the other part of this is we expect new research and new methodologies will reveal that what we thought we knew is not the case. And we do more research and we change what we know as a result. The scientific method would not be much use if if did not only allow for the changes but actually expected them to occur.

But, when the conversation does not involve scientists or people with such leanings, Latin names usually go unused. My bet is that, despite the names changes, the proper care and feeding of any given species do not change just because the scientific classification and naming have.

edited for typos and to correct 2 wrong words- next-->best and expert-->expect