Caño Raia

Colombia – Atabapo, 28 November 2009

ImageOne of Heiko’s 2009 Amazon expedition – which he does every year since his childhood with his mother – took him to the middle Atabapo and its tributaries. While searching again for Pterophyllum altum, which he introduced into the aquarium world in the late 1960s for the first time alive, he also looked out for all other fishes and found a beautiful aggregation of loricariids dwelling over a rocky stone-plate area. And possibly two very similar looking Dekeyseria species are living simpatric, together with Dekeyseria niveata. Natasha made some beautiful short underwater film of those – see for yourself and also the other species found in this small bay…  

Image

Pedro’s boat, called Mariposa was the “home” for a week during this field trip. Here anchored near the mouth of the Caño Raia.

Image

In this small sandy bay in the Caño Raia, Heiko found the following few interesting species:

 
Image

Image

Image

From the top: Belonodon apodion – smalles freshwater needle fish on earth, adult hardly 40 mm in TL; Acestrorhynchus – a dwarf species; two characoid genera living in mimicry her in the open water, a Bryconops species (the upper one) and Moenkhausia species (the lower in the lower photo)…

 
Image

…and in this rocky area, covered with large rock-plates below the surface, in very shallow water, hardly 50 cm deep…

Image

 
Image

Image

From top: a beautiful shrimp (see also in the video); Dekeyseria niveata; and one of possible 2 different undescribed similar looking Dekeyseria species, one banded and one spotted – see the video below.  (Note: the species of Dekeyseria are often in aquarium literature placed in the synonym Zonancistrus and the banded one is also known under the L-52 number).

 
Image

Note: of the two similar looking Dekeyseria species shown very well in Natasha’s video, here again in Heiko’s hand, the one to the extreme right is very different from the other three…

 
Image

…and in this rocky area was also a beautiful small tortoise saying: hello and good bye….

This post is also available in: English Italian German French Spanish

Deixe uma resposta

O seu endereço de e-mail não será publicado. Campos obrigatórios são marcados com *

Esse site utiliza o Akismet para reduzir spam. Aprenda como seus dados de comentários são processados.

AMAZON BUYER'S ATTENTION!!!

SINCE 1st JANUARY 2021 AMAZON CHARGES € 15,00 EXTRA - FOR ORDERS AT AQUAPRESS-BLEHER OR DIRECT AT aquapress44@gmail.com IS, A BEFORE,  EXTRA CHANGE