20 inch ex-Cichlasoma festae

[ecoli73]

Have to love RD's threads...come for the knowledge, stay for the arguments . I AM surprised that it was not claimed that the male attained that size by eating NLS pellets j/k


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[metalslug]

Not to derail, and I don't have pics but some years back a guy brought in two Oscars into a shop that when placed in a 20 gallon for temp holding until they cleared space, they both were a few inches shy of the length of the tanks. I'm talking mouth to tail tip.

Very true! I've long lost count of the number of claimed >12" oscars I have heard of over the ~15 years I have been in the hobby but not once, nowhere on the internet, despite the hundreds of thousands of ocars out there, have I ever seen a picture clearly showing an oscar lying on a tape measure showing a length greater than 12".

I would dearly love to see a 20" male festae though!!

 

[metalslug]

[video=youtube;eplBVLgjqXs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eplBVLgjqXs[/video]

 

[Gruff Master]

Very true! I've long lost count of the number of claimed >12" oscars I have heard of over the ~15 years I have been in the hobby but not once, nowhere on the internet, despite the hundreds of thousands of ocars out there, have I ever seen a picture clearly showing an oscar lying on a tape measure showing a length greater than 12".

I would dearly love to see a 20" male festae though!!

I can't say that I have personally seen a 20" Festae but I have for a fact seen 12"+ Oscars. Here in Florida finding Oscars of that size is not very hard. And no, I don't have pictures.

 

[RD.]

I can't believe that I am even wasting my time doing this ..........

yesterday i had to move all my fish to the new home due to me moving overseas...im sure they will be happy in a 8 foot 900 litre tank!!!!!
while i had my oscar out og his tank i took time to meausre him. photo dosnt show it to accurately but he measured 35cm! in the pic it looks more like 33 but when the tape measure was held righ up against him it was pretty close to 35! pretty big hey, had him over 3.5yrs. moving overseas for about a yr so a mate is taking care of him during this time

http://www.oscarfishlover.com/forum/13-the-oscar-fish/196496-full-size-oscar

The photo is still archived on his account, if anyone is interested in viewing it. I wasn't about to waste my own website bandwidth to prove a point to David, or anyone else.



and another from the same forum.

Anyway... here's my big boy! 13" long at 3 years old... my beautiful Red!

http://oscar.pennwooding.com/forum/57-only-oscars/279401-red-measured-outside-of-the-tank


Clearly both fish exceed 12" (30.5 cm) and both are still VERY young fish.

I found those oscars in less than 5 minutes of searching online.




So now that we have cleared up the ridiculous notion that a well cared for oscar in captivity cannot exceed 12" TL, perhaps we can now get back to those that feel that a researcher working in the field of origin and evolution of biological diversity, involving DNA sequencing to study the molecular variation in these species - would for some unknown reason exaggerate the measurement of a fish that was not only recorded, but then preserved for future reference, where fellow researchers can later come along & declare the original collector of the data a bold face liar as the fish was clearly not nearly as long as stated in his original documentation.

Pics, or that didn't happen.

 

[ecoli73]

The question is intent...there is no motive for this researcher to falsify this data point. He will not benefit from it if it war 12" or 20" inches. Certainly I do not think he has this sort of internet thread in mind when he noted the fish.

 

[dogofwar]

I think that the lines of festae in the hobby are just low quality if they're not reaching this kind of size

Wasn't there are thread about that?

Matt

 

[fishman09]

I think the moral of the story is that nobody is capable on a hobbiest level to replicate results in the wild that produce these mythical sized fish. And any line of festae bred in aquaria/kept in aquaria for a long peroid of time will definitely be lower quality fish than most any wild fish.

 

[Fish on Fire]

I think the moral of the story is that nobody is capable on a hobbiest level to replicate results in the wild that produce these mythical sized fish. And any line of festae bred in aquaria/kept in aquaria for a long peroid of time will definitely be lower quality fish than most any wild fish.

Simple if you're willing to sacrifice some space to raise some crickets, shrimp, feeder fish, and the occasional feeder frog coupled with an automatic water change system that changes 50% of the water in your 300+ gallon Festae tank every 3 days, you should be able to replicate what they have in the wilds, lol.

 

[David R]

So now that we have cleared up the ridiculous notion that a well cared for oscar in captivity cannot exceed 12" TL

Who said that? I was merely commenting that for all the claimed super-sized fish we so often hear of (be it a 14"+ Oscar, 4' arowana, 12" clown loach or 20" festae) there doesn't seem to be many pics of them clearly showing the size. I haven't tried googling Oscar pics because I simply don't care that much (I have however searched high and low for evidence of a 12"+ clown loach and never found any). Thanks for sharing those pics tho.


ps. I have no doubt of the universities claim and believe it is entirely possible, its just a shame we can't see a picture of it.

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