Gallery of P. filamentosus

P.filamentosus com­plex, the Part 2, Section1, a gen­eral report of the new find­ings about this species from the the recent expe­di­tion by

Went­ian Shi (S.J.D [N. J. B.]) with Team Bor­neo into Kali­man­tan Tengah.

Instead of being a sin­gle species, Fil­a­men­to­sus is more likely to be a quite big com­plex dis­trib­utes widely and con­sists of sev­eral sub-​species with a high diver­sity of local types. The orig­i­nal name-​bearing-​type of fil­a­men­to­sus was found in south part of Kalteng in the down­stream area of Sg. Bar­ito , near Ban­jar­masin, 40 years ago.

This type has red color in cen­ter of cau­dal fin and base of dor­sal and anal fin, but no, or no sig­nif­i­cant blue band beside the red area. In the north, sev­eral other closely related types, inc. cf. fil­a­men­to­sus, sp. Gaw­ing, sp. Ampah were fur­ther recorded.

In our expe­di­tion, we searched across 4 main river sys­tem in a range of almost 400KM from the east boarder of Kalteng to the west of Palangkaraya. We con­firmed sp. Ampah in the east boarder, which is quite dif­fer­ent from all other fil­a­men­to­sus types. They have no red on unpaired fins, but bold blue bands.

Mean­while sev­eral sim­i­lar types dis­trib­ute from upper-​Barito across Kapuas to Kahayan. They have both red and thin blue lines on unpaired fins. This type was found 1991 by Alfred in Kahayan and rec­og­nized as cf. fil­a­men­to­sus by Mr. Linke. We con­firmed this type with the help of our local friend Patrik. The sp. Gaw­ing from Kapuas by Linke and the new type we found in upper-​Barito are mor­pho­log­i­cal sim­i­lar to the Kahayan type. All these three local types will be labeled tem­po­rally as the cf. flia­men­to­sus Kahayan-​Kapuas group to dis­tin­guish from the orig­i­nal fil­a­men­to­sus Bar­ito type.

The dis­tri­b­u­tion of fil­a­men­to­sus ends until Sg. Men­taya. We can not find any paros there.

But the envi­ron­ment of this area is des­per­ately destroyed by oil palm plan­ta­tion, so we are not sure if this bound­ary of fil­a­men­to­sus is nat­ural or arti­fi­cial catastrophes.

Fil­a­men­to­sus are splen­did big species, can reach 4.5+ in wild eas­ily. How­ever they live very often together with their mini rel­a­tive, parvu­lus, who are only 1-​2cm big. In the fol­low­ing month we shall present these types sep­a­rately in details.

Hope­fully you all enjoy these mag­nif­i­cent paros.

The Part 2, Sec­tion 2, a detail report of the new type of fil­a­men­to­sus from the the recent expe­di­tion by

Went­ian Shi (S.J.D [N. J. B.]) with Team Bor­neo into Kali­man­tan Tengah.

What is actu­ally the sp. Ampah???

In 2009, was sp. Ampah intro­duced by Mr. Linke as sp. Kaltimur. and exported into EU in 2013. Dis­ap­peared since then.

We believed once that Ampah is a type of only blue and black color on cau­dal, which makes it dif­fer­ent from nor­mal fil­a­men­to­sus. But is it really so?

We searched around the orig­i­nal area for 3 days, finally found a per­fect small river, with beau­ti­ful black water and cryp­to­co­ryne cor­data. The ampah here are in huge size, 4+cm, some reach 4.5. BUT, there are two dif­fer­ent types mixed in the same river, some­times even both in the same catch. one, type 1, is stan­dard ampah form with only blue and black and bold bands. one, type 2, is with extra red color in cau­dal cen­ter and thin bands, more sim­i­lar to nor­mal filamentosus.

So, is Ampah a real dis­tinct type? or spe­cial indi­vid­u­als with­out red?

If we check the pics of the 2013 import, we can notice that some of the indi­vid­u­als are with red col­ors, namely type 2, mixed in the type 1. So at least, the Ampah does have two vari­ants. Fur­ther researches are required to clar­ify the puz­zle. Ampah is easy to breed, with good amount of off-​springs. The next gen­er­a­tion grows fast, but sen­si­tive to ood­inium. Due to its big size, it is very impres­sive and attrac­tive as ornamental-​fish. The good news is the con­ser­va­tion state of these fish is quite pos­i­tive. Their habi­tat is not in imme­di­ate dan­ger, since very remote from big cities and dif­fi­cult to reach.