Correction: I have to report a major error. What I wrote in italics in the previous posting was wrong. Sad to say, but expert Martin Hallmann made a mistake in identifying those fish as being the true deissneri “with 99 % certainty or something still more rare”. But what should be more rare than deissneri?
In fact, they are a variant of filamentosus, we call them cf. filamentosus. They look like that old photo of Karen Koomans on our species page; that mal with the blue dorsal.
How could that happen? Well, the animals showed nearly not colours at all. They were in poor health by the stress they had to overcome and therefore neraly only structural markers could be taken into account: rather long dorsals and anals, a slim long body and – above all – a rhombic formed tail with a black filament. I do not kwnow why filamentosus have not been taken in consideration; they have a structure near to that of the true deissneri; only colouring is completely different, But that was missing.
Fastly a German seller (Tropicwater, Mainhausen, D) had bought the whole bunch and offered it as being deissneri. In the meantime that is altered in the right denomination cf. filamentosus. They are very interesting, rare animals, and we suggest all who are interested to buy some of these rare variant. One could do so by writing a mail to info@tropicwater.eu They deliver to foreign countries, too.
We have to say sorry for that wrong information and try to learn from it. In any case it were good intentions that all people involved pursued. Even a very good expert can be mistaken in a borderline case. So, we still have to wait for that moment when the true deissneri will appear in the trade first, at least in Europe. I doubt very much that the so-called deissneri that are named in lists for the U-S., for example, are really referring to that species which is endemic on Bangka island. So far as we know nobody from the fish trade is catching there commercially. And the destruction of the habitats is going on as it is elsewhere.