[Peter Finke]

The Asian exporters (not importers) mostly know very well the localities, because they know the local catchers and see who delivers and who doesn’t. But they are quiet about this; it’s a business secret. There could be a competitor trying to seek an easy way to find out about productive places. Generally, the species are orderly defined, with the exception of “deissneri”: The redefinition of this species by Kottelat and Ng is widely not understood, so most Parosphromenus of the bintan-type run still under that wrong name. And only very seldom some people catch on Bangka island (the only place of the real deissneri’s ocurrence. There is not much else to be caught, so it’s economically worthless). As localities are concerned, only the most general origins are known and given (“Kalimantan”, “West-Malaysa”, “Sumatra”), often less. The precise differentiation of localities which we are interested in because it could be of evolutionary meaning, is nothing which matters there.
When the fish arrive in Europe or America, the importers and wholesalers take the names written on the parcels, and since more precise localities (“where the fish have really been caught”) are not given this remains a secret. For most aquarium fish, no one is interested in such matters. This is different with us strange girls and guys, the friedns of the licorice gouramis. Therefore, sometimes, a local pet shop owner telephones with the wholesaler on this issue, but when the place is unknown to the wholesaler (which is mostly the case) that questions remains unanswered. Only in a very few cases one could get a little more information.
The conclusion is: Those populations and lines derived from fish with a clearly given origin are especially valuable, although the fish are not more beautiful than others. Mostly a simple equation is true: Fish from the trade are without locality, and fish with locality are not from trade-origin but offspring of inividuals that were self-caught by one of the enthusiasts of the Parosphromenus-project.