This form of wild parosphromenus was obtained from The Cich­lid Exchange in the US in the lat­ter part of 2015. They were sold as P. bin­tan. How­ever, upon close inspec­tion they clearly were not P. bin­tan, but a dif­fer­ent form, more closely resem­bling P. tweed­iei, P. rub­ri­mon­tis or P. opal­lios. After post­ing pho­tos, it could not be deter­mined what species it was, pri­mar­ily because there was no col­lec­tion loca­tion asso­ci­ated with the fish, not even from which coun­try — only “south­east Asia” could the importers tell me. Fol­low­ing the con­ven­tion estab­lished regard­ing forms of uncer­tain col­lec­tion loca­tion or species, the name P. sp. TCE 2015 was decided as suf­fi­cient (P. sp. along with importer source and date of acquisition.)

 

The one pair obtained was very beau­ti­ful and suc­cess­fully spawned once, seen in the pho­tos seen here.

 

Even with good water para­me­ters and fre­quent changes, over sub­se­quent months, the pair proved to be increas­ing dif­fi­cult to feed, refus­ing even small live foods, and even­tu­ally passed away. To date this form has not been avail­able again from the orig­i­nal importer. Even though they could not be suc­cess­fully repro­duced, the pho­tos doc­u­ment the exis­tence of a unique vari­ant of Parosphromenus, show­ing that hith­erto unknown color forms or per­haps even species may yet be found in the wild.