CAN ANYONE IDENTIFY THIS RAINBOWFISH SPECIES?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhAXYeo7AQs&feature=related

Once again Youtube is being unhelpful and I am unable to embed this rather lovely film of a rainbowfish species that I am unable to identify. Max is in Iceland this week (believe it or not, amongst other things he was trying to get me a life-sized great auk candle, but on reflection we decided not to) so I cannot do what I would normally do, and ask his advice.

So over to you....

SALLY JO'S MYSTERY FISH

IDENTIFY THIS FISH

We thought that this was a swamp eel (Symbranchus). The India expedition bought it, photographed it, and then ate it. However, as Max points out, Symbranchus spp don't have these nasal tubercules...

ONCE AGAIN COELACANTH IS RED HERRING (Sorry to steal your headline concept Darren)

http://austriantimes.at/news/Around_the_World/2009-08%2027/15970/Prehistoric_monster_terrorises_kids_in_the_Ganges


What an exciting week it has been! The latest story to shatter cryptozoological headlines is this one: that a coelacanth has been found in the Ganges, of all places. Loren has cast doubt upon the story over on cryptomundo but we decided to pass the story over to Max B, the CFZ king of all things piscatorial and tarkus-related.

Kudos must go to Loren Coleman for his correct diagnosis. The creature in these photographs is NOT a Coelacanth. It is a grouper but of what species, I am uncertain. The dead fish differs from a Coelacanth in the following ways:

1. Coelacanths have very obviously 2 completely separate dorsal fins. The dead fish does not have this feature.

2. Coelacanths have “Bony fins”, such that the true fin appears to come out of a little leggy stump. The dead fish has no suggestion of this at all, and its fins are typical of normal ray finned fish.

3. This fish is a Perciform fish. This large group of ray finned fish has a spiny dorsal fin, which is a very good diagnostic characteristic. The dead fish has this feature, Coelacanths don’t.

4. The caudal (tail) fin is so completely different in both fish that it is not worth much consideration.

5. Coelacanths are typified by having large scales. The dead fish clearly has very fine scales.

I could go on, but I won’t. If I knew much about groupers (I don’t) I would try and identify it to species. However, because of the large size of the fish I would say it has to be from either Mycteroperca or Epinephelus. More than that, I could not say with certainty but I would back Loren’s postulation that it is an orange spot, Epinephelus coioides.

Unfortunately, this intriguing headline is backed up by absolutely nothing; a shame.

MAX BLAKE: The mysterious trout

The title I am sure bring to mind some sort of semi-mythical pan-dimensional trout which flits around ending up in all sorts of water ways where it has not been seen before, before zooming off again to the next area. Not quite...

I introduce you to Midsummer Norton. A not terribly nice town in North Somerset, its residents are mainly yobs who like nothing more than riding their BMX’s around town and eating greasy fried pizzas. Now, I went there armed with my machete the other day to try and find a reptile shop that was reputed to be around here. I never found it, but I did spend some time looking into the stream which runs down the high street. It is only about 1ft deep, with no features at all other than the fact that some silly council planner has decided that a gently sloping normal stream is not good enough, and decided to make it run in steps. I wasn’t really expecting to see any life in its bare expanse, but I was to be pleasantly surprised.

Sticklebacks! Loads of them! I am not sure which species it was, but I expect that they were all three-spined. Very interesting, but I was not expecting to also see larger fish in the same stream, I had expected that they had all been fished out. Not so. We had a very unusual group of trout. They were a stunning yellow with black squiggly lines all over them which reminded me of a tiger trout. There were three in the stream, about 1ft long with big fat bellies, presumably from all the bread that they got given by the locals. The attached photo shows a trout with considerably less black dots and bars than the ones I saw.

The other trout was considerably larger than the others, about 1.5ft long. He was brown on top with a reddish belly and a slightly hooked jaw. Jon suggested it was a grayling, but I didn’t think the colour matched up, nor did I notice that the dorsal fin was unusual. If anyone has any idea what these “trout” were I would be most grateful!

NOTE: Jon and I have been chatting again, and he thinks it may be a Atlantic salmon (picture attached) with the hooked jaw and it’s size. I will have to go back and get a better look.

NEIL ARNOLD: Monster fish of Dutch Folklore

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo with this first guest blog. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

Out there, somewhere, in the silted depths of the Netherlands watery abodes, there do indeed exist large swimming forms dredged out of folklore and into the minds of the general public. One such beastie was ‘Big Mama’, a huge European catfish that had tourists fleeing from their skinny-dipping escapades. The terror of Centreparcs made big news in 2006 with website Ananova reporting:

‘The 2.3 metre European catfish eats two or three ducks a day and has even taken a few small dogs, reports Hetlaatste News.

Dutch divers reckon 'Big Mama', in the lake of a Centerparcs at Kempervennen, could be the world's biggest. Remco Visser, head of a Dutch diving school which uses the lake for practice dives, said the fish had scared a number of divers.

"They don't have to worry because catfish don't eat humans. Most of the ducks have moved to another lake but visiting ducks, who don't know there is a catfish in the water, get caught." He commented. Centerparcs guards patrol the lake to keep away fishermen who have been trying to climb over the fences at night to catch Big Mama. Biologist Jean Henkes, of Centerparcs, added: "The catfish has grown so big because of the excellent water quality, enough food and rest."

The world record European catfish weighs in at 226 lbs, caught in Spain’s Ebro River in 2007.

There are several legends pertaining to monster pike in the Netherlands. One such giant was hooked by Rotterdam man Ewout Blom in 2004. After a good day of fishing with friends, one of whom caught a 35 lb specimen, Ewout caught a big one, weighing in at 42.9 lbs (almost 20 kg), and measuring some 127 cm (approx 50 inches). Bizarrely, one of the photos of Ewout and his prize fish, began doing the rounds on the internet with anglers far and wide claiming they’d caught the fish, or been there when it had been hooked, and the legend spread worldwide. This amazing freshwater shark, as pike are known, became a true ‘friend of a friend’ tale in fishing circles and there were even statements of it being a world record, but this was false information. The world record pike stands at 55.1 lbs, caught in 1986 at Lake of Grefeern, in Germany by Lothar Louis. One particular giant pike, rumoured to inhabit the IJ, is said to measure 1.60 metres in length but because no-one has ever photographed it, and rarely caught it, it has taken on mythical status. The fish is said to haunt the depths behind Central Station and pike fishing is illegal in the area. In 1998 a rumour also circulated of a monster fish living in the Oosthaven in Dordrecht and another monster pike at Lith.

In Kralingse Plas, Rotterdam, a person walking their dog filmed an unusual form in the water. Upon viewing the footage it’s likely that the ‘monster’ in question could be anything ranging from a dog, to a log, or something being dragged by a boat. In 2007 something very large was seen swimming at Moordrecht in the river Hollandse Ijssel. Witnesses claimed a freshwater shark was lurking in the twenty-nine mile stretch of water and the story made national news. Although it was believed to be a hoax, sharks have been known to turn up around the Netherlands. De Telegraaf reported in 2006 that a blue shark was the latest specimen to be added to Rotterdam’s Natural History Museum after it was found dead at Oosterschelde near Tholen. The shark was a young female measuring just over a metre and a half in length. Such creatures are considered very rare along the Belgian and Dutch coast line.

FOK!Weblog of March 2007 commented on an investigation into a sighting of a monster inhabiting a small lake called Oldambtmeer in Groningen but no beast was forthcoming. On the 16th August 2004 Patrick Scholte hooked a strange fish whilst angling at a canal in Rampur. The silvery fish with razor teeth turned out to be a piranha but at first Mr Scholte thought he hooked a Rock Bass due to its red belly. After photographing the fish, Patrick released it back into the water.

In the May of 1966 a white whale appeared in Dutch folklore. The creature, whilst en route to a zoo park in England, was aboard a boat which capsized during a severe storm, releasing the mammal into the north Atlantic. From here, and via the Rhine in Rotterdam, the whale would take in Berlin, Germany, and then travel back to the Netherlands, capturing the hearts of many who began to campaign against local pollution. In 2002 a documentary-film entitled ‘The Tale Of The White Whale’, directed by Stephen Koester was made about the incident, the promotional website stating:

‘This story of a white whale could have arisen from the fantasy of writers for Disney. However, it is a true story: On the 18th of May 1966, a huge animal appears from the dirty tides of the Rhine, near Duisburg-Neuenkamp and about 300 kilometres away from the open sea, to take a breath: the white whale. For one month this strange visitor will move the people and the media: it will raise conflicts between animal-rights activists and zoologists, between Germans and Dutch, between the political factions. In the meantime, the white whale swims further inland.’

THE CASE OF THE FURRY TROUT

I have always been fond of this particular image, because although it is obviously a hoax, it is a hoax that has been manufactured with one particular purpose in mind - to make people laugh. Because it is a hoax so unutterably ludicrous that one cannot, for a moment, imagine that anyone would take it seriously.

You would be surprised.

A few years ago I was working as the deputy editor of a tropical fish magazine called Tropical World. The editor was a very nice bloke, but he had health problems, and a weakness for the sauce which eventually killed him, so I ended up running the show for a considerable amount of the time.

One day when the editor was in hospital and I was once again in charge, I received an email from someone attaching this picture. Now, I had only ever seen it before in a wonderful book called Animal Fakes and Frauds by a bloke called Peter Dance, and was completely unprepared for a letter from a bloke saying that he was in the throes of setting up a coldwater fishtank, with some unusual inhabitants, and was looking for a furry trout to complete his collection.

The frightening thing was that this geezer was obviously somewhat of a fish afficianado (a piece of alliteration that sounds better read out than it does writen down). He already had some rather impressive North American coldwater fish (including bullhead catfish and pumpkinseeds, which are both technically illegal to keep) and an expensive filtration system.

So maybe I was once again suffering from the sin of pride through prior knowledge. There are, after all, hairy frogs. Why not furry trout?

CONJOINED PIKE

This picture has been in the CFZ archives for at least five years, and to my embarrassment I cannot remember where I got it. It is supposedly a siamese pike (Esox lucius) caught by Donald Tayer on the Ottertail River in North Dakota.

However, if you do what I did, and google "Siamese Pike" then a whole can of worms gets opened.

Is it:

a. Real
b. Real but caused by intentional human activity
c. A result of pollution
d. A Phototoshop hoax
e. Two pikes, with the head of one tucked under the gill flap of the second

If it is real, how big is it? Most conjoined creatures never make it to maturity, and this one looks to be pretty large in size.

So, it is over to you. Someone out there must have some more information about it, or at the very least, an opinion as to its veracity or not...

A round-up of some newly discovered fish species

New species of animal are discovered a lot more regularly than you might think. Bringing joy to Max and Jon's hearts are several new species of freshwater fish, which will - no doubt - turn up in the pet trade before long. As Max pointed out some weeks ago, the pet trade has new and undescribed species in on a regular basis.

1) Apistogramma erythrura
Location: Mamoré River, Bolivia.

A new dwarf cichlid, related to the well-known `ram` or Ramarezi dwarf cichlid, beloved of aquarists over the years. It is very similar to the `ram` in appearance, although is slightly smaller.

This one spawns in caves and measures less than 4 cm in length. It was described by Wolfgang Staeck and Ingo Schindler in 2008.

2) Australoheros spp
Location: Southern Brazil

Felipe Ottoni and Wilson Costa have recently described nine new species of Australoheros cichlid: Australoheros autrani, A. barbosae, A. ipatinguensis, A. macacuensis, A. muriae, A. paraibae, A. robustus, A. Saquarema. There are currently no photographs available, not even any that we could steal citing `fair use` (which covers a multitude of sins), but PFK have a series of technical descriptions of the fish HERE

3) Crenicichla tesai and Crenicichla mandelburgeri

Two new pike cichlid species have been described from tropical South America. C. tesai was taken in the Iguazú River, Argentina. This species was described last year in the journal Revue Suisse de Zoologie 115 by Cisciotta, J and A Almiron in the article Crenicichla tesai, a new species of cichlid (perciformes: Labroidei) from the Rio Iguazu basin in Argentina.

Pike Cichlids are a group of South American fishes of the genus Crenicichla. They inhabit the freshwaters lakes, streams, rivers and pools of most of the Amazonian rivers, but there are many species found in Colombian, Venezuelan and Guyanan waters to the north of the Amazon. To the south, there are representatives of the genus all the way down to coastal regions of central Argentina. Basically, they are found east of the Andes, from the island of Trinidad in the north to the area around the Argentinian Rio Negro just north of Patagonia.

This species is named after the tear-shaped suborbital stripe (the name comes from the Guaraní word for tears) and is known from the Iguazú River upstream of Iguazú falls in Argentina. According to the authors, the species was caught in streams whose bottoms were composed of mud, sand and mostly stone; the streams had falls and pools, with clear, rapidly-flowing water.

Crenicichla mandelburgeri however comes from the Paraná River, Paraguay, and was discovered in two different habitats, one with rapids and brown muddy water with a depth of 1 meter and the other with shallow water where visibility regularly fluctuated. Some of the specimens were collected from rapids in a large stream, 5–10m wide, to 1m deep, with turbid, brownish water, while others came from small, shallow brown-water streams up to about 3m wide, with varying velocity and transparency, with bottom of sand and stones, and generally without vegetation.

4) Hyphessobrycon spp
Location: Northern Venezuela

Two new species of tetra, Hyphessobrycon paucilepis and H. tuyensis were described in the journal Vertebrate zoology 58in 2008. Hyphessobrycon paucilepis originates from the small drainages in Lara state, northern Venezuela. H. tuyensis from the Tuy River drainage in northern Venezuela. Again, at present, there are no photographs available.

5) Puntius kelumi
Location: Sri Lanka

Sri Lankan scientists have described a new species of barb from southwestern Sri Lanka in a recent issue of the journal Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters. Puntius kelumi is found in the south west of Sri Lanka, mainly in large, clear-water streams flowing from mountains that contain a granite, pebble or sand substrate and are often strewn with boulders.


6) Lithogenes wahari
Location: Cuao River, Venezuela.

This species of catfish was first observed over 20 years ago, but not found again until 2001.

As described on the bloggo earlier this year, recently a type specimen was obtained and it was described in the journal American Museum Novitates. It has also been proposed by ichthyologists that an ancestor of this species may have been capable of climbing rocks.

THE BURU - THE WORLD'S LARGEST LUNGFISH?

Lungfishes are undoubtedly some of the most peculiar fishes known to man. There are several species in Africa, South America and Australia. In addition to gills they have a paired or unpaired lung and they breathe through the mouth. Because of their size (The Australian species grows to over 70 inches) they are seldom kept in home aquaria although they are regularly exhibited in zoos. They do have drawbacks, however. When Richard Freeman was working at Twycross Zoo in the West Midlands and he received a nasty bite from an African lungfish, which, he said was second only in painfulness to being bitten by an anaconda!

From a biological point of view, one of the most interesting things about these singular creatures is that they can and do survive for long periods of time out of water and can travel overland from one pond to another. The African lungfish aestivates, burrowing itself into the earth where it secretes a mucous bag around itself to preserve moisture during the long dry season.

In 1948 Ralph Izzard, correspondent for the Daily Mail and Charles Stonor travelled to Rilo a eastern Himalayan valley in the Dafla hills of Assam. To search for a swamp dwelling monster called the buru. It was well known to the local Apa Tani people. They described it as bluish in colour, 3.5 to 4 meters long, with four stumpy legs, and a lizard like appearance. It seemed almost totally aquatic, emerging only to bask in the sun. They fed by nosing about in the mud and gave birth to live young. They could use their tail as a powerful weapon. Their vocalisations were loud bellows.

British Zoologist Dr Karl P.N.Shuker has hypothesised that the Buru is actually an immense, and hitherto undiscovered species of lungfish. He writes:

“Although lungfishes have external nostrils, they breathe through their mouth, positioned at the very tip of the snout. This intake of air, readily percieved by the movements of its mouth and throat (proving that the lungfish is genuinely swallowing air) can be very audible. The size of the buru was such that if it were truly a lungfish, the bellowing moise reported when its head was visible above the water might well have been the very audible result of its ventilation period”.

Sadly it seemed from Izzard`s expedition that the buru were extinct. The local people drained the lake in which they lived for rice irrigation forcing the animals into the deeper sections. They were finally destroyed by being buried under deep piles of rocks hurled into what was left of the lake by the tribes people. Though extinct in Rilo the buru may survive elsewhere. Other unexplored lakes in the eastern Himalayas may hold such creatures. Identical creatures have been reported from India`s Gir region were they are called jhoor.

Unfortunately so much of the region in which these fabulous creatures may still thrive is beset with political unrest. Many zoologists, however, harbour the hope that investigative teams in the early years of the 21st Century will solve the mystery once and for all qand discover what we strongly believe is the world`s largest lungfish!

FISH YOU WERE HERE II: The Empire Strikes Back

Continued from last night..

It probably seems unlikely to any readers under the age of 40, but only half a century ago Great Britain was the hub of the greatest empire that the world has ever seen. On maps in schoolrooms all over the globe great swathes of the world were coloured pink to denote the fact that they were a pivotal part of the empire on which the sun would never set. Although the impact of the British Empire on the commerce, politics, and defence of the former colonies is well known, what is not widely realised is the effect that centuries of empire building had upon the Zoology of British colonies all over the world, and, indeed upon the motherland herself.

Whilst working on this two-part article we were surprised to find quite how many species of fish that we had assumed were native to the British Isles, were in fact no such thing, and were amazed how many British fish had been translocated to a pond or stream in some corner of a foreign field.

The Tench, for example, is an unassuming, bottom living fish found in still, and slow-moving waters found across Western Europe. Although they are edible, anyone who has tried to eat a tench souffle for example, will confirm that they are far from being the most appetising of Mother Nature's under water subjects. It is surprising, therefore, to learn that Frank Buckland - the founder of the Acclimatisation Society, whose name has cropped up in these pages before - introduced them to Madras in India in 1866 and again in 1873, 1874 and 1876. They were introduced to Tasmania in 1858 and from thence to the mainland, by the Australian branch of the society, also introduced them to New Zealand a few years later.

It must be admitted that Buckland could well be perceived as a zoologist of the "because I can" brigade, and there is very little that one finds out about him which is really surprising. However, the same species was introduced into Indonesia - by the Government - in 1927, and apart from remarking that Johnny Foreigner is a rum cove, it is hard to fathom out why they undertook this exercise. They were introduced into South Africa in 1910 - bizarrely enough - as a food source for another introduced species; the large mouth bass. They were introduced into Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe ), in 1938, Canada (1915) and the United States in 1877. In these cases, however, the motivation is an obvious one - the fascination that so many British expats have with a dangling worms on strings into muddy water of a weekend.

Rudd - another humble Western European species of no great economic importance have also spread across the globe as a result of Empire. On this occasion it was the French Empire who introduced this fish to several of them of their North African colonies for reasons best known to themselves. Curiously they have also turned up in Canada and parts of the United States with no one knowing how they got there, although other introductions to the USA over the years have been recorded for both food and sporting purposes. They were amongst the first species to be shipped to New Zealand aboard HMS British Empire in 1864, although none survived the journey. From 1971 onwards fertilised Rudd ova were smuggled into New Zealand illegally, and the species has now become established on both north and south island to the detriment of local wildlife.

The common perch has been introduced to Cyprus (1971), Spain (1970), and South Africa (1915) as well as New Zealand, Australia and to the Azores - all for sporting purposes. However, what was most surprising to us - at least were the foreign species which have become a familiar part of the British ecosystem. Carp, for example, were originally natives of central Asia, but were introduced to Britain some time in the middle ages. A book published in 1486 notes them as uncommon in British waters, but they soon spread across the country. Although most fish were introduced into the UK for sporting or gustatory purposes, at least four species arrived purely as a result of the aquarium trade. The two colonies of Guppys which survived for some years in artificially heated water in the UK are common knowledge, but less well-known are a species of cichlid which became established in a Liverpool Canal after a tropical fish shop went bust, and a small but viable population of the North American pumpkinseed in Somerset, and another one in Surrey, which have since died out although another colony in Hampshire remains healthy. More problematical are the bitterling which have been recorded from a few isolated locations in Lancashire, Derbyshire and the Welsh borders. These have long been assumed to have been introductions because although these are popular aquarium fish - especially during the 19th and early 20th century - they were popularly believed only to exist in central Europe, Asia Minor and eastward across Eurasia. However, the recent discovery that the pool frog is actually a British native, and furthermore has been recorded in exactly the same locations as the British bitterling, suggests that this attractive small fish may indeed have been a British resident all along.

Perhaps the most striking piscine introductions to British waters are the Zander and the Wels. Both originally natives of central Europe and Asia Minor, they were both introduced to the UK by Frank Buckland's cronies. The Zander is an extremely aggressive species which has disastrous effects on the native livestock of any area which it colonises, and the wels - or European catfish - is not only the largest freshwater fish in the world, but has even been rumoured to have eaten people. During the summer of 2002 the present authors led an expedition to Martin-Mere in Lancashire where "something" had been reported attacking swans on a nature reserve. It turned out to be a wels catfish, and we estimate that it is in excess of eight feet in length.

There is a popular misconception that the Zander is a cross between a pike and perch. This is complete nonsense, but the belief lives on. It is shaped vaguely like a pike, and has the bars and coloration of perch, but is not closely related to either. It has the voracious appetite of a pike and as it can also tolerate brackish water, its incursions into British waterways are viewed very seriously indeed. By 1996 this species had been reported from the Midlands, East Anglia, Kent and was making serious incursions into the Cotswolds. Despite all efforts to eradicate it, and its special position within the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1980, which condemns it to an ignominious death, it looks as if - sadly - this piscine predator is here to stay.

Global warming, and the attendant climate changes have already seen some exciting additions to our marine fauna. Such species as barracuda and even great white sharks have been noted from British waters in recent years. It is tempting to theorise that as our climate changes further, more freshwater species from warmer climes will become established. The White Cloud Mountain Minnow - a Chinese species which one of the present authors remembers catching as a child in Hong Kong - has reached as far afield as Madagascar and Columbia. Other species familiarly kept by aquarists have also spread around the world from their original locations. When our great grandchildren go down to the local pond with jam jars and nets in the 22nd century, what species will they bring back with them?

GUEST BLOGGER RICHARD MUIRHEAD: The mysterious seahorses of Lake Titicaca

PREAMBLE BY JON: When I was a child I lived in Hong Kong.

I spent the latter part of August and early September 1970 in hospital undergoing a barbaric operation on my knees. I went in on the day after my eleventh birthday, and stayed in for the next four weeks.

However, I was allowed to come home for weekends, and every Friday afternoon an ambulance would drive from Queen Mary Hospital down in Pokfulam, up the Peak, until I was carried into our ground floor flat at Peak Mansions by two burly young ambulancemen. Somehow, I can surmise with the benefit of hindsight, that my father had pulled rank, because I had even been provided with a hospital bed on wheels, (something which I doubt was a service available to all and sundry) and on very sunny days Ah Tim and Ah Tam (the Chinese couple who looked after us) would wheel me out into the conservatory, and open the french windows so I could haul myself up in bed using the support bars, and look out onto the world outside.

Peak Mansions was (I use the past tense because it was apparently demolished in 1989) a six story squat building with an impressively mock Georgian façade, and two seemingly pointless green domes on the roof. It had originally been built, either late in the 19th or early in the 20th Century as accomodation for expat Civil Servants, but during WW2 it was the home of the Hong Kong Volunteer Force and was badly damaged by shelling. However it was seriously rebuilt after the war, and carried on with its original purpose. Running along the front of the building was Peak Road, and on the other side of the road was a heavily forested hillside which tumbled down for miles to the town (now city) of Pokfulam. This forest was the haunt of leopard cats, pangolins, civets, and porcupines, and within living history had been home to tigers and possibly even leopards. It was a magnificent place, and I spent much of my childhood exploring it, and much of my adulthood dreaming about it, and after a week of surgery (they botched the operation the first time and had to do it again) and physiotherapy, just to lie in my bed looking through the open french windows at the jungle below was bliss.

Outside the windows, a shallow sloping stretch of lawn led down to the road, and my mother was wont to recline on a sun lounger there and sunbathe. Occasionally she would be joined by her friends, and on this particular occasion a lady called Sheila Muirhead, with an irritating young son aged four had come to visit. I was annoyed. Now my mother would not be willing to tell me stories, or make too much of a fuss of me, and what was worse, her son was too young for me to be able to talk to on any meaningful level, and as both my legs were in plaster, and I was wracked with agony every time I moved, I couldn’t do anything more boisterous in terms of play.

Then I had an idea.

For my birthday, the day before I went into hospital I had received a copy of Hong Kong Butterflies by Major J.C.S Marsh, and I was desperate to put my newfound book to use. I was at the age when I had just begun to realise that some creatures were more closely related than others, and I wanted to identify the myriad animals that surrounded me. Fluttering along a few inches above the closely mown grass were dozens of small, blue butterflies. Major Marsh listed several dozen members of this family, quite a few of which looked very similar.

So I called to the toddler who was earnestly chuffing up and down the sloping lawn pretending to be a goods train.

“Hello” I said. “I’m Jonathan. What’s your name”.

“Richard”. He said. “What are you doing in bed?”

So I told him, and despite the seven year gap in our ages, he not only seemed to sympathise with me, but – after I explained my predicament re. Major Marsh and the blue butterflies - he expressed - as well as a four-year-old can express anything – a willingness to help me in my investigations. So I told him where my bedroom was, and where I kept my butterfly net, and where my precious copy of Hong Kong Butterflies was, and he trotted off inside. About ten minutes later, after a few false starts, I was sitting up in bed with Major Marsh’s magnum opus on my knee, and a Robinson’s marmalade jar in one hand, as my young assistant – still making enthusiastic train noises – rushed up and down in search of butterflies.

We have been friends ever since. Richard has what Charlie Fort would have no doubt described as a "Wild Talent". He is the best researcher I have ever met, and invariably has something interesting on the go. I asked him if he wanted to write for Cryptozoology Online (I really must stop calling it the CFZ bloggothing) and he immediately asked me if I knew anything about mysterious freshwater seahorses in South America...

Seahorses are a genus(Hippocampus)of fish belonging to the family Synguathidae,which also include pipefish and leafy sea dragons.

There are over 32 species of seahorse, mainly found in shallow tropical and temperate waters throughout the world. They prefer to live in sheltered areas such as sea grass beds,coral reefs,or mangroves….The male sea horse can give birth to as few as 1 and as many as 2000 “fry” at a time and pregnancies last anywhere from two to four weeks,depending on the species.” (1)

They must be amongst the most interesting of sea creatures. There are many different species all over the world. Whilst reading William Corliss`s seminal work Anomalies in Geology,on pages 53-54,in the chapter ESB6 `Living Organisms and Recent Fossils Found At High Altitudes` I was very surprised to discover reports of living seahorses in Lake Titicaca.

Lake Titicaca,which straddles the Bolivia-Peru border at a height of 12,530feet/3820m above sea level is an unusual place. Not only do the local inhabitants use reed boats to traverse the lake,similar to the ones used in ancient Egypt[“In fact,the type of reed plant is reportedly the same as the reed plant used in ancient Egypt…”(2) ] but up to at least the end of World War 2 and may be later, a species of sea horse,Hippocampus titicacensis was said to inhabit the Lake,proving to some that the Lake was once attached to the Pacific Ocean.Corliss refers to beliefs that the Andes may be very “young” geologically and that the putative Lake Titicaca seahorse,very high beaches with recent marine shells and recent plant fossils at very high altitudes are a sign of this.

There is a photo of a degenerate(because of in-breeding?) seahorse from the Lake on the website of Jim Forshey and Bruce Watts,two American experts on seahorses.

This photo dates from about 1943 and is said to be a specimen at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. (3) Arthur Posnansky,who mentions this seahorse in his volume one of “Tihuanacni: Cradle of American Man” stated: “The Indians believe that this animal is a sort of divinity,like everything that is strange and inexplicable to them.”(4). What is really inexplicable is,how did the seahorse get into the Lake and where are they now?

Even in the 1940s they were very rare and very recent web sites do not mention them at all,though trout,”suche” and “capache,” flamingos and duck are mentioned. If anyone can shed light on these enigmatic seahorses please can they contact the CFZ?

Thank you.

REFERENCES.

(1)Project Seahorse. The Biology of Seahorses. Reproduction. In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seahorse

(2)Donald E.Chittick The Puzzle of Ancient Man (Newberg,Oregon), p193

(3) See: http://www.seahorses.com/AquariumAndFishItemsForSale/BibliographySeahorses2005Edition.pdf
(4) Ibid

Richard Muirhead`s cryptozoological web site can be seen at:http://geocities.com/cryptozoology.muirhead