Telling hymenophysa apart from reversa

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Greek
Posts: 72
Joined: Sun Sep 14, 2008 2:17 pm
Location: Krakow, Poland

Telling hymenophysa apart from reversa

Post by Greek » Fri Nov 27, 2015 1:35 pm

Hello,
After buying pretty Green Tiger Loaches some time ago, i didn't even think that it could be something other than S. hymenophysa - here in Poland availabiliy of loaches is really poor, and buying hymenophysas is such a success. But. My tigers don't really looks like a typical hymenophysa. Their colour is definitely darker and green stripes are at least two times wider than the brighter ones (hymenophysa has stripes like 1:1).
Just look at the photos:
(when they were younger):
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Beautiful, dark one, with bloody-red marked fins :)
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Just look at those wide dark stripes!

And recent photos:
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It's really hard to take a good photo of them. The reddish colour of fins is now weaker, but it's still visible.
They have about 11-12 stripes - less than typical hymenophysa. After reading Tyson Roberts' article about fishes from western Borneo (1989) - with reversa described for the first time, i'm more and more convinced that my specimens are actually S. reversa! :D In this article he points out that hymenophysa has very dark margins of the pale stripes - mine doesn't have stripes like that. He also writes about pale stripes on a darker background (hymenophysa), and dark bands on a wider body. Just like mine! And hymenophysa has definitely larger eyes - eyes of mine are really tiny.

That's one interesting thing more. That was one more tiger i bought with them. And i'm 100% sure that it was hymenophysa. That is said specimen:
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It looks like a typical hymenophysa. I bought that one just with the rest - so it can indicate that those species are living together in nature :)
As You can see this loach is a little bit skinny - i was succesfully treating it for skinny disease. It was very active - swimming through the aquarium all the time! As i know hymenophysas are very shy. My loaches (reversa?) are too. I concluded that this one was mentally unbalanced - and maybe that was the reason of it's sudden death - i just found this loach dead one morning (a day before everything was perfect, it was swimming through all the tank as always). I think that the problem was "inside" :(

Enjoy!
Any more hymenophysa/reversa keepers up here? :)

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