Experiences with Red Whiptails

[Zeaqua]

Hi all! 

Recently, in one of his fish room updates, Cory mentioned that he and Dean had been interested in the Red Whiptail Catfish. I had been considering these, so I did a bit of research. A lot of articles that I had found seemed slightly unreliable, and many possibly had anecdotal evidence. Some said that they were super easy to breed, and others said that they were fairly difficult. So I wanted to ask, if you've bred these guys, how did you do it, and what were your experiences with them like?

[Guppysnail]

@Lennie has these and they bred. 

[Lennie]

First, their origin is unknown. Therefore this makes stuff harder to know about their nature. Some say they came from nature, some say they are selectively bred and some say they are hybrids.

Also there are two versions from what I understand, actually red ones and more of the browns/hybrids. 

Malik says they can breed with close species and this is much easier than breeding the actual reds, ending up hybrid babies that I guess are infertile?

 

Is breeding them easy? I wouldn't say so. To me, I categorise like this: easy is guppies, bristlenose plecos, or basically any fish that requires almost no attention to breed.. Medium level is german blue rams, due to requiring specific conditions and fry needing attention. Hard is fish that are quite hard to reach success, need very specific conditions and environment, pairing, mating and egg keeping process, keeping eggs fungus free and alive, etc. like betta macrostoma. And I would say very hard for rarely or never homebred fish.

 

In my opinion I would say these guys would fall anywhere between medium to hard. 

To me, keeping them in a species only tank planted and huge wood piece with varying lenght of small hole pvc pipes (even floating options) and lots of leaf litter (mine's fav is banana leaves) worked. I bred them at 28C.

Their fry is very VERY hard to keep alive in the main tank. They basically stick themself to the glass and do nothing. I haven't seen them feeding of natural growth nor any grazing too. I have never seen any making it through even in a species only tank by themself. I always raised babies in a seperate container. First couple days frequent water changes between feedings, live plants, leaf litter, baby mystery snail from helping to clean food and their poop may source some infusoria naturally, then live bbs once they start eating it. I know some people do an actual spirulina soup in the tank for whiptail babies but these guys are not heavily herbivores like many others.

 

Now Im gonna mention the negative side. Providing them pvc tubes and making them go for the potential breeding activities fairly decrease their activity level in the tank. And they can get protective and territorial. They are more of a joy to keep in the tank rather than setting up a breeding tank I would say. They would jump from one leaf to another, graze around, play as a group. The breeding acting killed all of these acts. Which is a big negative IMO