Angels - PageSuite

AMAZONAS
24
COVER
STORY
Pterophyllum sp. 1 from
the Río Nanay in Peru. The
reddish brown spots on
the flanks are typical. This
species is also erroneously
known as the “Peruvian
Altum” because of its
mouth form and
body height.
The latest on Pterophyllum:
species and forms of angelfishes
by Heiko Bleher For years there has been disagreement regarding the names of the
various angelfishes we keep and the species to which they belong. Heiko Bleher
shares his personal experiences and discusses the forms he has collected during
his travels and imported for the aquarium hobby.
I first made the acquaintance of an angelfish in the early 1950s, in my mother’s fish and plant hothouse
in Frankfurt on Main, where, as a little lad, I had to keep out of the way of her free-roaming 6.5-foot (2-m)
caiman. The daughter of Adolf Kiel, the “Father of Water Plants,” my mother had inherited his passion for
adventure and collecting wild things, something she passed on to me. It was also she who told me about the nomenclatural
confusion attaching to the angelfish: in 1758, Carl von Linné, the father of the binomial scientific
nomenclature of all species, assigned a number of fish species to the genus Zeus.
It was Schultze who first described the species Zeus scalaris in a work by Hinrich Lichtenstein (1823), from
N. KHARDINA