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AMAZONAS
82
From Thailand
New Snakeheads
In February 2009 it was rumored that a particularly
colorful snakehead had arrived—our telephones hardly
stopped ringing. The locality for this new species was the
Chatuchak Market in Bangkok, near which AMAZONAS
editor Hans-Georg Evers was staying at the time. He
didn’t miss the chance to take a closer look and discovered
a snakehead that appeared to remain small and
looked similar to Channa gachua, but was markedly more
splendid in its coloration.
The bright red pigment beneath the eye in this snakehead,
plus the ice-blue fin-rays, induced Evers and his
colleagues, Kamphol Udomrhitthiruj and Neil Woodward,
to devise the first common name for this fish: Channa sp.
“Fire & Ice”. The name caught on and is now accepted in
REPORTAGE
Channa sp. “Fire & Ice”
by Dominik Niemeier and Pascal Antler Many aquarists grow especially fond of certain
fish groups as time goes on. In recent years we’ve seen the birth of a new group of fish
fanatics, people dedicated to very strange fishes that used to be regarded as monsters—the
snakeheads of the genus Channa. With interest in this genus increasing, a number of new
forms and species, including the three discussed in this article, are now being imported.
the Channa world. The fishes were found together with a
batch of loaches (Schistura balteata “Sumo II”) in the market,
and the location for the latter was given as the Ataran
River on the border between Myanmar and Thailand.
Hans-Georg Evers brought three specimens back to
Germany and a consignment of four individuals was
dispatched to Pascal Antler. It wasn’t long before the first
photos of this new form were published. Evers’s specimens
exhibited extreme aggression when kept together
in the same aquarium, and had to be separated. Precise
water parameters from the collecting locality were
unavailable and so at first it was a matter of guesswork
based on the climatic conditions and geographical location
of the site.
H.-G. EVERS