Décor is relatively unimportant and maintenance simple provided sufficient space is available.

A natural-style arr…

Type locality is given simply as ‘Amazon River, Brazil’ and according to current thinking this species has a huge natural range encompassing the Amazon River system in Brazil and Peru plus the Paraná-Paraguay drainage in southern Brazil and Paraguay and rio São Francisco basin in southern Brazil.

Specimens in our images were collected fro…

This species is very rare in the aquarium hobby and may never have been available on a commercial basis although it has been collected, bred and distributed by some private collectors.

It’s a member of the putative G. surinamensis ‘group’ of closely-related species within the genus and ca…

C. amandajanea is rare in the aquarium trade and appears to be variable in colour pattern to an extent, with some individuals posssessing relatively larger dark spots on the body, for example.

Unfortunately diagnostic characters cannot be provided since we’ve been unable to obtain the type description, and little has been written about this species since it was published.

In the upper Iténez it most commonly inhabits riparian zones with sandy substrates or edges of sand banks, although it’s also been collected in smaller streams and residual flood waters.

It typically forms large aggregations of up to several thousand individuals and at the confluence of the ríos Paraguá and Iténez occurs sympatrically with the congener C. paragua.

This species can be confused with three similar-looking fishes of uncertain taxonomic status which have been assigned the C numbers C024, C077, and C109 in the aquarium hobby.

C024 and C109 are unlikely to be conspecific in that they occur in Pará state, Brazil, several thousand kilometers outside the range of C. acutus, in the rio Guamá (Tocantins drainage), and lower rio Xingu, respectively.

Type locality is ‘Furo do Lago São Francisco, 7°40’S, 72°39’W, tributary at left bank of Rio Juruá, Acre State, Brazil’, and C. acrensis appears to be endemic to the rio Juruá basin.

Unfortunately diagnostic characters cannot be provided since we’ve been unable to obtain the type description, and little has been written about this species since it was published.

Described from ‘Igarapé Candiru-Mirim, Rio Capim, Pará, Brazil’, a relatively short river draining into the rio Pará near the city of Belem, eastern Brazil.

Records of similar-looking fish exist from Santarém, Pará state, in the central Amazon region, and the coastal city of Fortaleza, Ceará state, much further southeast. These may require confirmation.

This species is also known as ‘Marilyn’s pencilfish’. It’s rarely traded in numbers and more often seen as bycatch among shipments of other species, particularly Paracheirodon axelrodi.

It can be identified by the following combination of characters: three dark lateral stripes (sometimes referred to as primary, secondary, and tertiary); nocturnal oblique bars relatively narrow, with the anterior bar reaching, but not extending past, the anterior base of the dorsal-fi…

This species is poorly-known in the aquarium hobby but is sometimes exported as bycatch among shipments of other species, especially Nannostomus beckfordi to which it appears quite similar. The easiest way to tell the two apart is that N. grandis lacks pale white or bluish tips to the ventral fins.

It can be further distinguished from all congeners by the following combination of characters: body size up to 46.2 mm, the largest in the genus; bo…