Type locality is the town of Luxian, located north of Luzhou city, Sichuan province, southwest China. Luxian lies on the Laixi River, one of several tributaries converging with the main Yangtze river channel near Luzhou and forming part of the latter’s upper drainage basin. The full extent o…

This species not often seen in the aquarium trade and is apparently rare in its natural waters, with the occasional individual imported as bycatch in shipments of S. pulchra or S. robusta, or by private collectors. Like others in the genus it has a highly flexible, sinuous body which makes it very interesting to observe.

It's told apart from congeners by the following combination of chara…

The type locality is a karstic freshwater stream flowing under 80% forest cover with a mixed substrate of mud and sand plus patches of leaf litter.

O. woworae was collected from a still pool around 3-4 m deep, opposite an affluent spring, where it was schooling with a species of Nomorhamphus which may turn out to be a form of N. ebrardtii but has subsequently appeared in the aquarium trad…

This species is not traded commercially at present and the specimen pictured above was brought back from northern Papua New Guinea by private collectors in 2008. It's diagnosable from other members in the genus by possession of 10 segmented rays in the second dorsal fin, males with filamentous spines in the firstandusually with 14 rays. Colour patterning in males is also distinctive (see 'Sexual Dimorphism').

The Gobiidae is the most speciose vert…

This species is traded under various vernacular names including 'Chinese hillstream loach', 'Chinese butterfly plec' and 'Hong Kong Otocinclus. It's the commonest member of the genus in the hobby but has been frequently misidentified as the congener P. cheni in the past with the two often said to be indistinguishable in terms of colour pattern. Some sources additionally suggest the sole defining external character to be that in P. cheni the distance between the resp…

This species is probably the most common member of the genus in the aquarium trade but still not often exported in numbers.

Instead it’s more often found in mixed shipments of other wild-collected fishes from southern China, particularly Beaufortia or Pseudogastromyzon spp.

It may appear superficially simi…

This species is diagnosable from other members of the genus primarily by its unique colour pattern which consists of 7-11 dark blue, irregularly-shaped, parallel vertical bars on the anterior portion of each flank plus a short horizontal stripe on the caudal peduncle which extends into the central caudal fin rays. Phylogenetic analyses suggest it’s most closely-related to Indian Devario spp. plus D. xyrops from the western slope of the Rakhine Yoma mountains in Myanmar (Fang et al., 2009; Fang and Kullander, 2009).

P. fasciata is rarely seen in the trade and is typically available only as bycatch among shipments of Sinibotia spp., particularly S. robusta. According to current classification numerous species from several genera are considered synonymous with it.

It can be further distinguished from other species in the genus by colour pattern consisting of a dark, horizontal P stripe originating around mid-body, where it’s relatively faint, this becoming thicker and darker in the posterior portion of the body and terminating at the base of the caudal-fin. Among congeners it’s most similar to D. chrysotaeniatus but that species lacks the infraorbital process, has three rows of pharyngeal teeth and the P stripe extends to the end of the caudal-fin rays.

This species has mostly been collected from small (1-2 metres wide, 20-40 cm deep), moderate-to-swiftly-flowing streams with clear water, substrates of sand, gravel and rocks and no aquatic vegetation. Marginal vegetation was present in some cases, offering a degree of shade, and sympatric species included an unidentified Schistura sp., S. vinciguerrae, Misgurnus anguillicaudatus, Garra qiaojiensis,…