Petricolas are some of my favorite Lake Tanganyika fish. I really love their interesting body shape and the way they glide snake-like through the water. I had read that they are a schooling fish, and pictured a school of them cruising through an 8' tank to be one of the coolest sights I could imagine.

Unfortunately petricola are not cheap - even at an auction $7 is about the minimum I would expect to pay for a 1" fish, although there are exceptions like last week when I picked up three 1.5" petricolas for just $11, and the next bag went for $10. Luckily they come up quite frequently, and so I acquired more and more over time. At some stage I also bought some from Rudy (sorry, never caught the last name, feel free to send me an email if you read this and want to be listed here), a really nice guy from Michigan, who seems to sell mostly wild caught African cichlids via the OCA forum and similar outlets, and hangs out with John and Betty Oyer a lot. From what I have seem, his fish are top notch, and certainly the petricola I got from him where nice. The best thing was that he happened to have some business in Ohio at the time, and went out of his way to meet with me and get me my fish.

Eventually I got at least two dozen of them together - kind of lost count of the exact number - and now expected them to school through the tank in bright daylight. Unfortunately this hasn't happened yet. To the contrary, my petricola don't even come out at feeding time, and it is a rare occasion indeed that I actually see one of them while the tank lights are on. People on Planetcatfish suggested that if I fed less, they would definitely come out at feeding time. However, the main purpose of my 240G is to grow out my burundis. To achieve good growth rates I feed generously, and the catfish obviously find plenty of food lying around at night. That they do come out at night I can clearly see when the moonlights are on. At that time, the whole tank is swarming with petricolas, and they seem comfortable cruising around at all levels of the water column - just like I had envisaged, but not during the daytime! Last but not least, the reason I call these Synodontis petricola 'dwarf' is that people on Planetcatfish, who I would consider to be in-the-know have ascertained that nearly all of the Synodontis petricola currently in the hobby, and certainly those that readily breed for the hobbyist are of a comparatively small variety of Synodontis petricola, besides which several other varieties of Synodontis petricola exist as well. These have been referred to as 'true', 'giant', 'big', and so on. Even how many different varieties there are that are occasionally sold as Synodontis petricola is an entirely open question. For more information please visit this or this thread of the Planetcatfish forum.

Addendum July 2007

I recently did a major tank maintenance which among other things considerably increased the output of the UGJ system. Be it that this drove the petricolas out of some of the caves in the background, or be it that they are simply getting too big for these caves, I manage to see a little more of them these days, an I even got a few pictures of them, which you can now see on this page, even though they are pretty blurry.

Addendum January 2009

The Petricola are now out and about in the tank at all times - no just when feeding. On some days they chase each other wildly all over the tank, and disappear in the Java moss that is covering the background, usually in groups of three. I am pretty certain this is spawning behavior, but since they are egg scatterers with no brood care, there are plenty of other fish in the tank for whom the eggs are a welcome snack - especially dozens of little Julidochromis transcriptus, who are hanging out in the plant thickets right where the catfish are spawning!

Some pictures from 2008 and 2009.