They’re the hottest property in the characin world right now, and new contributor Michael Tuccinardi was lucky enough to get hold of some. Meet the pencilfish of your dreams.
It's not too often that something genuinely new, different, and completely unheard of appears out of the blue in the aquarium trade, at least not these days. So, when I first saw an image making the rounds on Facebook of an all-red pencilfish in a small handmade photo aquarium in Iquitos, Peru, I was immediately a bit skeptical. Surely something so colourful could not have been overlooked in the neighborhood of this city in the midst of the Peruvian Amazon, which has been exporting aquarium fish across the planet for well over half a century.
While the region around Iquitos is incredibly biodiverse and new species do make their way into the trade with some regularity, they are rarely so flashy as to demand instant attention like this fish did.
The first photo of what was being called the ‘Cenepa red pencilfish’ showed a single, vivid red male without the telltale horizontal black stripe seen in Nannostomus mortenthaleri, the coral red pencilfish, a species known in the hobby for decades. Given that the original photo I saw was just one specimen, I guessed it was an aberrant pattern specimen of N.mortenthaleri, or a new locality that
displayed more vivid reds.
In this case, I was more than happy to be proven wrong. Within a matter of days my supplier in Iquitos had a few hundred specimens, both male and female, arrive at his facility. It became increasingly clear with each new photo or video that this was almost certainly a new, undescribed, and attractive species.