Loaches Online Forum

The CBC in Canada is showing David Attenborough's recent HDTV documentary series Planet Earth. The series is spellbinding, as usual with this guy, but tonight they showed the episode on life in caves. A full five minutes was devoted to what he called the "Angel Fish." This was a blind cave loach, clearly a loach, filmed in Thailand. I wonder if it was not the same loach first documented here by Nonn.

In the episode, they show the fish actually climbing out of water and up a waterfall, "walking" in its way up a vertical incline.

Fantastic footage, and no mention of loaches. But clearly a loach!

Nice.

I saw that program a few months ago over here, as per usual with David Attenborough it was a great series. The Loaches you mention were indeed very interesting fish and afterwards I had a look around the internet to see if I could find out anything else about them and the closest I could find are the Triplophysa gejiuensis or Gejiu blind loach

There is very little info and what there is Icant read because I am not totally sure what language it is in

http://kepu.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/gb/lives/a ... ls505.html

There was another species of blind cave loach that I found Schistura trogocataractus but it didnt look like the ones in that program.

Homaloptera thamicola?



http://pages.nyu.edu/~rb4/thaicave.htm

Martin.

Thats the one Martin

He he! Found it "just like that!

Thought this would be the one....Put 'Homaloptera, cave' into Google and it was the first hit!

David Attenborough's contribution to raising public awareness of nature in a positive way spans over 50 years of broadcasting and writing.

In 80 years, he's never found a decent barber

He first got in front of the camera when a presenter he was directing couldn't deal with the technicalities of the situation.

My first job ever was working in Chiswick Aquaria in West London. It was a petshop up top, but in the basement was the fish import and wholesale business. One of my boss's sidelines was providing animals to the BBC for film purposes. So we had a lot of contacts at the Beeb.

My boss had known David for years and every so often he would drop in the shop because he kept fish (bet ya didn't know that huh?). It would usually be when we had wild shipments in from S.America or Africa. David wasn't interested in the regularly available kinds of fish and he's probably the one who raised my interest into searching for oddballs.

He'd find something unusual and would always expect to get it for the same price as the regular fish.......at that point my boss and he would retire to the boss's office for negotiations

Whatever was agreed, at some point they would reappear and my boss would catch and bag the fish. I'm not sure if it was me as a recent school-leaver in awe at this childhood hero, but I always felt awkward when he was there. He came across as a bit pompous to be honest. He certainly wasn't very chatty with me, but that's probably because my boss was flitting around him and keeping him sweet. I'm sure that David's importance at the BBC was in his businessman's mind for future good favour with the corporation.

Martin.

I missed that one!

as long as you have seen the blue planet. thats great

Any time I see that a TV program is a David Attenborough project I HAVE to watch it. He is probably the best at what he does.

he IS the best at what he does. no other wildlife programme has quite the same class and information. i wonder if he still keeps fish, and what he has?

I totally agree!