Blue-eye panaque

The blue-eye panaque is a wood-eating armoured catfish found only in the Lake Maracaibo basin of Venezuela, a drainage cut off from the Amazon and home to its own fish fauna. It is a plain charcoal-grey pleco whose one distinctive feature is a pale, almost luminous blue eye, with a mouth of spoon-shaped teeth built for rasping wood. It reaches about 28 cm and is heavy-bodied with it.

Wood is not decoration for this fish — it is the food. It practises true xylophagy, gouging and digesting soft driftwood such as alder, beech, birch and oak (avoid conifers), and a tank without a constant supply of it will not keep the fish alive. Supplement with algae wafers, spirulina and blanched vegetables, and keep animal protein to a small fraction of the diet. The wood also files the teeth down and stops them overgrowing.

This is a large, long-lived fish for a committed keeper. One adult needs at least 500 litres in a long tank, a fine sand bed, and filtration that can cope with the fibrous waste it produces. Water should be soft and stable at 20–24 °C, pH 6.2–7.5. It is peaceful toward other species and fits a large community with tetras, silver dollars and the like, but it is territorial toward its own kind and other big plecos, so keep just one. The species is listed as Data Deficient by the IUCN, and every fish in the trade is wild-caught.