Melon Barb

This page carried the wrong scientific name for a long time. The melon barb is Haludaria fasciata, described by Jerdon in 1849 and shuffled through Puntius and Dravidia since; Pethia fasciata, the name this entry used to carry, is not a species FishBase recognises. It is endemic to the Western Ghats of southern India, in rivers of Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and not to Sri Lanka as the old entry claimed.

The published water figures are tight: pH 6.0-6.5, hardness near 5 dGH, and 22-26 °C. The temperature ceiling is the part worth acting on, because this barb is often sold as a warm-water community fish and kept several degrees above it.

Body size needs a caveat. The catalogue lists it as reaching 6 cm, a figure that comes from the Wikipedia species article citing FishBase's October 2013 version, which does not say whether the measurement is standard or total length. The current FishBase page prints no maximum-length row at all, and the 8 cm this entry carried before had no source behind it.

Tank volume and group size on this page are editorial. Neither source recommends either, so we suggest 100 litres and six or more fish on the ordinary grounds that a shoaling barb colours and behaves better in numbers. Males in condition flush red and grow fine tubercles on the snout, and the species scatters eggs over the substrate and then ignores them.