Barred Bichir

About

The barred bichir (Polypterus delhezi) is one of those fish that makes you feel like you're keeping a piece of prehistory. Its relatives trace back to the Triassic, and the fish itself looks the part. A long, armored body banded with dark markings along its flanks, topped with a row of small finlets running down the back that are unlike anything else in freshwater fishkeeping. In the wild it occupies streams, lakes, and flooded zones across the middle Congo River basin, emerging at night to hunt small fish and invertebrates in the shallows. Vision is poor, so it navigates and locates prey almost entirely by smell. One of its more remarkable traits is the ability to breathe atmospheric air using a modified swim bladder that acts as a functional lung. Deny it surface access and it can actually drown. Young fish even sport feathery external gills, a feature more reminiscent of an axolotl than a fish. In the aquarium, delhezi is generally manageable alongside similarly sized tankmates like other bichirs, larger catfish, and robust mid-sized fish, but anything small enough to swallow is fair game. Most specimens reaching the hobby are wild-caught, so a careful quarantine period is genuinely worth the effort.