Gilded Catfish

About

The gilded catfish (Brachyplatystoma rousseauxii) is one of the largest catfishes in the Amazon and Orinoco basins, and that fact alone tells you most of what you need to know before considering one. Adults are uniformly silvery-white across the body, and while juveniles and subadults carry elongate filaments on the caudal fin lobes, a trait shared across the Brachyplatystoma genus, these are reduced or lost entirely by the time the fish reaches full size. The deeply forked tail with its narrow, nearly equal lobes is a reliable identification marker in adults, and the species can be separated from close relatives by the relatively short maxillary barbels, which often don't even reach past the head in mature fish. In the wild, this species undertakes remarkably long migrations through the river systems of South America. A life history so complex that captive breeding has never been achieved. In the aquarium, this is strictly a species for very experienced keepers with the resources to house a fish that can approach six feet in length and live for over two decades. Tankmates need to be large enough that they don't become a meal, and even then, the sheer scale of housing requirements makes this one of the most demanding freshwater fish in the hobby.