The following is a profile of one of my favorite species of fish, the Dojo Loach.

The Dojo Loach goes by several different names such as:

Scientific Name:
Misgurnus anguillicaudatus

Common Names:
Dojo Loach
Golden Dojo
Weather Loach


Preffered pH: 6 - 8

Hardness:

Preffered Substrate: Soft substrate as this loach likes to burrow. Caves or hiding places are a plus.

Schooling/Schoaling?: No. Enjoys company but can be kept as a single specimen.

Temperment: Very peaceful. Perfect for community tanks.

Potential Size: 10"

Special Notes: Dojo loaches will eat the eggs of other fish.

Comments:

This unique fish has quite a few traits that make it a very hardy fish. It is capable of tolerating a wide variety of conditions, o it is fish well suited for beginners. Where the Dojo Loach originates, the pools it lives in are prone to drying out, so the Dojo has to have a way to survive until the pool fills back up. The Dojo does this by secreting a mucous that covers it's body to keep it from drying out. It also has a mechanism to allow it to absorb a large amount of oxygen so that it can survive out of water. So if your Dojo ever jumps out of your aquarium, you have a bit more time to put him back in the aquarium than you would any other fish.

The reason the Dojo Loach is known as the weather loach is because when a storm is approaching, or a strong rain, the loach reacts to the barometric pressure and begins to swim erratically around the aquarium.

The loach tends to stay active all through the day, even though they are considered more noctural.

The Dojo Loach will thrive on flake, algae wafers and sinking pellets, although from what I have found, they absolutely relish blood worms.

Be sure to provide hiding places for them so they will feel more at home. They also like to burrow, so be sure to provide fine gravel or sand substrate.

The Dojo Loach is known to grow to about 8" in the home aquarium.

If any of you ever have the chance of owning one of these fine creatures, be sure to get one! They are very personable and mine eats out of my hand. They are very fun fish to watch and are very peaceful.

Mazza,

I'm going to get picky here but if you're going to be an administrator, errors/omissions shouldn't be acceptable.

Scientific names should be written in italics, the genus is capitalized the species is not.

Misgurnus anguillicaudatus as per Axelrod's Atlas of Freshwater Aquarium Fishes, 10th edition the weather loach is not (or no longer) Cobitis.

Hardness was omitted; soft to moderate

You didn't mention geographic origin (which leads to water type) nor that they prefer cooler water, compared to most tropicals.

Sorry to be anal about it but I believe I read that part of the forum's mission was to provide specific reference information.

roflmao his first post on the forums and hes trying to boss aroud / insult an admin.

1. hes not getting paid for writing this
2. hes doing this for free
3. havent seen you do anything yet
4. not writing names in italics only makes a diffrence to you . people looking up this information wont know the diffrence between if its all caps all lowecase or mix and match and being in italics wont even matter to them. the only people who care are the self important know it alls who think it makes them special.

2 things are important correct spelling and correct information

and if you were even remotly conserned aboyut this you would have sent the admin a private message with the corections but it looks like to me your just trying to either show off or be a brat and i find both annoying.

and i honestly think the information put on sies should be from personal exsperince with these fish and not just another book website refrence. anyone with 200 dollars can have a set of books published and any person with 10 dollars for a domain name can have a website for 5 bucks a month . doesnt mean the info is even remotly correct. personal exsperince with fish is something you can stand behind

until you have acctually contributed something or you pay for the website whats accepable to you doesnt really matter. if you had been on any other forum the admin would have deleted your post and probably banned you for your rude outburst.

Thank you jadefoodog.

ghinksmon -

Not only was this the first 'article' I had ever written on a specific fish, I wanted it to be based on personal experiences. I hope you understand that we are all human, and a person with absolutely no experience writing fish profiles couldn't possibly know how to properly format a fish profile.

If you ever have a concern with anything that I post, please send it to me in a private message and we will find a resolution.

This information was found on other websites. I thought including the scientific name would be useful to those looking at the profile. I apologize for the error.

Since this 'fact sheet' was based on personal experience and observations only, and since I did not know the exact hardness they preffered, I did not include it.

I will admit fault that I did not know it would be important to include the geographic origin. Whether it's bad or not, it wasn't something that was specifically important to me when I am trying to find out information on a certain fish. The big factors, which I made an honest effort to include, we're basic background information, pH, compatibility,potential size and any other information that I had observed.

If you would like to see something included in any profile that I attempt to write, please send a private message to me or one of our other administrators.

Our mission is to provide reliable information for our members to use to provide a better environment for their fish. I could sit here all day and copy and paste information, whether I had done any research or not, in a sad effort to make a profile 'perfect' based on what a book thinks a fish should like. The reason this 'profile' was not pinned and put in with our fish facts is because I wanted it to be a reference, a recommendation if you will, for anyone looking to purchase a dojo loach. It wasn't meant to be hard evidence or years of research. I apologize for the confusion.

In an effort to avoid further confusion, I have renamed the post from 'Dojo Loach' to 'Interesting Information About The Dojo Loach'.

The staff here at Aquatopia strives to provide the best environment for you to discuss the wonderful hobby of keeping fish. I'm not going to fool you into thinking that I am absolutely perfect. Administrator or not, I try my best to provide high quality information for our members.

I don't frown t constructive criticism. If you have a comment, suggesstion or complaint, please send any member of our administration team a private message and it will be handled promptly.

Ok first of all, let's not wear our hearts on our sleeves. I actually appreciated that correction. Even if it is something as simple as italicizing the scientific name, I do want all the information out there to be accurate. Even though the hobbyists that we're here to serve, arn't likely to care one way or the other about italics.

As far as omitting the water hardness, etc, is concerned, that is one reason we did not pin up this profile.

PS - I'm giving you 10 AquaTokens for your correction, 5 for the italics, 5 for the changed scientific name.

still shoulda been done from the privacy of a PM and not posted public

wouldn't it have been easier instead of making it sound so offensive saying something like

just to fix a few things up in your post...

and then listing the changes that he needed to make or as jadefoodog said PM would have been more appropriate

yeah, you NEVER captilize the species name.

end of story.

thats why you will never catch me writing one of these profiles. ill never post something i havent seen with my own eyes. blindly repeating something on another website doesnt mean its right. i dont trust the media and i dont trust books and defiantly i dont trust most websites.

the media is controled by sponsers and political figures

anyone with 400 dollars can get published. plus publishers dont care nor have the time/money to check the information to make sure its correct.

anyone with 5 dollars a month and a domain name can post anything they want on a website.

but the biggest reason i dont trust profiles is its useually based off of mass generalzation and fish are as individual as people they are useually all diffrent. to have a correct profile for one fish you would have to have up to 50 tanks with diffrent temps / ph and all that. monitor them all every day for at least 4 months and then compare data. and thats just on one fish. imagine doing it on every known species.

yes i understand most profiles are based off of the place the fish are native to. but with that mentality all black people would like extremly hot climates like africa but i personally know many of them that hate hot weather. who is to say fish are diffrent. theres many things that people make up and basically just say "its that way because i said it is" with no research or study just cause they saw it in a book or online somewhere.

so why get bent out of shape over a capitol letter when god knows if the content is even valid. sure it may work for 80% or 50% or as low as 10% theres something us great humans just will never know.

I think they CAN be useful, when used correctly. With the exception of all fish needing access to oxygen, at least occasional access to H2O, and some form of sustenance, the rest are generalizations. They can help people who haven't kept a particular kind of fish before, get a general idea of if it will work in their current community tank or not. Many people might not know how big an ornate bichir will get. Seeing the fish in a pet store, doesn't tell you what to expect in a year or two. At the same time, just because it says a fish is an herbivore, doesn't mean that it shouldn't ever have meats/proteins in its diet, because even the herbivores need some proteins from time to time that they won't get from algae wafers.

Ok, I'm going to offend someone here with this... but it's a bit like religion. It's to be taken generally, but not literally. Just like it's not practical to go out and stone every adulterer, it's also not practical to think that every cichlid will get along just great with every pleco just because most sources say they get along.

PS - I apologise if you do take your religion that seriously, and if I might point out, I live in Siberia. :P

I apologize for any offense, that wasn't my intent. I also apologize for not using PM I agree that would have been a better approach.

As for Jadefoodog's comments I also agree that there is far too much misinformation being circulated as fact. But posting personal experience doesn't necessarily prevent this. Personal experience isn't necessarily true for the majority of that species, or what one considers a success and therefore they consider it "correct conditions" may have actually been on the edge of tolerance for the specimen. As for the authority of the source I quoted... look up the scientific name of the Cardinal Tetra.

You're right I haven't contributed here or elsewhere, mostly because I don't consider my years of fish keeping to be an accurate study warranting printing.

Just for fun however, google Herbert R Axelrod to see what he's up for lately; possibly 5 to 10 (years). Oh well even the best can fall eventually:)

:lol: "Leaders of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra are divided over an investigative report that failed to assign personal blame for deceptions that turned the orchestra's acquisition of a collection of rare string instruments into an embarrassment." :lol:

And then there's the taxes... there's always taxes.