Living with catfish

My first encounter with armored loricariid catfish was in the Rio Frijoles, a lovely clear-flowing former tributary of the Rio Chagres in Central Panama. Small mixed-species groups were grazing limestone platforms, looking like ostracoderms, and I felt (illusorily) transported back to the Devonian. In fact, loricariids are highly evolved, intelligent beings with incredible spatial memories, relationships based on individual recognition, and tender, self-sacrificial paternal care of young. I chose to live three years with these catfish because I fell in love; they taught me a lot about how free-swimming catfish deal with threats, opportunities, and challenges in heterogeneous, fluctuating environments.