Geophagus hondae mouthbrooding

This is the same tank as you saw the Megalichthys in and in fact these Geophagus hondae were breeding while the catfishes were in there with them, but because of their great mouthbrooding ability, they didn’t lose many of the fry.

You can see the full chin and cheeks being a dead giveaway that she has a lot of babies, which we will see in another clip.

The species used to be called Geophagus steindachneri, but that was considered a bit of a mouthful in itself and so it got shortened to ‘hondae’, since Honda was actually Steindachner’s favorite motorbike.

Here we see the old Austrian ichthyologist himself reminiscing about riding his Honda bike in and out of Harvard Yard making as much noise as possible at two o’clock in the morning and waking up all the undergraduates, as well as Louis Agassiz.

Franz Steindachner, incidentally, would have made a great mouthbrooder as his copious beard would have provided additional cover for the fry as well as looking serious and this warning off predators.

And that’s another thing we don’t get to do in YouTube, either, and that is add still images next to the videos.  This one is from Wikipedia, so it has the GNU licence.