Python Loaches

Python loach

- Barbadon icthyopodus

Habitat: Rheophilic in nature, prefers clear, fast flowing streams with lots of stones and pebbles

They range from England all the way to Ukraine in europe

Length: 30cm-45cm on average

Diet: Mostly piscivorous as adults with lots of crustacean matter, insectivorous as juveniles

Ancestor: Barbatula barbatula, or the eurasian stone loach

Python loaches are large, macropredatory descendants of the humble stone loach that have grown massive since their days as 2-3 inch animals in the Holocene. They generally keep the same shape, though their proportions are much longer even as juveniles.

Python loaches prefer fast flowing, clear water, and do not tend to be found in still waters, most likely due to their intolerance for low oxygen levels. 

Python loaches are carnivores, and unlike most cyprinids, have developed something akin to teeth, with 4 seperated plates of reinforced keratin in their jaws to help hold and crush their usual prey, as well as hooked pharyngeal jaws similar to animals like the Pikeminnows of North America to process their food, which chiefly consists of other bottom dwelling animals such as other loaches, crayfish, crabs, leuciscids and sticklebacks. In the small streams they call home, they are major apex predators.

They breed in the springtime, both sexes developing spawning tubercles during their mating season. Males will find and pester females into releasing their eggs, which can number over 20,000. These eggs stick to rocks after being fertilized, and are often covered by sediment before they hatch.

Young python loaches are much more typical in a loach sense, being nearly identical to the ancestral stone loach in behaviour, though as they grow, they exhibit more macropredatory tendencies, before finally graduating into a life of piscivory.