There are currently 3 described species in the
Dario genus:
D. dario,
D. dayingensis and
D. hysginon. They are all small fishes, reaching about +-2.5cm in size.
D. dario comes from India,
D. dayingensis from China and
D. hysginon from Myanmar.
D. dario is most recognisable by their vertical bars and found in our LFS quite often. However, they are known as Scarlet badis or Badis badis in the trade.
Badis badis is actually a different fish, which is much bigger.
D. dayingensis and
D. hysginon looks quite similar, entire body is red with black blotches on the dorsal and ventral fins. They are rarely found in our LFS.
A website with pictures of the biotope of
D. dario,
http://www.kolumbus.fi/vuorela.antti/dariobiotope.htm
And
here, MrTree shows you where
D. dayingensis can be found, although I think that MrTree has removed the picture of
D. dayingensis.
There is possibly a fourth undescribed
Dario sp. that came to our shores recently. A recent discussion of the fish here,
Dario hysginon and Dario sp..
And finally, Alexander Dorn's webpages of
Dario spp.
Apistos can be quite agressive and territorial.
D. dario are rather slow fishes and easily outcompeted when it comes to feeding. I do not recommend this. They would do well with smaller and less boisterous fishes, e.g the smaller
Parambassis spp.,
Boraras spp.
Also, they are found in slow streams with lots of vegetation and plants, so they do not like current very much.
Edit: Oh yeah, lest I forget, there is an article on
Badis and
Dario in PFK magazine, Oct 2006 issue, written by Anti Vuorella (whose website I posted above) and Stefan van der Voort, who is active in the other forum and successfully bred a number of
Badis spp.
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