Farlowella acus
species of fish
Farlowella acus, the whiptail catfish or twig catfish, is a species of freshwater ray-finned fish belonging to the family Loricariidae, the suckermouth armored catfishes, and the subfamily Loricariinae, the mailed catfishes. This catfish is found in South America. It is the type species of the genus Farlowella. The whiptail catfish is kept in the aquarium hobby.
Taxonomy
Farlowella acus was first formally described as Acestra acus in 1853 by the Austrian ichthyologist Rudolf Kner with Caracas given as the type locality. When Kner described A. acus he proposed the new genus Acestra and in 1864 Pieter Bleeker designated this species as the type species of that genus. The name Acestra was, however, preoccuppied by a genus of Hemiptera, Acestra, named by William Dallas in 1852, and a genus of pipefishes named by Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1852, now a synonym of Nerophis. Carl H. Eigenmann and Rosa Smith Eigenmann proposed the name Farlowella as a replacement for Acestra, in respect of the catfishes in 1889. The genus Farlowella is placed in the tribe Hartiini by some authorities. This genus is classified in the subfamily Loricariinae of the family Loricariidae and the suborder Loricarioidei within the catfish order, Siluriformes.
“Farlowella acus” enters the record as species of fish. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Farlowella, acus and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1073909. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1853, 1864, 1852 and 1889.
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This entry incorporates text from “Farlowella acus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.