Hoplisoma sp. CW111 "Vulcan"

This fish doesn't have a scientific name yet, but everyone knows it as "Vulcan". It was first documented in 2016, collected from the Rio Curua in the Xingu drainage, a river system that has been at the center of one of the most contested infrastructure projects in recent Brazilian history. The Belo Monte dam complex began diverting flow on the Xingu in 2016 and wasn't fully operational until 2019, and the full downstream effects on endemic fish communities are still being worked out.^1,2 The Xingu has an unusually high rate of endemism, with species found nowhere else, which makes undescribed taxa from its tributaries worth paying attention to.

CW111 also happens to be exactly the fish serious hobbyists spend years trying to find: compact enough for smaller tanks, straightforward to keep, and more vividly patterned than almost anything else in the genus. The zebra patterning and the size (males top out around 4cm) do the talking. It shows up on waitlists far more often than it shows up for sale.

The fish you're looking at were bred here in Eugene, Oregon. There's no IUCN assessment for an unnamed species, and no formal conservation program to cite. What exists is a small, healthy, captive population...and a lineage that doesn't depend on what's happening in the Xingu.

1. Fearnside, P.M. (2017). Belo Monte: Actors and arguments in the struggle over Brazil's most controversial Amazonian dam. Die Erde, 148(1), 14-26.

2. Higgins, T. (2020). Belo Monte boondoggle: Brazil's biggest, costliest dam may be unviable. Mongabay.