Species Profile: Panaque cochliodon

Common Name:   Blue-eyed Royal Pleco

Description:   A true holy-grail loricariid and one of the hobby's earliest status-symbol plecos, it was first imported in 1975 by Heiko Bleher before largely disappearing from the trade in the mid-1990s as collecting in the Río Magdalena and Cauca became impossible due to guerrilla and paramilitary conflict. For almost 30 years, it was consistently misidentified in both scientific and aquarium literature as P. suttonorum, a distinct species from Venezuela's Río Catatumbo–Lake Maracaibo basin that hardly ever enters the aquarium trade.

Category:   Catfish

Global Region:   South America

Distribution:   Río Cauca and Río Magdalena