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The secret of Pahang

There seem to be a trend growing for the Pahang Toman Bunga or Channa marulioides from Pahang. As far as I know Pahang produce the worse Toman Bunga, they lack in colors and flowers. Many had asked me if their recent bought Pahang Marulioides is from Pahang, I will tell them Pahang Perak Selangor and all over Malaysia is unidentifiable. They are just the common Malaysian Marulioides.

 Wild caught Pahang
 Wild caught Pahang
Wild caught Pahang

The above images are wild caught Pahang from my collector. As you can see there is no way you can ID them apart from the rest of the clan, or the common cb marulioides you buy for RM10.

However, I had a long chat with my collector during our Terengganu expeditions and I discovered a very interesting secret about the Pahang Marulioides. Apparently there is a hidden gem at the very edge of the state of Pahang that my collector told me about. He was there a few years back looking for new grounds and they had stumbled upon a swamp where a unique variant of Marulioides still thrive. I asked if he had any pictures of the fish and it took him awhile to dig the thousands of photos searching through all his images and finally showed me 2 pictures that he managed to keep. 

It left my jaw wide open when I saw those images, it was one of the most beautiful Marulioides that I've seen. They caught quite a few and all of them are packed with flowers and some of them even had flowers passed the gill!!! They are extraordinary large specimen unlike what he usually encounter. Its every Marulioides keepers dream, Its a true gem. 

He told me the catch location and as the excitement grew we planned another expedition to this secret location. But....there is always a but, reaching the location according to him makes Terengganu habitat a walk in the park. From the boat launching point from the river to the hidden location takes 6 hours if it is not blocked. If you can recalled what we had to do to reach terengganu habitat then this will be far worse. Its terribly inaccessible according to him and that is also the reason that they don't play there anymore. So for me reaching there from Kuala Lumpur will take another 3.5 hours and add everything in I'm looking at easily 10 hours of struggling, hmmmmm.

We planned for a bit and this place seem to need plenty of preparations and also considerations. I don't have the luxury of time for another expedition as I do need to work but I also wished to document the fish desperately as it could possibly turned out to be a new variant, Pahang variant perhaps. Now there is one thing that I need to consider carefully since it is near impossible to access. This should be a trip for the end of the year in the rainy season that coincide with the Marulioides spawning season. And if possible I would prefer to gather some babies to sample. Where I can grow them and document the life stages and flowers development as how I'm documenting the Terengganu now. We can better understand the different pattern and flower formations, the colors and the fin pattern.

 This look something like the var Terengganu but if you take a closer look it has just 4 bands, very very wide band.
 Cropped and this too samples very wide band.

The hidden gem of the Pahang Marulioides, possibly variant Pahang. Unfortunately he did not take pictures of the finnage for further identification. The snakeskin is tidy unlike the Terengganu and the head seems short and pointy similar to the Melanoptera.

This new found variant must be investigated, I think not many players had even heard of Pahang snakeskin. How did they remained hidden for so long, what is the secret that is waiting to be unfold? These are all the questions that fueled my curiosity that nobody can possibly have answers to.

How many more hidden gems are out there actually? Will we reached them before human destruction's do and will they suffer similar fate as the variant Terengganu? It is a joy to find a new variant but at the same time we will jeopardize the habitat of this new found variant when they are being made known. It will be too selfish to keep such beauty for myself but if I were to reveal them, it will also meant to make them a hot target. Took me sometime to finally decide to write this article and tell the Pahang secret . Such is the dilemma, the guilt and also the joy.


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