For those that you who also visit pfury and pkeepers
Lucien Bal recently posted two photos; one known to be S. elongatus and the
other a very questionable species also being called S. elongatus.
Lucien intimated that Dr. Antonio Machado-Allison did the positive ID on the
the second fish. With that Lucien posted the photos on at least two forums to
my knowledge. There may be more. In my email conversation to Antonio, it was
discovered Antonio had downloaded the lucien photo and it was stretched and
corrupt. This gave the scientist the wrong impression on what the fish was.
Instead of researching the fish ID better Lucien ran with it to the forums
causing arguments with members and including a few unnecessary digs at me in
the process. I didn't participate in the discussion until much later. I
preferred to stay out of it until I noted that Antonio's name was being
tossed around too much by Lucien. Further, Lucien also brought in Heiko
Bleher as an authority on piranhas, using the magazine article published this
year to open the flood gates of old discredited work by Gery pertaining to
subgeneric ranking placements. Including Heiko opinion stating there are
actually one distinctive species of S. elongatus and one distinctive
species of S. pingke. Both under present science have been made
synonyms under the proper species S. elongatus.
While this might not seem to be much to most hobbyists who are aware of
current standings of species, as the owner of OPEFE and its science based
information, it cause me worry that Lucien might continue this misinformation
and lead a new generation of hobbyists down the slippery slope of bad
science.
In conclusion, Antonio Machado-Allison is a wonderful person who really tries
to help people and hobbyists as much as possible. Its just sad that Lucien in
his quest to further his agenda (whatever that is), had to use this nice man
to that end. Let's hope we all learn from this.