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Does anyone know why the common names for some plecos are anything but common names? For example (to name a few):

Imperial Zebra
King Tiger
Queen Arabesque
Sultan

Did someone feel they needed to "dress up" these stunning beauties to seperate them from the common pleco?

Makes you go hmmmmm.

Throughout the 80's and 90's the way most fish wholesalers communicated to stores was the weekly fax of the fish list. The fish list was remarkably uninformative. It would read something like:

card tet lg .60, plco sm .45, grn terror md .40

imagine that for two or three single spaced pages and you have a good idea how hard to read and generic they were. The readable lists had learned to put the names in columns to make it more readable but still, all you had was a blur of fish names and prices.

Any fish whose wholesale price was high - high being over $10 for freshwater, I'd say, would generally have some sort of description to help it stand out:

qn goddess arabasque super plco gold w/tux 40.00

I remember that when the "hot" plecos first appeared in the late '80's and early 90's we did not know "L" numbers or any other way of cataloging them. So you got some pretty amazing descriptions on the wholesale lists. Often the same fish changed name from week to week.

The L numbers were a real blessing when it came to ordering fish.

Well, that makes sense. Thanks for the answer.

Thats very intresting