It’s all started in a restaurant when I complaint to my fish buddies that I have kept all species of the mouth brooder Betta found in Thailand –even bred some- but have not seen any of their habitat. Since, majority of their habitats are in the South –Malay penisular, which required a long drive or an expensive air ticket. I still had no chance to visit any. Good thing there is always exception, one mouth brooder Betta can be found in an area not so far from Bangkok. Betta prima can be found in Jantaburi province ONLY 4 hours away to the Eastern shore line on the Gulf of Thailand.

Normally when you think of Jantaburi, it is all about Tropical fruits. This province is a major producer of Durien, Lambutan and Mangosteen to name a few. The province is also famous for its pristine beach resorts, but no, we are not interested in those this time. We are heading to Pliew Waterfall where Mr. Chaiwut told us about the present of B. prima. He also told us about a huge school of Neolissuchilus soroides,,a brook carp, found in the waterfall.

7.30 AM on a fine Sunday morning in December, I, and 4 friends –Akkapol, Manoch, Anuratana, Wuttidate- were ready to take off. I’m a designated driver as usual. We had all kind of fishing equipments we can imagine on the back of the car. Apart from Betta prima and the Brook carp, another species we would love to see this trip is Rasbora espei and Aplocheilus panchax. The R. espei is a popular fish in the aquarium trade which is available in large quantity every year from Jantaburi, we were wondering how they actually live. For the Killi, A. panchax found in this area should be the sub species, A. p. siamensis. We were wondering how they look like.

About 4 hours later, we were at the last road that would take us to the waterfall. Sra Baab mountain –where the waterfall originated- looked huge from there. The ditch along the road looked so promising that we had to check it out. In the water, there was a school of silvery fish swimming around a bunch of Blyxa sp. After a long drive, I always love to get my feet wet so I’m always the first to reach water. With my dip net, I caught the fish we saw. They were Rasbora sumatrana, a common species, not the R. espei I hoped to see. We also caught Trichopsis vitatus from this location but no Betta was found. (We later found out that this spot is type locality of B. prima.)

A few kilometers from the first location, we parked our car at the entrance of the park. We just realized then, that Pliew waterfall is a National Park and that it had been so since 1959. On our way to the waterfall, there were a lot of shops selling fresh vegetables. The sellers told us that the fish love them and that we would be regret if we were not going to take one. Needless to say, we bought the veggie.

“WOW”, it was the first word from my mouth at the first sight of the stream that came form the water fall. There were hundreds if not thousand of huge Neolissuchilus soroides swimming in crystal clear water. A girl swimming in the water surrounded by them and a father and son pair just stood there amazed at the same sight we were seeing was unforgettable. At that moment, 4 hours of long drive had already worth every second……...

From the first spot, we found another place where there were even more fish. There were many tourists there but the fish didn’t seem to care. In fact, the fish were really enjoying the fresh vegetable from them. We decided to swim with the fish at this spot. The day was rather cloudy and very few light pass through the thick canopy above but we did tried taking underwater pictures anyway. The problems this time were very unusual; there were so many big fish that it was so hard to get a flame filling shot of one of them. After a lot of head and tail shots, I manage to take a few decent pictures. Another fish we found in the water at this point was Poropuntius normani. This smaller and least aggressive fish didn’t look very happy among N. soroides. There were so few of them that we think they will soon disappear from this stream. Actually, there were too many fish here. With out veggie from the tourist, I don’t think the stream would be able to feed such large population of such large fish. We were also worry about them being inbreed to the point that they started to get deformed off spring. This already happened to another population of closely related species in Erawan National Park in Kanchanaburi Province. The problem can be easily solved by introduction of fish of the same species from another location. It sounded simple enough but practically it should not be that easy.

It should be interesting to also point out that another reason why this fish is so numerous is because they are not “safe” for human consumption. Some populations of them eat fruit from plant in Hydnocarpus genus. The oil from this fruit which is traditionally used to heal chronic skin diseases, wounds and ulcers when ingested will irritate human stomach. Thus, the meat of this fish that consume the fruit is toxic to human.

After a while, Anuratana noticed that some young fish have strange circled scar around their head. We searched for the answer and found a young fish with rubber band around its head. The question was answered. The rubber band must came from those uses to tie the vegetable together. Some people just throw a whole bunch into the water with out removing it first. You know the rest of the story…… It took us a while to catch the poor fish to remove the rubber band. We informed one of the park ranger about the incidence and advised them that the use of rubber band should be ban in the park area.

At the big pool where the Pliew waterfall cascade down the granite rock mountain, there were so many tourist and so many fish. I swam to a deeper part of the pool where there were not many people. Under the rather deep water, I saw some brownish fish swimming among the rock formation. I dove down and found out that they were Garra taniata. After several dives, I managed to take a few decent shot of them. It was difficult because my body tends to float and the fish love to stay at the bottom. I had to hug a rock to keep me down, hold my breath and took picture of the fish with another hand.

We left the waterfall around noon. Our lunch was a quick one from street wender, BBQ Chicken with sticky rice. So far, we had not seen Betta prima at the water fall but Mr. Chaiwut told me to look out for them at a stream behind a toilet at the parking lot. So we went there after lunch. Once again, I’m the first to get to the water. It is always my pride to catch the fish we were looking for before any of my friend. I picked my spot on the other site of the bank where the grass and wines were quite dense. Wuttidate whom followed me, picked another spot down stream about 20 meters from me. Unfortunately, for me, it was him who had a very small B. prima in the net first. From that first little one, we worked our way down the stream and we caught a lot more B. prima at all ages. Apart from the Betta, we also caught many others neat fish species. We took pictures of them and released all but 8 sub adult B. prima for our study of their breeding behavior. Since the stream was very near to the parking lot, there were a lot of junks in the water. Before we left the spot we tried to pick up as many junks as possible to drop them at the designated area.

At that point 2 of our wish list had been fulfilled. The 2 species still left on our wish list were Aplocheilus panchax and the Rasbora espei. We were more eager to see the Rasbora, so we headed out to find a good looking stream which is a preferred habitat of the fish. Our plan was to drive around Sra Baab Mountain. Luckily, we did found a stream that looked very promising. The stream was about 3-5 meters wide, shallow, sand bottomed, with brownish tea color water. It was an ideal habitat for Rasbora. We got down the car, worked our way down to a steep and very dense bank and once again managed to get our feet wet. With dipping net in our hand, we started our quest for the R. espei. We were not very successful as most of the fish identified as Rasbora sp. were R. sumartrana. We caught many more Betta prima, which made us pretty happy to know that they are still very abundant in this area. Thanks to their pretty drap coloration and non aggressive behavior which make them “not fun” to keep for most of the people –except me of course. We found many others species of fish in this stream as well.

Further up stream, Wuttidate worked his way into a bunch of trees branches, where many fish was seen swimming. In there he finally caught our first Rasbora espei –him again, I hate this guy :D It took 4 of us almost a full hour to find this little fish. We were satisfied to finally got to record this species on our book but wondering why there was so few of them. At this point, it started to rain. We decided to head back to the car. Fortunately, we caught 2 more R. espei on our way back. That was 3 fish from 4 guys from 1 full hours of searching. He were wondering where those fish in aquarium trade come from. They couldn’t be that cheap if they were this difficult to find. We hope that we were there at the wrong place and time rather than to think that these 3 were just about what this stream had left after the fish being heavily collected each year.

It started to rain heavily. We decided it was about time we should all go home. It was another successful collection trip, although we will sure come back again for more of Jantaburi.

more survey ...