The saratoga, Scleropages leichardti, also known as the spotted bonytongue, spotted saratoga, or southern saratoga, is a freshwater

Freshwater

Fresh water is naturally occurring water on the Earth's surface in ice sheets, ice caps, glaciers, bogs, ponds, lakes, rivers and streams, and underground as groundwater in aquifers and underground streams. Fresh water is generally characterized by having low concentrations of dissolved salts and...

 bony fish native to Australia. It belongs to the subfamily Osteoglossinae, or arowana

Arowana

Arowanas are freshwater bony fish of the family Osteoglossidae, also known as bonytongues. In this family of fishes, the head is bony and the elongate body is covered by large, heavy scales, with a mosaic pattern of canals. The dorsal and the anal fins have soft rays and are long based, while the...

s, a primitive group of teleosts. Like all arowanas, it is a carnivorous mouthbrooder

Mouthbrooder

Mouthbrooding, also known as oral incubation and buccal incubation, is the care given by some groups of animals to their offspring by holding them in the mouth of the parent for extended periods of time. Although mouthbrooding is performed by a variety of different animals, most notably Darwin's...

.

Along with the gulf saratoga

Gulf saratoga

The gulf saratoga, Scleropages jardinii, is a freshwater bony fish native to Australia and New Guinea, one of two species of fishes sometimes known as Australian arowanas, the other being the saratoga...

 (S. jardinii), the saratoga is also known as the Australian arowana (mainly by non-Australian aquarists) and barramundi, although the latter name is nowadays reserved in Australia for the unrelated Lates calcarifer.

This species is found in turbid waters and has a more restricted distribution than the other Scleropages native to Australia, Scleropages jardinii.

Description

Like all Scleropages, S. leichardti is a long-bodied fish with large scales, large pectoral fins, and small paired barbel

Barbel (anatomy)

A barbel on a fish is a slender, whiskerlike tactile organ near the mouth. Fish that have barbels include the catfish, the carp, the goatfish, sturgeon, the zebrafish and some species of shark...

s on its lower jaw. Each scale on its dark colored body has a red or pink spot; this feature distinguishes it from S. jardinii, which has several reddish spots on each scale in a crescent shape. S. leichardti is a slimmer fish than other Scleropages; a 90 cm (35 in.) fish was weighed at only 4 kg (8.8 lbs.), compared to 17.2 kg (38 lb.) for a S. jardinii of similar length. The depth of its body is 23-25% of its Standard Length, and it has fewer fin rays than S. jardinii. It is a popular aquarium fish, although it will eat other fish, shrimp, yabbies etc, that are in the tank.

Conservation status

This species is not currently listed on any CITES appendix. http://www.cites.org/eng/app/appendices.shtml. Its IUCN Red List

IUCN Red List

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species , founded in 1963, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature is the world's main authority on the conservation status of species...

 status is Lower Risk/near threatened (LT/nt) http://www.iucnredlist.org/search/details.php?species=20035. Although it does not occur naturally in Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

, it is a protected species in that country.

It has been stocked in number of dams in Queensland, Australia