Care
The Cuckoo Catfish is common throughout Lake Tanganyika, where it inhabits the littoral and benthic zones to a depth of 100m (328ft).
Their aquarium should be spacious with a soft sandy substrate in order to protect the sensory barbels. It should be decorated with a good amount of rocky caves/PVC tubes, some driftwood, and robust planting (that can cope with hard, alkaline conditions) to provide shady areas, but you should also ensure that a roomy swimming space is left along the front of the tank. Efficient filtration is recommended, as these fish are voracious eaters and can produce a fair amount of waste. The water should be well-oxygenated with a moderate current, and frequent partial water changes are a must to help keep nitrate to a minimum. These fish are most comfortable in aquaria with subdued lighting, and the use of blue-moon type illumination is highly recommended so that you may observe a few hours of the nightly goings-on in an aquarium containing these catfish. Ensure that heaters are covered with heater guards to prevent these catfish from being burned when looking for dark crevices to rest against. A gregarious species, S. multipunctatus should be kept in groups for their continued wellbeing. Companions should be relatively peaceful although these fish will use their pectoral spines to thwart attackers. They do well as part of a Tanganyikan community of medium-large sized fish but will also thrive and breed alongside mouthbrooders from Malawi or Victoria, which serve as great hosts for their eggs. Young 'multis' are surprisingly deep-bodied and very stocky, before growing into a more graceful adult body shape.
Considering how easily these fish will breed when kept in the right company, it's rather a shame to see that they're widely used to produce hybrids through artificial spawning. These hybrids share some features of both parents but with the commercial bonus of much larger brood sizes from a non-rift female fish. As these mass-spawned youngsters are cheaper to produce, they are occasionally exported as multipunctatus and it can be tricky to tell them apart. Price is often the best guide and thanks to their small broods of large eggs, real Cuckoo cats are never cheap.
Feeding
Omnivorous. Offer a variety meaty frozen foods such as bloodworm, white mosquito larvae, vitamin-enriched brineshrimp, Mysis shrimp etc., along with some sinking catfish pellets/tablets/granules. Be sure to offer some vegetable matter such as cucumber, courgette, and shelled peas, along with occasional algae wafers. These are greedy fish and are easy to feed on a quality sinking staple diet.
Breeding
Unlike the majority of Synodontis species, S. multipunctatus is routinely bred in the home aquarium. Interestingly, it has two reported methods of breeding: brood parasitism and egg scattering. For the former, which is much more common, the catfish coincides its spawning with that of a mouthbrooding cichlid (the catfish will come racing out of their caves the moment they become aware of the cichlids spawning) and stealthily lay eggs amongst those of the host fish. As the Synodontis eggs hatch more quickly than the cichlid eggs, the young catfish consume all the cichlid eggs, leaving the unsuspecting adult cichlid to guard the catfish fry as if they were its own. In the aquarium, well-conditioned S. multipunctatus are most likely to breed in the company of Malawian Haps or Peacocks - brood parasitism taking place if suitable host cichlids are present with tiny Synos being a surprise sighting as they bumble around the shelter of rocks. During egg scattering, the spawning clinch follows a period of excited chasing from the male fish. Eggs are deposited on the substrate or in a cave, often in the care of (uncooperative!) territorial cichlids which then guard the area.
