Taxonomy & naming
The species was described in 1996 by the American ichthyologist Robert Rush Miller as Theraps wesseli, in Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters. Miller built the description around material gathered by the Louisville aquarist Richard 'Rusty' Wessel, the 'dedicated amateur naturalist of the Papaloteca River basin' for whom the fish is named; the type series came from the Río Belleaire at the CA-13 bridge near Entelina, in the Río Papaloteca drainage of Departamento de Atlántida. For two decades the fish sat awkwardly in Theraps, a genus of riverine Mexican and Guatemalan cichlids that it superficially resembled but to which molecular work showed it was not closely tied. The resolution came with Říčan, Piálek, Dragová and Novák's 2016 revision of the Middle American cichlids (Vertebrate Zoology 66), a combined molecular and morphological analysis that dismantled the remaining catch-all genera. Their phylogeny recovered wesseli as an old, isolated lineage with no close living relatives, and they erected the monotypic genus Chortiheros to hold it alone. The name fixes the fish to its homeland: Chortiheros combines 'Chortí' — the Ch'orti' Maya of the Honduras–Guatemala borderlands, and by extension the Chortís Block, the geological terrane that underlies northern Central America — with the old cichlid genus Heros, so that the fish is, in the authors' phrase, 'the hero of the Chortís.' Within Cichlinae it belongs to the heroine radiation; the Cichlid Room Companion files it in tribe Therapsini. It is monotypic: Chortiheros wesseli is the genus's only species.
Morphology
Chortiheros wesseli is a small cichlid by Central American standards, reaching about 3 in in standard length (FishBase) — a fish of streams rather than the deep-bodied lake giants of the family. The body is moderately elongate and laterally compressed, built more for holding station in current than for the slab-sided territoriality of larger heroines. Ground colour is a pale silvery to olive-tan, broken by a series of dark vertical bars down the flank and by a dark mid-lateral band that runs from behind the eye toward the caudal base, where it commonly resolves into a discrete spot or blotch; the bars and band intensify with mood, flushing dark during display, courtship and stress and fading to a washed pattern in a settled fish. The dorsal and anal fins are long-based and can carry rows of pale spotting, with the soft-fin tips somewhat produced in mature fish. Sexual dimorphism follows the usual heroine pattern but is modest at this size: males grow a little larger and develop slightly extended dorsal- and anal-fin tips, while ripe females are rounder-bodied and often show higher-contrast breeding colour. Outside of breeding the sexes are not reliably told apart at a glance.
Habitat
The species is a strict endemic of the Caribbean (Atlantic) slope of northern Honduras, confined to a small cluster of rivers in and around the Departamento de Atlántida: the Río Papaloteca, the Río Cangrejal and the Río Danto. This is a genuinely tiny range — the whole distribution falls within a few adjacent drainages descending the Nombre de Dios and Cordillera Central foothills to the Caribbean near La Ceiba — and the fish is best described as a microendemic. It is a rheophilic, lowland-to-foothill stream fish, recorded from fast-flowing, clear, well-oxygenated water over rock, cobble and gravel, the kind of tumbling forest river that drains the steep Atlantic-facing slopes of the region. As a benthopelagic fish of running water it works the riffles and runs and the pools between them rather than still backwaters, and its whole biology is tied to the warm, clear, current-fed habitat of these few rivers. The range sits within the Caribbean-slope freshwater fauna of Honduras, a province of high local endemism and correspondingly high conservation concern.
Feeding
Detailed gut studies have not been published for wesseli, and FishBase carries no measured diet, estimating its trophic level at about 3.2 from body size and the diets of close relatives. In practice it reads as a generalist omnivore-invertivore of fast water, taking aquatic insect larvae and other benthic invertebrates picked from rock and gravel surfaces, supplemented by algae, biofilm and organic detritus scraped or grazed from the substrate. A small rheophilic heroine of clear, current-fed streams is functionally an opportunist that works the productive riffle community — the larvae of caddisflies, mayflies and midges that colonise stony substrates, plus the aufwuchs that coats them — rather than a specialist predator or a dedicated substrate-sifter like its lowland relatives. In the aquarium it accepts a correspondingly broad diet, which fits this generalist, current-feeding natural history.
Mating
Like the other heroine cichlids of Central America, the Honduran mojarra is a biparental, pair-bonding substrate spawner. A bonded male and female select and clean a spawning surface within a defended territory and tend the brood together, in the familiar division of labour in which the female concentrates on direct egg-care and the male on perimeter defence. Specifics of courtship and seasonality in the wild have not been formally documented for this microendemic, but the pattern is consistent across its riverine relatives: lateral displays, fin-spreading and substrate-cleaning lead up to spawning, with the female's heightened breeding colour signalling her condition, and territorial aggression sharpening around the nest. In a fast-water stream, spawning sites are the sheltered faces of rocks and crevices out of the main current rather than open sand, which shapes where and how pairs nest.
Breeding
Chortiheros wesseli is an open or semi-open biparental substrate spawner. The adhesive eggs are laid on a cleaned hard surface — a rock face, ledge or crevice sheltered from the current — and guarded and fanned by both parents; after hatching the wrigglers are typically shifted to a pit or sheltered hollow, and once free-swimming the fry are herded and defended as a school by the pair. Clutch size and exact developmental timing have not been formally published for the wild population, and given its protected, narrow-range status the species is bred only occasionally and on a small scale by specialist aquarists rather than in commercial volume. As with most substrate-spawning heroines, parental care is extended across eggs, larvae and free-swimming fry, and a settled pair in condition will spawn repeatedly. No specialised cave- or tunnel-nesting behaviour distinct from this conventional pit-and-substrate pattern has been documented.
In the aquarium
Wessel's cichlid is a rarity in the hobby — a sought-after fish among specialists in Central American cichlids rather than a shop staple — and it reached aquarists largely through the collecting efforts of Rusty Wessel, after whom it is named. It is one of the more manageable Central Americans on account of its small size, but it is emphatically a stream fish and should be kept as one. The defining requirements are strong flow and clean, well-oxygenated water: this is a rheophilic species from tumbling, clear rivers, so a tank with brisk circulation (a powerhead or river-manifold arrangement), generous filtration and the cooler, oxygen-rich conditions of running water suits it far better than a warm, still community tank. Aquascape with rounded rock, cobble and a few caves and crevices to provide current breaks and spawning sites over a sand-and-gravel bed, leaving open runs for swimming.
A pair can be housed in a tank on the order of roughly 30 US gal upward; a larger footprint helps if a pair is allowed to form from a group, so subordinate fish can keep clear during spawning. Water should track its warm, clear-water origins — temperature in the mid-to-upper twenties Celsius and a roughly neutral to slightly alkaline, moderately hard chemistry — with the strong aeration and regular water changes that any flow-loving fish demands. Feeding is straightforward: a varied diet of small frozen and live invertebrates (bloodworm, brine shrimp, daphnia) and good-quality sinking or floating prepared foods, with some vegetable and algae-based content to reflect its grazing habits. For tankmates choose robust but not oversized companions that share its preference for current and will not bully a relatively small, uncommon fish; avoid the genuinely belligerent large Central Americans, which will dominate it, and bear in mind that as a protected microendemic it is a fish to keep responsibly and, ideally, to breed.
Conservation
The IUCN Red List assesses Chortiheros wesseli as Vulnerable, under criterion B1ab(iii), in an assessment published in 2020 (assessed 4 February 2020; assessors Juan C. Carrasco and Tim Lyons). The listing turns on the fish's very small range: as a microendemic restricted to a few short Caribbean-slope rivers around the Departamento de Atlántida, it has a limited extent of occurrence and an inferred continuing decline in the quality of its habitat. The pressures are those bearing on the forested Atlantic-facing watersheds of northern Honduras — deforestation and the resulting siltation and changes in flow, agricultural and urban pollution, and the general degradation of clear, fast-water habitat on which a rheophilic specialist depends. Climate modelling has flagged it specifically: published projections indicate that the already small suitable range of this microendemic could contract further under future climate scenarios, compounding the threats from land-use change. It carries no CITES listing and is of no commercial-fishery interest beyond the small specialist aquarium trade. Among Honduran freshwater fishes it stands out as one of the very few assessed as threatened, and its monotypic genus makes the conservation stakes correspondingly high — losing the species would mean losing the lineage.