Five-lined Clown Goby literally /only/ eating BBS. Dither fish/teacher? Sacrificial SPS?

Jay Hemdal · Aug 4, 2022

Cool container. We make them for large fish out of plastic laundry baskets and screening - same exact design.

Jay

Tired · Aug 4, 2022

Thanks! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and it seems to be working well so far. It looks like a reasonable amount of flow is getting into the box, and it's nice and stable. Hopefully he can get comfortable in there, and then get nice and fat. I'm glad I found a nicely sized box for him.

I'm going to have so many munnids by the time he's ready to come out of the box. I already have a lot, from the tank being fallow before I got him, and I don't know if he's been eating them at all. Whatever fish gets added next to him is going to have a field day.

I did see some really cute redhead gobies at my LFS a couple days ago, and was tempted to pick one up and put it through QT to serve as an example for him. But they get a little larger than I'd prefer for this current tank (they had one once that was nearly 3" long!), and two of them were sparring through the glass, so they might not play terribly well with other rock-creeping gobies. Even if the sparring was cute to watch, all puffed up at each other.

Tired · Aug 16, 2022

He's fattening up nicely, from what I can see. I'm keeping a slightly excessive amount of BBS in there at all times. It's always fresh BBS- whenever I check in the morning, there's maybe 10 left in the box, total. The rest all get eaten and/or leak out.

Tried some frozen calaminus copepods. No dice, as far as I could tell. These things stink. Literally, they stink- it's a weird smell. Maybe why fish supposedly like these so much. Might try them again, they're bright red and seem like a good size.

Tired · Aug 29, 2022

He has now upgraded to biting and then spitting out foods. I've gotten him to taste the golden pearl pellets and the frozen calaminus, and he won't try frozen BBS or frozen cyclops. Is there any chance he'll eventually stop spitting the food out, if I keep trying?

There are also copepods living in the box with him, in the opposite corner from his hiding spot. I am not impressed with this animal's hunting skills.

By contrast, the curious wormfish I picked up at the LFS (never heard of them? neither had I!) started eating frozen foods right away, and has now learned that it can eat out of midwater instead of off the floor like it originally did. If it didn't still need to be quarantined, I'd put them together and see if it can teach the clown goby a thing or two.

homer1475 · Aug 30, 2022

One reason I stopped keeping these fish.....

They only live 2 to 3 years tops. Not really worth the effort to me for a fish that has such a short lifespan.