bbxd
New Member
Loooong time lurker but I wanted to post about my experiences with mini dart gobies and how I've been able to keep them for a full year now. Hopefully this will be helpful to anyone in the future who is interested in these
There are a couple fish which usually get lumped together as 'mini dart gobies' or 'dwarf dart fish', the most well known is Aioliops megastigma, which you can find occasionally online. These get to about 3/4 of an inch
The ones I have are from the Parioglossus genus (I think they might be Parioglossus dotui but there's a lot of varieties), and I have only ever found them by chance at fish stores or mislabelled as Aioliops. Mine are now about an inch long
All the sources I have read about mini dart gobies have maintained that they are very difficult to keep and only take live foods, and this seems to be based on experiences with Aioliops gobies. I have tried twice and been unable to get those to feed on even live baby brine, and each time they have died within a couple weeks. Compared to Parioglossus gobies, these are even smaller, have much smaller mouths and seem to always come in with really sunken bellies like in this photo (they should be nice and round if healthy):
In contrast I haven't lost any of the Parioglossus gobies I have managed to find. They are a bit larger with larger mouths, and even the fairly starved ones eagerly went after bbs. But most surprisingly, they also love finely shaved frozen food and will even take tdo b2 pellets once in a while. This is a similar species, but you can see what I mean about the mouths:
These guys have been great because they actually hang out peacefully together. I'd been looking for schooling/shoaling fish for my 22 long nano, and I first tried a group of eviota gobies which fought each other and again a group of masked gobies which also fought each other pretty relentlessly. After lots of torn fins and rehoming, I resigned to keep those singly, but my experience with these mini dart gobies has been the opposite. There is only ever really minor squabbling and they are genuinely too small to hurt each other. It's cool to seem them roam the tank as a group, definitely more like schooling behavior than shoaling, and they will occasionally follow each other into really tight holes into the rocks where they also sleep. Just make sure not to have any tankmates which might eat them, my own current tank mates are a trimma goby, masked goby, 2 different eviota gobies, and a hi fin goby. I would stick to other similar small perching fish including yellow clown gobies, two-spot blennies, sharknose gobies, etc.
When I first got them, I put them through tank transfer and fed them 3x a day on live bbs to get them fattened up, it was only after they got in the main tank that I saw them going after shaved frozen. For regular feedings, I have been feeding them 2x a day with either bbs or finely shaved frozen food. Pellets are definitely their least favorite food, I toss them in for the rest of the fish but they will go for it too, just not very aggressively. And for the bbs, I use a brine hatchery dish which is super easy to use, and there is plenty of excess bbs which I freeze to use in between hatching cycles. I'll occasionally do a third mid-day feeding of bbs during hatching cycles. They love the frozen bbs as much as the live, but I have not had great experiences with hikari's frozen bbs so I freeze it myself. They will also pick out pods from the water column.
To track if I am feeding enough, I keep an eye on their silver stomachs and make sure they look round and filled out, like you can see in this photo compared against the quality marine photo from before:
if they ever look flat, I'll do an extra feeding of bbs
Overall these Parioglossus gobies have been pretty easy to keep, especially with the hatchery dish being so easy to use. While they might not be as colorful as the Aioliops gobies, they have been way hardier and resilient, and my group of 5 has been doing great a year in. I only wish they were easier to source, but if you can find them and you have the appropriate setup and tankmates, they make the perfect nano schooling fish.
There are a couple fish which usually get lumped together as 'mini dart gobies' or 'dwarf dart fish', the most well known is Aioliops megastigma, which you can find occasionally online. These get to about 3/4 of an inch
The ones I have are from the Parioglossus genus (I think they might be Parioglossus dotui but there's a lot of varieties), and I have only ever found them by chance at fish stores or mislabelled as Aioliops. Mine are now about an inch long
All the sources I have read about mini dart gobies have maintained that they are very difficult to keep and only take live foods, and this seems to be based on experiences with Aioliops gobies. I have tried twice and been unable to get those to feed on even live baby brine, and each time they have died within a couple weeks. Compared to Parioglossus gobies, these are even smaller, have much smaller mouths and seem to always come in with really sunken bellies like in this photo (they should be nice and round if healthy):
In contrast I haven't lost any of the Parioglossus gobies I have managed to find. They are a bit larger with larger mouths, and even the fairly starved ones eagerly went after bbs. But most surprisingly, they also love finely shaved frozen food and will even take tdo b2 pellets once in a while. This is a similar species, but you can see what I mean about the mouths:
These guys have been great because they actually hang out peacefully together. I'd been looking for schooling/shoaling fish for my 22 long nano, and I first tried a group of eviota gobies which fought each other and again a group of masked gobies which also fought each other pretty relentlessly. After lots of torn fins and rehoming, I resigned to keep those singly, but my experience with these mini dart gobies has been the opposite. There is only ever really minor squabbling and they are genuinely too small to hurt each other. It's cool to seem them roam the tank as a group, definitely more like schooling behavior than shoaling, and they will occasionally follow each other into really tight holes into the rocks where they also sleep. Just make sure not to have any tankmates which might eat them, my own current tank mates are a trimma goby, masked goby, 2 different eviota gobies, and a hi fin goby. I would stick to other similar small perching fish including yellow clown gobies, two-spot blennies, sharknose gobies, etc.
When I first got them, I put them through tank transfer and fed them 3x a day on live bbs to get them fattened up, it was only after they got in the main tank that I saw them going after shaved frozen. For regular feedings, I have been feeding them 2x a day with either bbs or finely shaved frozen food. Pellets are definitely their least favorite food, I toss them in for the rest of the fish but they will go for it too, just not very aggressively. And for the bbs, I use a brine hatchery dish which is super easy to use, and there is plenty of excess bbs which I freeze to use in between hatching cycles. I'll occasionally do a third mid-day feeding of bbs during hatching cycles. They love the frozen bbs as much as the live, but I have not had great experiences with hikari's frozen bbs so I freeze it myself. They will also pick out pods from the water column.
To track if I am feeding enough, I keep an eye on their silver stomachs and make sure they look round and filled out, like you can see in this photo compared against the quality marine photo from before:
if they ever look flat, I'll do an extra feeding of bbs
Overall these Parioglossus gobies have been pretty easy to keep, especially with the hatchery dish being so easy to use. While they might not be as colorful as the Aioliops gobies, they have been way hardier and resilient, and my group of 5 has been doing great a year in. I only wish they were easier to source, but if you can find them and you have the appropriate setup and tankmates, they make the perfect nano schooling fish.
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