Loaches Online Forum

The good and fish-interested woman who runs the fish room at our semi-local good fish store called to tell us she had some "really cool gobies." They're long, eyes on top, friendly. It took her a couple weeks to get the latin from her supplier, and it is as in the subject title. We can't find it with google. Not any variation of it.

She said her supplier had only seen these fish once before in the last 20 years, very rare. So she got some more of them.

We of course are a bit wary of buying some strange thing that we know not what it might be or become.

It's about an hour drive, so we haven't gone just to check them out.

Anyone? Any ideas?

How big? Fresh? Salt? Any idea where it was collected?

Gobiopterus stellatus could be corrupted into the name you've got, but they don't really match your description. (I couldn't find any good photos of this species online, but the genus consists of tiny, translucent, relatively short and compressed gobies).

Gobionellus stomatus is another possibility that seems more like your description.

Thank you!

They're in fresh water now, and surviving, but I don't think the LFS knows anything about the origins or care of this fish.

I guess we'll drive and see them tomorrow. We can bring a laptop along and maybe google from a cafe after we see it, or post here.

And the LFS person may have actually spelled it gobioie esserratus -- not that that helps at all to our googling.

A photo of them in the fish store:

http://www.lehet.com/bitbucket/IMG_1161.jpg

We brought two home. While the light was good, they were still pretty greyed out, so no photos from home yet.

That photo above makes them look a little bit more mud-skipper-ish than they are acting here in the Q tank. They're a little bit speckled, and they're acting a bit like dojo loaches (from memory -- it's been a while since I've had a dojo).

A photo of them in the fish store:

http://www.lehet.com/bitbucket/IMG_1161.jpg

We brought two home. While the light was good, they were still pretty greyed out, so no photos from home yet.

That photo above makes them look a little bit more mud-skipper-ish than they are acting here in the Q tank. They're a little bit speckled, and they're acting a bit like dojo loaches (from memory -- it's been a while since I've had a dojo).

First, let me emphasize that I am in no way a goby expert. That said, it does look a bit like a Gobionellus to me, but looks even more like a Pseudapocryptes mudskipper. Both genera are euryhaline, so either is likely to do well in fresh water. Perhaps you could give them a haul-out spot and see what they do with it. Gobionellus do not, to my knowledge, leave the water, so if you see the fish using the haul-out they are almost certainly mudskippers.

Yes, I've been googling for a while now, and I just came back here to post that. I'm pretty sure we've got Pseudapocryptes elongatus, Elongate Mudskipper.

I found a thread where Frank Greco has not been able to get them past quarantine; they always succumb to a bacterial infection. However these have been in the LFS for a few weeks now, and hopefully we can give them better conditions than that. I guess they'll go into the 120 gallon loach tank once they're through quarantine here.

Do mudskippers need to be able to get out of the water? I usually see them sitting on some surface halfwya out of the water.

They should have brackish water as well.

> brackish water

As pointed out above, these seem to be euryhaline, and should tolerate fresh as well as salt water.

From what I've found about these gobies, they will generally not crawl out of the water even if given the opportunity. As we were releasing them after floating in tupperware, tipping the tupperware toward the tank surface, they did sort of get their heads up out of the water on the tupperware surface and rest there, with their eyes up in the air. They seemed happy resting there like that, but they also didn't make any moves to get farther out of the water than that. These fish seem to be a generally-stay-underwater flavor of mudskipper.

It'll be interesting to see if or how long we can keep them alive. I'm glad we didn't buy more than two of them though.

If anyone's interested in them, and in the northeast, they have a fair number of them at onestop pet store in Brattleboro VT

WOW!
I really like those fish! The "eyes on top" look is really endearing!
I don;t suppose there is a way to have a small place for them to get up and poke their faces out of the water surface if they wanted to!!???
Don't you think that would be a very interesting addition to any tank?

Yes, they are interesting. They are stars in an especially interesting Quarantine tank-- with a Serpenticobita Octozona, 3 Homaloptera confuzona, one hillstream that we don't even know, and some other hillstreams.

They don't actually seem to show any interest in the surface. They'll swim up off the bottom sometimes, but they definitely seem most happy on the bottom. Maybe I'll try something floating as an experiment, though it will probably fly around that tank a lot in the current.

Glenna, you should come visit, and you can pick up a bunch of them here.