Concerned About My Royal Gramma

[Donya]

I've had a royal gramma for a while now, and it's been doing great. It's exhibited a fairly fast change in behavior in the last two days though. Previously it would run over to me every time I walked past the tank and would beg for food (literally, every single time I walked past) and eat from my hand, while now it eyes me from a distance, comes out when it's really hungry , and the rest of the time darts away. It looks like it's scraped itself and lost a few scales on it's back right in front of the dorsal fin, probably as a result of darting into a narrow but sharp-edged hole in the rockwork right next to what I can only describe as its "nest". Over the last two weeks it has started building little round mats of Chaeto neetly arranged on the substrate and on rocks. It has been increasingly not wanting to stray very far from these, and I just caught it doing a sort of tail-fanning behavior over its most recent nest that is reminicent of what I've seen in spawning behavior in the males of other fish species. I'd put the weirdness up to some strange spawning behavior, but the only other fish in the tank is my antisocial engineer goby...so I have to think something else might be going on that's making it skiddish Is this sudden personality change something expected with the species (like my engineer goby's moodyness), or likely to be a reacton to some sort of a problem like whatever happened to the fish's back?

 

[Lynden]

Lining pits with algae is typical spawning behaviour of royal grammas. Perhaps your is a female and has laid eggs? A lone spawner is not unheard of (I have had at least one freshwater fish do it), but of course the eggs will not be fertile.

 

[Donya]

Lining pits with algae is typical spawning behaviour of royal grammas.

Well I guess that's that behavior explained. It's made several macro mats, but my urchin ate a couple of the older ones. Now I just have to hope that it gets those scales back

 

[SkiFletch]

Yeah, I'd probably agree that it's spawning behavior. Odd that there isn't another Gramma present, maybe yours is lonely

 

[Lynden]

Their mothering instinct must be extremely strong for them to waste their time caring for eggs that won't hatch.

 

[Donya]

If there are eggs hidden in the most recent macro mat (which I can't see very well), the cause for the new behavior won't last long once the urchin or tiger cowrie finds its way over there. It's too bad I don't have a much bigger tank; I'd like to try to find it a mate, but I'd be worried about trying to introduce another one since I know they're territorial.

 

[Donya]

Another random question...would it be advisable to have some kind of a cleaner shrimp in with the royal gramma? It seems to get covered in junk regularly from spending so much time in the rockwork, but I wasn't sure if it was a species that would go get cleaned (my engineer goby rarely let itself be cleaned back when I had another shrimp) or if a small cleaner shrimp would even help with that. The color seems to be returning to the scratched up area at least. I'm just getting paranoid with the amount of time I see it popping out of the LR looking like a dust bunny for a few minutes.