Help With Bumblebee Goby Id

[ac106]

Hi,

I am trying to ID my BBGs since they arent yellow and their bars are odd looking. Can anyone help?

Here is the pic:

 

[Fella]

Hey

After looking at your goby and taking a look online, I'm not sure. He's quite pale which might mean he's ready to spawn, but without knowing the species it's a little tricky to know if thats just his natural colouring I guess.

After looking on fishbase I found this

http/filaman.ifm-geomar.de/NomenClature/...ary&backstep=-2

which is fishbases list of Brachygobius species, and to me it looks a lot like the top one. I'm by no means an expert on this (wait for Nmonks to get here, he wrote this fantastic article which contains IDing techniques for some species - http/www.aquariacentral.com/faqs/brackish/FAQ6.shtml) but that would be my very vague and quite likely inaccurate guess. Either way, he looks like he's feeding well which is always great to see in BBGs! Did he reach you in that colour or has he changed colour at all?

HTH.

 

[ac106]

The gobies were that color when i brought them home. I have had them for about 2 weeks or so and they haven't brightened up at all.

I havent dont the usual things that prompt Bees to spawn (lower salinity and temp etc) but i suppose its possible. At first I thought they were stressed but they seemed to be very happy and well feed on live blackworms and frozen bloodworms

 

[nmonks]

Well, I did write that, but years ago. Aquaria Central never updated the FAQ and doesn't respond to my e-mails. The goby section was heavily revised. The current version is on my web site, here (scroll about halfway down). The problem was the source I used for the identification of bumblebee gobies was old, and, it turned out, erroneous.

According to people working on gobies, identifying bumblebee gobies to species level is almost impossible for the aquarist. At least, not with 100% confidence. It requires dead specimens and a microscope, because you need to count scales and such. There are several species and some species can overlap the others in terms of colour and banding. Treat all as Brachygobius spp. Yours looks like B. sabanus, but I can't be sure.

Basically, hard, alkaline freshwater or slightly brackish water is fine for all species. Slightly brackish water is perhaps optimal for breeding, but it is not essential. Feeding is more of an issue usually. They can also be adapted to moderately brackish water (SG 1.005 to 1.010), and some people have adapted them to fully marine conditions, though slowly. They're actually quite hardy. The one thing they don't seem to like is soft, acid water. They will survive in such conditions for months, perhaps years, but they seem much more prone to bacterial infections. Even so, in the wild they do occur in soft, acid water so the problem may be more about their survival in aquaria than requirements in the wild.

The Aqualog book on brackish fish is a good reference. If you can obtain it (and it isn't expensive), do so.

Cheers,

Neale

(wait for Nmonks to get here, he wrote this fantastic article which contains IDing techniques for some species - http/www.aquariacentral.com/faqs/brackish/FAQ6.shtml) but that would be my very vague and quite likely inaccurate guess.

 

[ac106]

i will look for the Aqualog book

My question is this: Why the hell aren't they yellow

If they have good water quality (0 amm/0 nitrites/SG 1.005/PH 8) with plenty of places to hide and are fed with good food they like. Shouldn't they be showing better color now?

Or is this species just pale/clear instead of yellow?

I really want black and yellow BBGs damn it!

 

[nmonks]

I suspect that you have one of the species that isn't yellow. Your fish looks healthy. They can change colour somewhat when spawning, but if this was the case, you'd know about it by now. Some of the dwarf bumblebees are practically transparent, while others have orange bands instead of yellow. It's all pretty confusing, and this all underlines the point that many species are traded, not just one.

Cheers,

Neale

Or is this species just pale/clear instead of yellow?

 

[egoz]

As i understand it, the only empircal way to determine which flavor of bumblebee gobie you have is to count the spikes on the anal fin and then to also examine the bands (i.e., do they break at their under-belly). Here's a great resource on bbg's in general, one that i refer to constantly:

Various sources often repeated on the internet state that bumblebee gobies are best distinguished according to anal fin spine and ray counts, together with banding patterns [example: http/www.aquariacentral.com/faqs/brackish/FAQ6.shtml]. The most commonly encountered species distributed in the USA were reportedly B. aggregatus (1 spine, 6 rays), B. doriae (1 spine, 7 rays), and B. xanthozona (1 spine, 8 rays). The best guess was that the species I have are B. xanthozona. The black bands do not go beneath the belly, the second dorsal fin is not all black. Viewed using a dissecting microscope, however, the ray counts are not in agreement with those reported for B. xanthozona. Two fishes that were examined had 1 spine but seemingly 9 and possibly 10 rays. Moreover, one of the fish that died early on looked a little different from the others, having a more elongated face, a different looking vertical banding pattern that was interspersed with occasional spots, and it had more pronounced eyes than the others. Perhaps the original fish breeder had a group of mixed-species bumblebee gobies, and through sloppy breeding, had created hybrids. Alternatively, the fish being produced by the breeder are very poor quality and contain mutants that should have been culled! Other considerations are the effects of poor nutrition and parasites. The exact bumblebee goby species remained unresolved, and so a decision was made to maintain them at moderately low salinity, in water adjusted to a specific gravity of 1.004 with synthetic sea-salt.

Bumblebee Goby: Effective Maintenance and Breeding, and Raising of Fry

After careful counting, we figured out we had the brackish sort. Anyhow, i found the above article a great help on all these questions, and is just generally interesting reading for anyone interestedin bbg's.

 

[nmonks]

Hello --

As the author of the Brackish FAQ, it's perhaps worth mentioning where that identification table for the bumblebee gobies comes from. It is from Freshwater Fish Of The World, by Gunther Sterba (1967). Since I wrote that version of the FAQ, other scientists have come to different conclusions, and I've removed that identification key because it could be (probably is) misleading. I'm not an expert of these fish. While I am trained as a systematist, my group is fossil cephalopods, so I cannot pretend to know more about fish taxonomy than anyone else here on this Forum. Anyway, the current version of the Brack FAQ doesn't have the table and is substantially updated. I constantly get feedback from aquarists and scientists, and it all gets fed into the FAQ. It's a shame Aquaria Central won't update it.

I'd strongly encourage anyone keen on getting definitive identifications for these fish to visit the Yahoo Goby Group. There are goby experts (scientists) who help out aquarists all the time.

I am consistently told by fish scientists that identifying Brachygobius to species level is very difficult, so any names fishkeepers come up with are, at best, tentative. Brachygobius xanthozona, for example, is said to be so rare in the wild that few museums have specimens, let alone fishkeepers. Apparently the usage of this name in aquarium books is consistently wrong, even in things like Baensch's Aquarium Atlas. Naomi Delventhal, a scientist working on goby systematics, has produced the chapter on gobies for the upcoming Brackish Encyclopaedia that TFH will publish later this year. This should be the first time the right pictures are being used with the right species.

Since we cannot 100% safely identify bumblebees, my advice is to keep them in slightly brackish. They don't need a lot of salt, and in fact 1.003 is perhaps ideal in that it allows you to keep plants, which these gobies love. But they do live fine in freshwater, though I have learned by experience that they do not last for more than a year in soft, acid water. So a high pH and hardness is perhaps essential if you want to keep them without salt.

(By contrast, my wrestling halfbeaks and glassfish are thriving in soft, acid water, despite what the books usually say. I concur with Schaefer 100% on saying that both these fish are fresh, not brackish, water species.)

Personally, I find it hard to imagine they are migratory. Fishbase doesn't say that any of these fish are amphidromous (i.e., they swim up and down rivers) and given how poorly they swim it seems much more probably that (except perhaps as fry) they are more or less fixed to a certain patch of river. I just can't see a bumblebee swimming tens of miles up or down stream to breed. A scat or mono, yes, but not a goby. But that's merely a guess.

Cheers,

Neale

 

[nmonks]

Hello all --

I showed the picture posted here to a goby systematist. She responded with the following:

"This certainly isn't B. xanthozona - the pictured fish has way too few lateral scales. I think I know what this is but the name slips my mind....will get back to you when I think of it! (I haven't gotten all my literature here yet.)

Please tell them that the pale colouration is not a problem - it's common among young fish, and some species tend to be more pale. It's and excellent picture and the fish looks very healthy."

So at least you know for certain it isn't B. xanthozona nor one of the more regularly traded species like B. doriae or B. nunus. It's one of the other species... If I hear back more, I'll post it.

Sincerely,

Neale