Tankmates For Bumblebee Gobies

[eschaton]

My girlfriend and I recently moved in together. She currently has a freshwater tank with BBGs, Otos, a mystery snail, and some African Dwarf Frogs. I'm going to move the stock around in my various tanks, but I'd like to set up a dedicated small brackish tank.

My ideal setup would be a 20 or 30-gallon tall low-end brackish, approximately half-filled with water with emergent mangroves. It's going to have Nerites, MTS, and Amano Shrimp (red-nosed if I can find them), but I'd like something else a bit more interesting. I'm leaning towards some small crabs, though even fiddlers and red-claws are so much bigger than BBGs I'm a bit worried about them getting attacked.

Barring that I'd like something bigger, but not too big to serve as the centerpiece. I'm interested in "freshwater pipefish" and heard that they do eat frozen cyclops, but anything larger than a BBG but smaller than a Scat/Mono would be interesting to hear about.

 

[Fella]

Figure 8 puffers would make a decent addition, and there are plenty of other BBG tankmates available as well. Orange chromides maybe?

If you could lay your hands on them some mudskippers would make a great addition to the kind of tank you mention, as long as there is plenty of land and you choose a sepcies too small to eat the BBGs.

 

[nmonks]

Puffers will, of course, eat the shrimps and probably pester the nerites, so I wouldn't necessarily mix these.

None of the traded crabs are really good community animals. Fiddlers are perhaps the best bet, but mixing them mudskippers gets variable results. Large mudskippers (such as P. barbarus) simply eat them. Small mudskippers (P. novemradiatus) are themselves at risk from large crabs. That said, fiddler crabs tend to be detritivores, and shouldn't harass your fish if adequately fed with algae, soft plant material (like banana), and the odd bit of whitebait.

Cheers, Neale

 

[eschaton]

Well, the water volume will probably be only around 15 gallons or so to begin with (assuming a half-filled tank), and the tank will be high and not long, meaning a limited footprint. This really limits my options with semi-aquatic critters. Crabs and mudskippers, from what I understand, need a good deal of land area, and a tall, narrow tank will lead them to be quite unhappy. Adding enough sand to create a slope (meaning a likely 45-degree angle) will cut the water amount to seven gallons or less unless I can make some sort of a "cave" system under the sand base. the three BBGs should be able to live in a water volume this small, but it wouldn't be useful for much else other than a fiddler bath.

It's a shame, because in some ways the ideal setup would be a long, low tank (say a 30 breeder) with an open top, which would allow the mangroves to grow from natural light. But open top and climbable plants seems like a very bad combination with mudskippers and crabs.