So what is your biggest question on fish compatibility, and properly selecting the right fish to go with your existing fish in your reef tank or fish-only tank? Enter a comment here on this blog post and tell me what your biggest question is that you’d like me to cover on the radio show this weekend.
The person with the best question will get their questions answered in detail, live on the show.
Here’s a cool interview series on keeping saltwater aquariums, with multiple experts being interviewed – revealing their secrets on both saltwater and freshwater aquarium keeping. And the great part is you can download the recording and listen to it on your iPod at your leisure.
Click Here! to get the interview series. It’s well worth the cost.
In the reef aquarium, it is important to remove as much detritus and organic matter from the system as possible, because the collection of detritus and organic matter is one of the biggest causes of water quality problems and algae problems. Strong water movement in your display tank is crucial, but nothing can take the place of having the right animal to do the job for you. In fact, no manual effort can even come close. You need animals that will get into the sand and rock to kick up the detritus into the water column where it can then be removed by your protein skimmer or mechanical filter. And the Yellow Headed Sleeper Goby (Valencienna strigata) is one of my favorites.
Yellow Headed Sleeper Goby
Aside from using a hand-held powerhead or turkey baster to blast the detritus out of the rock (a great manual method to be done weekly), few other fish can clean your sand of unwanted detritus and organic matter.
I think that this fish should have been called a SIFTER Goby, rather than SLEEPER goby. After all, they are constantly busy sifting through the sand. I call them the steam shovel with gills. They scoop up a mouthful of sand and then tilt their head up and sift the sand through their gills, where gill rakers act like baleen on a whale to sift out the food (small crustaceans, worms, copepods, and detritus).
And the best part is that as they sift the sand through their gills, they throw the detritus up into the water column where the currents keep it suspended, so that it can get removed by your protein skimmer or filter sock. And this is how this fish helps control phosphates, by helping to remove detritus, which is usually loaded with phosphate.
Their diet is important to note. These fish have a high metabolism, what with all the sifting activity they do. So they do well when offered at least one type of sinking pellet along with several frozen foods. My favorite sinking pellet is the New Life Spectrum pellets (small – 1 mm diameter).
As for frozen foods, I prefer Piscene Energetics brand of mysis shrimp, and enriched adult brine shrimp by San Francisco Bay Brand.
This fish will easily pair up and stay together, and do well as a pair in most aquariums 50 gallons and larger. They will lay their eggs on the under side of a rock, which they accomplish by digging out a burrow under live rock. You don’t have to get them as a pair, but they do seem to do better as a pair, plus it is fun to observe them together.
One additional note here about building your live rock structure. Always be sure to build live rock structure directly on the bottom of the tank and then add the sand after the live rock structure is completed. This way your live rock structure is not vulnerable to collapse caused by animals that dig out burrows at the base of the rock.
As for compatibility, the yellow headed sifter goby gets along well with most other fish. The only likely possibly conflict would be with another species of sand sifting goby, such as the others from the genus Valencienna. They are available through most local fish stores and online retailers.
Do you have experience with keeping this fish? We’d love to hear your comments, as it is always helpful for others too.
In some saltwater aquariums, it is a mystery why some clownfish will not go into the anemone that is provided. It can be pretty frustrating for the aquarist, who purchased the clownfish and the anemone for just that purpose – hoping all the while that they would end up with the cool phenomenon of having a clownfish that lives in an anemone, right in your aquarium.
So what can you do about it? Watch this video and then leave a comment.
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