The Puffer Forum

so i was searching my lfs and i cam across a pair of gobys, in with a tiny tiny tiny tiger fish. ( the big silver hell mawed beastly ones ) they are pretty gobys so i picked them up. at the moment there in quarantine, but they look amazing and will probably soon me in my figure 8 tank. along with all the other gobys i own. ( a pair of bbgs and a pair of knight gobys ) there really weird for gobys, in the sense that i have never seen gobys so active. they are almost never laying around, they love to swim and hover about mid tank. they will eat any thing i give them blood worm, pellet, even flake. ( but i don't think they will get allot of flake ) does any one know what kind it is? ( not the best picture but its the only good one i could come up with my friends camera)

Is that a jade goby? If so we have them at the store where I work... I think they get like a foot long, and the ones we have are JERKS.

no my firend has a jade goby its large and stupid looking i would tell you what my lfs called it but they didnt call it anything they had them labled mystery gobys

my firend seems to think there purple spotted gobys and i tend to agree with him but it doesnt exsist according to fishbase also the image for a search of Morgurnda adspersa or the purple spotted gudgeon also looks like my little guys but if i do have them they are babys

I think it looks like a purple spotted goby as well.

That is something from the Mogurnda family, my guess would be M. adspersa or M. mogurnda, but can't tell from this view. There's a slight variation between those two that was explained to me on another forum

M.adspersa have a row of red/purple spots on both the anal and second dorsal fins while M.morgurnda only have spots on the second dorsal and a line of red/purple on the anal fin though at small sizes identification isnt always 100%.

To sex them look at the genital pappilia (spelling?) which is what thought was a ovidepositor, girls have short blunt ended papilia while males are longer and pointed.

This is my female Mogurnda when she was younger. She was smaller than my female betta when I got her, and is about 5-6" now. Shouldn't get much larger than that, but like most gobies they'll try to eat anything they think they can, and they're also rather territorial, so watch out for that.

ohh dont worry my tank is a complex of caves and hideing plaves there every where and its im possible to look through from one side to the other i have put alot of thought and time into designing this tank for puffers and gobys and mine looks like that but its less white and more of a blueish grey

I didn't actually notice this was under brackish tanks when I posted since it came up as part of a search, but you may want to double check that they can be kept at length in brackish as they are actually a freshwater species to my knowledge. Mine is much darker now than she was, but some of that white is from using a flash, I have another picture where she looks rather pink, but it's just the lighting.

I would also be concerned that they might try to eat your BBGs when they get larger if you keep them together.

my figure 8 tank is so low salinity at 1.005 i think they will be fine pluse after some research they look more like the northern purple spotted then the southern ( i don't even know if theirs a difference but according to the internet ones brackish ones fresh one gets big and one stays small )

so i thought i would update on these two i dont know what they are but there huge and there eating anything that fits in there mouths ( worms pellets flake feeders crickets my fingers anything one is pushing 5 inches and there so colorful there probably my favorite gobys of all time. im so happy with them

Probably Mogurnda Mogurnda, can you get a new pic of it?

M. mogurndas are actually gudgeons, not gobies. Gobies have a fused pelvic fin; gudgeons have two fins.

I had a mated pair of M. mogurndas. I kept them with the clown loaches and rainbow fish. As clown loaches will, mine got ich for no apparent reason. I raised the s.g. to 1.004 using kosher salt and cranked the tank up to 86 degrees. That killed the ich, and none of the fish were bothered by this.

In fact, about a week after the treatment, my gudgeons spawned. The male perched over the eggs and fanned them, and promptly ate the fry as soon as they hatched.

I tried hatching a couple of spawns, but I really didn't have the space to set things up the way I wanted to.

These guys would be great for fry control in a tank of mollies.

I used to believe this too. It's actually a little more complicated, with some species of "true" goby (family Gobiidae) have two fins rather than the one sucker, for example Valenciennea. I had to learn this the hard way from Naomi Delventhal while putting together my brackish book! She quite took me to task! She actually prefers to call all the goby-like fish gobies, and rather rejects the idea of "true" gobies as such.

So while no sleeper (what Australians call gudgeons) have disc-like pelvic fins, neither do all "true" gobies. Adding to the confusion, in Europe, a gudgeon is a type of cyprinid, Gobio spp., rather like a cross between a goby and a loach. I suppose the Australasian species were named after them.

Cheers, Neale

PS. Another bit of Naomi's wisdom she's shared with me is how to handle mystery gobies. Since small amounts of salt won't harm freshwater species, it's best to keep any mystery goby at around SG 1.003-1.005. That'll be enough to keep brackish species healthy, without upsetting the freshwater species unduly.

goby1kenobi wrote:M. mogurndas are actually gudgeons, not gobies. Gobies have a fused pelvic fin; gudgeons have two fins.

Yeah, you're the one I learned it from, back in the days of The Brackish Forum, when it was dang near the only source of info for brackish fish!

nmonks wrote:I used to believe this too....

goby1kenobi wrote:M. mogurndas are actually gudgeons, not gobies. Gobies have a fused pelvic fin; gudgeons have two fins.

Can be added to the list of things I've changed my mind on! Along with figure-8s are freshwater fish (it isn't) and the common archerfish in the trade is Toxotes jaculatrix (it's T. microlepis, a freshwater species)...

Over the years, I've been lucky enough to get in contact with some much smarter people who keep me from making too many mistakes! What's fascinating is how even the freshwater side of the hobby changes, even though a lot of people imagine it's "all been done before".

Cheers, Neale