My engineer goby mystery

[friendlyAlien]

Hi you all,

so I bought two years ago three engineer gobies. They were proud specimen and live happily in my 380 deep sand bed aquarium.

A few months later there were four and I thought I just remembered it wrong.
But then two died a month or two ago (different weeks). I know as I fished them out of the vortech pump.

But yesterday when feeding three of them showed up. So I am getting old and clearly forgetful but this is too much - they must be multiplying.

There are a few things that baffle me though. All of them are 3-4 inches long - I never saw baby gobies or even children / smaller gobies

Are they hiding until adult hood? has anyone else ever experienced something like this? Also how old do engineer gobies actually get?

[CedzAquAddictio]

A friend of mine with a 180g reef experienced a similar situation to yours. He put two in his tank a couple of years ago, and thought they both died, then saw four sometime later while he was feeding. He didn't even see where they were digging up his substrate or covering corals which was another thing that led him to think they were dead. I even helped him move his tank once since they were added to his tank, and we saw no sign of them. The only thing I can think of is that they were hold up in some LR, or something. And, yes we were absolutely sure they were engineer gobies... Just weird... You never know, huh?


I believe they live up to 10 years or so in the wild...