Goby having issues

[dugg]

My yellow watchman has been changing colors lately. He acts normal, but has been getting black stripes for about a month now. It started out real light and gets darker almost daily. Just wondering if anyone else has seen or heard of this before. He is about 2 years old.
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a151/dugg/100_0950.jpg

[jcatblum]

maybe he isn't a yellow watchman after all??????

Don't know, that is just weird!!!!

[aleiodubua]

I've heard of clowns having this happening due to costing in certain corals like hammers and frogspawn. Does he sit around a certain coral a lot?

[djc1026]

My pink spotted watchman changes coloration. He gets dark bands evenly spaced down the length of his body and his fins turn bright blue. None of this coloration is visible at other times. I haven't found a connection between a triggering event and the change in coloration.

Dave

[dugg]

He never sits on corals. His diet hasn't changed that i know of, unless i have some new critter i don't know about. He is deffinatly a yellow watchman, i have had him since he was about 1/2 inch. I was thinking maybe it had something to do with male or female reaching maturity or something, but i can't find anything about them doing this. The water all checks out good. Everything zero except nitrates at .05ppm which is where mine stay most of the time. Temp is almost constant at 79.5, and sg is at 1.025. I am stumped on this one.

[jcatblum]

Maybe try the nano forum...since it is a nano fish???

[Travis L. Stevens]

dugg, contact NicoleC. She has been breeding Yellow Watchman Gobies, so I'm sure she knows quite a lot about the behavior of these guys. My guess is it is a male that has come to sexual maturity and/or territory coloration. But that is a wild guess.

[NicoleC]

Hello, ya'll, I was paged over here :)

The #1 question I get PM'd is "why is my watchman goby turning grey?!" Sometimes it's because the fish was pale when the lights first came on in the morning (normal), but that's not the case this time.

Truthfully, no one knows why some are grey and some are yellow, but it is a reasonably common occurance and is nothing to worry about. I do have some theories. There are a couple of things to know first:

There is some indication that when the species was originally identified, it was a grey specimen. Clearly, collectors looking for "yellow" watchman gobies are going to be looking for yellow fish, which is why we don't see grey ones in the fish stores. (Or the grey ones get mis-labelled.)

The dark bands across the body are there even on yellow fish, they are just not as obvious. When the yellow starts going away, they appear more pronounced. Also, YWG's have some camoflauging ability.

Finally, MOST breeding pairs have one yellow male and one grey female fish, like my avatar. But, this is not set in stone, some breeding pairs are both yellow and some are both grey -- like mine are now, since my male has also turned grey.

Here comes the theory part -- I suspect that YWG's can change sex, and the grey coloration is usually a female fish They yellow coloration signifies a male or a sexually immature fish. Their ability to camoflauge may be what accounts for the "matched" pairs. My grey male, for example, is in a tank that is almost all grey:
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a294/nicolecastle/ywg/gobytank.jpg

To complicate matters, Amy Drehmel (who commercially breeds them) has reported batches of very small juveniles with BOTH yellow and grey members, all of which turn yellow when they go to new homes.

The bright blue fins go with the grey color variation and can get very intense. There may be some environmental factor that triggers the color and/or sex change that we just don't understand. They may not even be linked, but the evidence leans in that direction.

My female used to look like this (the small on on the right), the night they were paired:
http://home.socal.rr.com/reef/images/ywgpair.jpg

Two weeks into pairing, showing her color change:
http://home.socal.rr.com/reef/images/colorchg.jpg

Four weeks into pairing, when she was pregnant with their first spawn:
http://home.socal.rr.com/reef/ywg/preg1.jpg

How she looks today:
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a294/nicolecastle/ywg/mama.jpg

Anyway, dugg, don't worry. I think there is a good chance that you need to start referring to her as "she," but I can't say that for sure.

[Travis L. Stevens]

Thanks for the reply NicoleC. Very informative.

Oh, and keep up the good work :D

[dugg]

Wow, thanks for the goby lesson, i feel much better. I never thought to try and get a pair, i was told years ago that i couldn't keep two of them in the same tank or they would kill each other, so i have never tried before. What would be the best way to choose her a mate?

[NicoleC]

I would not recommend trying to pair them in a reef unless the tank is very large. There is no "method," and pairing seems to be love at first sight or not at all. Every case of "buddy" YWG's that I have heard of eventually ends in one of the fish "disappearing."

Pairing has been done in reef tanks, but there is a lot of risk because if the pairing fails, it will be very hard to catch the rejected fish. In my case, I succeeded in catching my rejected suitor, mostly because the fish was desperate to get out of the tank. I successfully paired on the second try. Dumb luck.

If I were to try it today, I would purchase a healthy medium sized adult fish and put it through a rigorous 6 week QT with prophylactic deworming, lots of vitamins and beta glucan and good food. While in QT, I would train the goby to enter a fish trap, left in the tank at all times, to eat every meal, even using the trap to wean the fish from live to prepared foods, if necessary.

Then, when introducing the fish to the tank, I would use the same method to introduce a shrimp -- i.e. place the new fish in a cup with a lid loosely on top, then turn the cup upside down, place the cup near the bottom near the goby's den, then slide the lid out from under the cup.

If the pairing works, there will be about 5 minutes of posturing and bluffing and mouth gaping, then suddenly they will pair. This may mean the fish enter the den together or will lay across each other in an "x" -- behavior I have also seen in fish stores where YWGs are pairing up in community tanks. (This "crossing" behavior doesn't seem to last for more than a few weeks.) In my case, after their posturing, the new female took possesion of his den while he looked offended, and then she came out and started laying on top of him.

Yes, the females very much wear the pants in these pairs. They are larger and force the males to tend the eggs non-stop, plus they will take the lion's share of any food and may not permit the male to eat at all while there are eggs around. This is similar to clown pair behavior.

If the pairing DOESN'T take, you can put the fish trap in and bait it, and the new goby will hopefully be unafraid to enter the trap for his meal, where you can close the trap for the first time and remove him back to QT... where you will need to find a new home for him and start over with a new fish.

Good luck if you decide to try it! Be forewarned, however, that your cute little goby may turn very aggressive when paired. My clowns thought this was a hoot and would "buzz" the front of their den to get a rise out of them. However, they tormented my scooter and would push the snails around. Eventually I moved them to their own tank -- the ugly thing above, which is plumbed into the reef and fortunately no longer has the hair algae problem since I boosted flow in that tank -- and added a pair of spawning pistols. It's a happy foursome.

[pwhitby]

Hey Nicole, what do you recommend for a good dewormer.

I think I have lost wild caught fish to worms in the past.

also, Thanks for visiting our forum and sharing. I enjoyed the article you had a while back on the raising of YWG.

Paul.

[NicoleC]

That wasn't my article, that was Amy Drehmel's. So far I have only managed to have one baby goby survive... she's raised many hundreds!

I like Pipzine for an oral dewormer, but you can't get it anymore. I have a stash. :) (Piperazine citrate)

Unless you know what kind of parasite, metronidazole is good general dewormer. Look for stringy feces after the treatment to see if there are other kinds of internal parasites that it doesn't help.

I would also include fressh chopped garlic in the food. There's some evidence it may help, possibly a lot, with internal worms.