animalzrok2
Aquarium Advice FINatic
- Joined
- Aug 30, 2011
- Messages
- 815
today at the lfs i fell in love with mudskippers. anyone know anything about them??????
adeebm said:Yep mudskippers are fairly easy to take care of. Spacing requirements depends on the species. For instance, indian mudskippers, which only get to about 4in, can be housed in much higher densities than africans, which can get upwards of 9in. Salinity requirements also vary by species, but usually 1.005 to 1.015 is fine. If you can get pics of the ones at your LFS I could ID them. Also Homer, mixing mudskippers with fiddlers is not a good idea. I have tried this with a medium sized species and it doesn't go well for the fiddlers. They will hide in the presence of the mudskippers, causing stress, and while the skippers can't eat them outright, the will nip off the legs. Indian mudskippers might work with fiddlers, since they max out at 4in and are more docile, but I have yet to try it.
Tank setup can be fairly simple, with half land and half water. They don't often go in deep water and will spend most of their time either perched out of water or in a shallow area. In the wild, most species live in muddy areas, but playsand works well. If you can create a shallow, beach or mangrove type environment, that is best. They'll eat live foods like crickets and small insects, as well as any frozen foods like bloodworms. I'm sure it's possible to get them on flakes or pellets as well.
--Adeeb
I was just clarifying the difference in size and temperament among species, since to the OP it may not have been obvious what size you were talking about.When i talk about spacing requirements im obviously talking about smaller mudskipper species. Most people that own mudskipper keep smaller species. Mine is about 5-6 inches and which is about average.
Yeah, mixing P. barbarus with smaller species will probably go badly. Why not have two tanks?
--Adeeb
Homer8 said:i forgot to mention that if you feed your skippers meal worms, what i do is crush the head of the meal worm first because meal worms have been know to eat through a fishes stomach. i want to try fruit flys next because i think it will keep him amused chasing all the wingless or flightless flys.
That's very interesting info. I've never fed my fish mealworms but I had a tree frog at one time I fed those to, he lived about 6 months or so then mysteriously died I wonder if that's why??