Rainbow Gobies

OMG!!! I'm so excited my male is changing colour!! Every time he sees his favorite female he starts to turn black and his head goes blue!!! I'll try and get photos.

Dunno why they've gone small, I used my sons phone camera and he uploaded them for me. He's in the middle of a D&D game atm but I'll get him to sort the images out.

Its really weird, his bottom third and top third flushes black and his entire head changes colour and then it fades out. He definitely has different colouring to the way he looked yesterday.

I set up a large flat pebble I picked up on Brighton beach against another more rounded one, making sure there's no way they can fall and he's dug underneath the flat stone making himself a den. He goes for a wander round the tank then dives in and wafts out sand with his tail and crawls out the other side.

I'm going to take a video and show it to the guy at MA, that said I bet he'll stop as soon as I point lens at him.

On a more sombre note, my shoal of rummynose tetras seem to have been afflicted with whitespot overnight! I've no idea how that started, everybody else looks alright. Grrrr there's always something...

Umm I'll try, if I get it on camera I might need to email it to somebody to post unless my son makes willing.

Simon do you have females as well? My male was quite a self contained guy until I introduced the new female.

ps:they love blanched courgette

You know what? My supposed same species females are completely different.

One has bands circling its body and very fine stripes and I do mean a scales thickness and seems to have a reddish dorsal fin. Its quite dull looking. Thats the one my male displays at.

The other has 2 well defined diamond stripes and the male just chases it off.

Hmmmm. Methinks MA is getting a mixed bag of fish.

I have pictures but my son is being grumpy and I have no idea how to download the pics I have. SF say the different species intermingle and as they're all coming from the wild I'm guessing the trader is just netting and selling them as one species.

I've finally gotten a couple of photos that (almost) do my Gobies justice.

The Male (you can just make out the flash of electric blue on his head)


A Female (much paler but with an attractive red blush on her dorsal)

Hmmmm, just been to Seriously Fish. Females are supposed to have black stripes down the length of the body. Some of the pics on SF look a bit like the one of yours labelled as female and SF say theirs are males 


The problem with stiphodons is that there isn't much info on the internet.

I think it's virtually impossible to identify Stiphodon species for certain by looking at photos. As Seriously Fish says "The Gobiidae is the most speciose vertebrate family and notoriously problematic in terms of identifying fishes down to species level.". The identification of species is basically down to anatomical features such as number of rays in various fins. Consider Seriously Fish description of one species "It can be told apart from congeners by the following combination of characters: first dorsal-fin with 6 spines and 1 soft ray; second dorsal-fin with 9 soft rays; male with pointed, but not filamentous, first dorsal-fin with spines 4 and 5 elongate; posterior tip of first dorsal-fin normally extending to base of soft rays 2-5 in second dorsal-fin; pectoral-fin rays 15-17 (mode 16); premaxillary teeth 32-40; dentary with 32-45 horizontal teeth;  female with 2 dark lateral stripes with a relatively large space between, lower stripe comprising 8-11 regular blotches, upper stripe thin and pale; all fins of female usually with faint markings; non-nuptial males with a dark lateral stripe below lateral midline, absent in nuptial males; nuptial males with blackish or sometimes orange body, metallic turquoise laterally on head; metallic turquoise spot on upper pectoral-fin base in life; pectoral-fin rays in male often having 1-6 somewhat obscure black spots."

Of Stiphodon they also say "Over 30 (species) have been described to date with at least a similar number awaiting description"

Also consider the distribution and lifestyle of these fish, most are found in very short streams that run down to the sea, the larvae develop in the sea and swim upstream later. Specimens from nearby streams may look different, but actually be varieties of the same, or they may look the same on the outside but actually be different species. Some of these islands have a very large number of streams, there could potentially be many Stiphodon species on even a small island.

As a professional invertebrate surveyor, I meet a similar problem regularly, people insist that the insect they have seen must be a particular species because "it looks the same as pictures on the internet (or in a book)". They rarely believe me when I say that there might be many species which apparently look exactly the same, but once under a microscope (or even dissected) the differences become clear. People joke about us "counting the hairs on a fly's legs", that's not quite true, we don't count the hairs, only the bristles 

A similar situation applies to these less well known groups of fish, looking at pictures may not give you the correct answer.

I have just got some more stiphodons 

The shop where I got my first two had some more in, though as my husband hasn't been well and I don't drive I had to wait till yesterday to go there. This time they were labelled as 'indie blue stiphodons', the name the wholesaler gave them. I bought 4 and decided to risk not quarantining them as I've only just taken the QT down after cycling the betta's new filter and my husband was complaining about it so I didn't dare set it back up again.
Last evening, all six of them were sitting in the same 4 square inches of tank floor, and I couldn't tell which were the old ones.

Time will tell if they continue to get on as I read that males can be territorial and it was impossible to tell the gender of the dozen or so in the shop tank 

Me too!

I asked in my MA last week and they get all their wild caught fish from a major importer, so basically they sell what they're told they are getting. I have 3 different looking types of stiph. I promise to take some decent photos soon. The stripey ones happily lie all over each other and spend a lot of time in the plants, the banded one with a reddish dorsal fin mingles with them in the plants but gets a bit stroppy if they go near its home under the morpani wood The final type which I thought actually may be a male rainbow but have my doubts about now, is stroppy about every gobie and sometimes chases the ottos away. His scales are black edged, he flushes black in 3 bands along his body when he's territorial, which is most of the time. He's the only one that digs btw