Elassoma Gilberti

By request, here is a video of the pygmy sunfish actually eating blackworms:


and a photo of them guarding prime blackworm territory as their home base:
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I love how much they can change color on whim. Here's one, capable of being just as dark blue, being clear to blend in with the plants.
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Close up:
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Edited by EricaWieser, 23 March 2011 - 08:06 PM.

Oh, and I'm just awful at telling the females apart, because the one that turns her body dark blue / black is still there in the anubias. I don't know what's going on with her but one thing's for sure, she's hard to photograph.
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Edit: Let it be noted that I took those anubias out and soaked them in an algae-killing chemical bath for over a day. She either remembered liking the spot and came back to it or wound up there again by chance. My bet is she just likes it because back in the day I got some video of her chasing other fish away from her "spot". That's her home.

Oh, and yes I'm sure she's a female, even though she's dark. She looks like a normal female most of the times I look at her, and she's got that egg shape to her belly.

Edited by EricaWieser, 23 March 2011 - 08:16 PM.

I think they're happy

I see a whole lot of blackworms in the first pic on this page. It looks like your worms have more than recovered. Before they seemed mostly bunched up near the front glass. Now it looks like they are spread out more but it large numbers. Nice.

I see a whole lot of blackworms in the first pic on this page. It looks like your worms have more than recovered. Before they seemed mostly bunched up near the front glass. Now it looks like they are spread out more but it large numbers. Nice.

I push the substrate up and back every now and then because when the tank was newly established ( less so, now that there are roots), it would all slide down the slope to pile at the front of the tank. When I push the substrate back, the worms get pushed into the back of the tank, too.

There was a reason the worms were at the front of the tank; it was my way of luring the fish out into the open. If they wanted to eat, they had to come to the front of the tank. It's an effective method, by the way, and I recommend it. Certain of my gilberti just hate me, and now that the food's available in the back, I never see them. I think it was Gerald who once said that some males who were not too shy when younger can get skittish as they get older, well, there is this giant male in the tank who must be at least a year old, the male who was shipped to me originally, well, I only saw him once this past two weeks. He just stays in the back behind the plants, eating the worms there.

And yes, I've restocked the worms since killing that leech. It made me sad; the worms initially cost only about $20, but what with restocking and all, I've spent about $60-$80 on worms. Leeches are expensive . At least I bought a bristleworm trap, so if it happens again, I'll trap the little sucker before it can do too much damage (I hope). Last time I noticed there was a rapid decrease in worm population, there wasn't anything I could do until I saw the worm. Next time I'll put a trap out right away.

Edited by EricaWieser, 25 March 2011 - 10:59 AM.

I just counted six males at the same time and two of the darkened females.

I just found a nearly full grown Elassoma in my bucket tank, the one that I feed fish flakes once a day or every other day. (It's the tank I'm waiting for the swordtail fry to grow up in so I can send them off to someone else). Because I've fed that tank nothing but flakes, ever, I think it's official that Elassoma can live on just flakes.

The question is how it got in there. It probably was a tag along when I was throwing plants away from my main tank, as an egg or super small fry. My bet would be as an egg because I thoroughly shake all the plants out so they're dry when they get tossed out of the big plants. This makes me wonder how many fry I've thrown away (the plants usually get tossed into the garbage instead of into the bucket tank).

These Elassoma must be only ones in the world with their own twitter account!

These Elassoma must be only ones in the world with their own twitter account!

I guess I update pretty frequently. They just keep doing interesting things (to me at least)

I just counted six males at the same time...

I wasn't the only one to notice the sudden density of males. Here's two males vying for territory. The smaller male had the space first and the large male wants a chunk of it.
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Here is a photo of a juvenile Elassoma gilberti, for identification purposes.
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But I think your website should mention how skittish and frustrating to keep these fish are. My friends who visit me to stare at my tanks really hate the Elassoma; they can never see anything inside the aquarium and even I can only rarely find a fish in there. My friend Shane is most vocal, and advocates, "Giving them away and getting some real fish." The Elassoma spend 99% of their time being invisible.

I couldn't take a photo because they still hate people too much. These fish are starting to annoy me, with how little I see them and how shy they are. 99% of the time, it's as if the tank is empty.

I've come to a conclusion about these earlier posts: Yes, these are shy fish. Yes, if you only have one male in there, you'll never see it. The solution is to have a high population density. Because there are at least six males in the tank now, at any given time I can watch one or two of them displaying. That's the trick to it; the fish breed and there are more of them, and then all of a sudden the tank is packed full of activity. It just took a couple months for the babies to grow up and bring some life into the tank.

Future Elassoma keepers: Don't be frustrated when your starter colony is, for the most part, invisible. If they are happy and breeding, soon you will have a tank bursting with Elassoma and they will be everywhere you look. Population density is key.

Just wanted to point out the pros and cons of stocking the Elassoma tank with live plants.
Pros: They're a nitrogen sink, the fish love them, and they're pretty.
Cons: Trimming. Yesterday the tank went from this (see below) to this (see below).

Before and After:
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It took about three hours. I was scared at one point that I had snipped a fish in half with the scissors, but thankfully it moved pretty quickly and is fine.
And I feel like the plant is laughing at me; yesterday when I was trimming, the tippy top of the Ceratophyllum demersum didn't touch the surface. Today (which is when I took the after photo), you can see how it has grown up to the surface and is already bending. It grew probably four to six inches in one day. *sighs*

Edited by EricaWieser, 29 March 2011 - 08:03 PM.

So, I got a question about my lighting, and I thought I'd post my answer on this topic so everyone could see it. The question was about watts per gallon (an old standard rule of thumb for designing a tank). You're supposed to have three watts per gallon of light, yet my tank only has 2.3, and they wondered how my plants grew at all, let alone growing so fast.

The watt per gallon rule only applies to incandescent light bulbs. Other types of light bulbs are more efficient, and get more lumen output (light brightness) for the same number of watts.

Incandescent bulbs work by heating up a filament until it is so hot that it glows. A lot of the energy put into the bulb is used to raise the temperature of the filament, not for light output. For that reason, incandescent bulbs are one of the least efficient type of light bulb, and they get very little light output for a large amount of energy.

Fluorescent bulbs work a different way. Here's a more detailed description with a diagram http://home.howstuff...scent-lamp2.htm but basically how they work is the energy that goes into them goes directly to exciting the electrons, which emit photons (light particles) when they fall back down to their unexcited state. Because fluorescent bulbs are a more direct route to producing photons, they use less energy to make the same amount of light.

So the one watt per gallon rule does not apply to fluorescent lights. The bulb I prefer is this model, http://www.homedepot...53#BVRRWidgetID (obviously not the ten pack, though), which has each bulb using only 32 watts of energy to produce 2750 lumens of light. I like these lights because they are 6500 K, the same color temperature as natural sunlight. I have four bulbs in my tank total, two of the previous best model I could find (32 watts, 700 lumens, 6000 K each, I think) and two of my new favorite bulb (see link above) for a total of 700 + 700 + 2750 + 2750 = 6900 lumens of, on average, 6250 K light for only 128 watts. That's 2.3 watts and 125 lumens per gallon.

Edited by EricaWieser, 30 March 2011 - 01:27 PM.

Has anyone ever seen this before? It looks like internal bleeding in his face. I don't know what's going on. This is my oldest/second oldest male (can't tell).
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He's pineconing, so I think it's dropsy (which is caused by the kidneys failing and fluid building up between scales and internal tissue layer, which pushes the scales outward). This is the second fish I've had in the past month with dropsy/bloat and I'm wondering if there's a reason behind it. Is it a pathogen targeting their kidneys? Or is it something else?

I hope his kidneys aren't failing because of the high osmoregulation they are being forced to perform in 20 GH water. The constant pumping of staying balanced with 20 degrees of hardness outside might have overworked them to death.
If the high mineral content of the water is the problem, then I wonder if the babies born in the water will have a similar tough time? They seem fine right now.
But I shouldn't jump to conclusions; I've had a lot of fish over the years get dropsy in normal hardness water and I shouldn't necessarily freak out, right? And the internal bleeding is possibly a symptom of a pathogen, I just don't recognize it among the list of pathogens I'm familiar with. Help?

Edited by EricaWieser, 31 March 2011 - 10:48 PM.

Yes, I've seen that happen even in soft water. It's pretty common in old age (~2-3 yrs for gilberti) but I've also seen it happen to young fish, so yes it could be a bacteria or other pathogen causing it. Get him out BEFORE he dies so he won't be releasing large amounts of bacteria into the tank, IF a pathogen is involved. I suppose diet might be a factor too. Some fish are prone to fatty liver degeneration, especially herbivorous & omnivorous cichlids fed too much meat.

Yes, I've seen that happen even in soft water. It's pretty common in old age (~2-3 yrs for gilberti) but I've also seen it happen to young fish, so yes it could be a bacteria or other pathogen causing it. Get him out BEFORE he dies so he won't be releasing large amounts of bacteria into the tank, IF a pathogen is involved. I suppose diet might be a factor too. Some fish are prone to fatty liver degeneration, especially herbivorous & omnivorous cichlids fed too much meat.

I took your advice and removed him from the aquarium. I also took a video to help with dropsy identification in the future. ID video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-XM5Qqm_ak

I feel bad for him.

So, because that is super depressing, here's a quickly shot video of the other males being cheerful.

Update: None of the other fish are sick. The dropsied male has been confined to the hospital 10 gallon tank.