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Elassoma Gilberti

Started by Guest_Okiimiru_* , Aug 22 2010 01:19 PM

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#501 Guest_gerald_*

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Posted 27 May 2011 - 09:43 AM

My guess is the fish is looking for tiny worms, cyclops and rotifers that gather to feed on the flake food. But if he does actually ingest some flake while hunting bugs, it'll probably be nutritious. From what I see they suck in and chew dry food, and blow most of it back out the gills or mouth. Fish that eat tiny bugs have extremely sensitive taste buds and gill rakers for separating food from non-food. If you look in a sand-sifting sucker's gut, it's full of bugs and hardly any sand. I've wondered for years why certain fish just wont swallow yummy flakes or pellets even after years of living with other fish that eat it. What are the magic chemical cues in whole bugs that signal "swallow" versus "spit"? I don't believe it's simply movement, since most will eat freshly killed bugs. That'll be neat if some of your pygmies do learn to eat flakes, and really cool if it's a heritable trait.

Photo evidence of Elassoma gilberti noticing the crushed flakes on the surface of the water. Notice how it's one of the not-fully-grown juveniles. They seem to be more interested in the flake food than the fully grown adults.

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#502 Guest_EricaWieser_*

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Posted 27 May 2011 - 04:52 PM

Erica,
What if you just bought blackworms in bulk and dumped them in your existing tank? Then all you would need to feed are the blackworms. You might have a living shag carpet on the bottom, but I don't think there would be any health issues with this setup.

I've tried it three times. The populations always get obliterated. Either I have some sort of predator eating them (see the leech saga) or the Elassoma population is too large and eats them all (see a few pages back) or I have to treat the tank with chemicals to kill cladophora algae (the current state of the tank). The end result is that I always have to buy more blackworms. It's expensive; I've spent over $100 on blackworms. To put that in perspective, I only spent $25 on my tank, $30 on my lights, and $3 on my substrate. Flake food is $15 for half a year's worth, so if the pygmy sunfish would eat it, that'd be really great.

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#503 Guest_EricaWieser_*

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Posted 27 May 2011 - 04:54 PM

What are the magic chemical cues in whole bugs that signal "swallow" versus "spit"? I don't believe it's simply movement, since most will eat freshly killed bugs.

I wish I knew. Seriously, if anyone knows more about that, I'd really appreciate it.

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#504 Guest_EricaWieser_*

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Posted 27 May 2011 - 05:10 PM

Here's the first shiny male I've seen since the move. The tank doesn't have any blackworms in it (none could have been transferred because I got new substrate during the move). Crushed fish flakes are added multiple times a day, and there is a numerous snail population.

first shiny male since move.jpg 225.49KB 0 downloads
http://gallery.nanfa...e move.jpg.html

Edited by EricaWieser, 27 May 2011 - 05:16 PM.

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#505 Guest_NVCichlids_*

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Posted 27 May 2011 - 05:23 PM

would these eat the tylo snails that are popular right now? I have a 15 gallon right now set up just for the snails, but have been tempted to try a different species of elassoma again. I love my zonatums and they are doing good, but do not want to destroy my orange poso' population

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#506 Guest_EricaWieser_*

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Posted 27 May 2011 - 06:05 PM

would these eat the tylo snails that are popular right now?

My source for thinking that Elassoma gilberti might eat snail eggs is from the Elassoma zonatum page of wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia....d_pygmy_sunfish which says that "Stomach contents of 46 individual banded pygmy sunfish (26 of which were spawning adults) collected at Mound, Louisiana were examined for food identification by Barney and Anson. The main food identified at Mound included insect larvae (mostly from the family Chironomidae), small crustaceans and snail eggs. The crustaceans and snail eggs combined constituted the majority of the content."

I assume that since Elassoma zonatum eats snail eggs, Elassoma gilberti might, too. I'm not sure what kind of snail eggs or how much they eat them, though. I've never seen the gilberti eat snail eggs, nor have I seen destroyed egg cases, but I also wasn't paying much attention to the egg cases. I will now.

Edit: I will say that I have been having trouble breeding my assassin snails. My friend who I speak to at the Ohio Cichlid Association and who has similar water parameters to mine says his assassin snails are breeding like crazy, whereas I never had a single baby assassin snail. The main difference between our tanks is that I have Elassoma gilberti while he has a cichlid fish species. So it's very possible that Elassoma gilberti eat assassin snail eggs.

Edited by EricaWieser, 27 May 2011 - 06:15 PM.

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#507 Guest_gzeiger_*

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Posted 28 May 2011 - 08:17 AM

I always had both pond snails and ramshorns in my Elassoma (zontaum) tank. Very few snails survived to adult size. Most egg cases that I would watch - when they were laid on the glass - would be eaten when they were nearly ready to hatch. When I took down the tank, I found many hundreds of very small snails living in the thick algae, but essentially all of them were less than a millimeter in length with just a few breeding size adults, which makes me think that juvenile snails were being eaten also.

This tank also contained a pair of Heterandria formosa and some Malaysian Trumpet snails, but I think it was the Elassoma eating them. Snails will certainly thrive on flake food in the long run, or on fish poop if the fish are eating the flakes.

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#508 Guest_gerald_*

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Posted 28 May 2011 - 03:31 PM

I dont think ANYTHING will eat Tylomelania snail eggs .... since they are livebearers.
My E. gilberti coexist in small tanks (3 to 10 gal) with self-sustaining ramshorn and pond snail populations.
FWIW, the Lymnaea pond snails (aperture on right) have a very tough egg capsule, not like Physa pond snails (aperture on left) which have the soft gelatinous egg capsule. So Lymnaea may do better with snail-egg-eating fish. I also heard somewhere long ago that Lymnaea are more prone to eating fish eggs than Physa or Planorbis (ramshorn) - dunno how true that is.

would these eat the tylo snails that are popular right now? I have a 15 gallon right now set up just for the snails, but have been tempted to try a different species of elassoma again. I love my zonatums and they are doing good, but do not want to destroy my orange poso' population

Edited by gerald, 28 May 2011 - 03:33 PM.

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#509 Guest_EricaWieser_*

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Posted 28 May 2011 - 04:40 PM

My E. gilberti coexist in small tanks (3 to 10 gal) with self-sustaining ramshorn and pond snail populations.

Ditto. My Physa, Lymnaea, and ramshorn populations are self sustaining. It was only my assassin snails that were having trouble getting a self sustaining population.

I think you're right that the Lymnaea are harder to eat. They were a newly established snail in my tank a few months ago, and now they are approaching being the dominant species. They must have some advantage over Physa.

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#510 Guest_gzeiger_*

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Posted 28 May 2011 - 05:51 PM

My Elassoma tank was the only one I could even achieve survival of adult Physa when added.

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#511 Guest_EricaWieser_*

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Posted 29 May 2011 - 12:57 PM

My Elassoma tank was the only one I could even achieve survival of adult Physa when added.

Interesting. Usually Physa are the snails that people complain about, because they reproduce so much.

Update: I have removed all of the guppies to the 10 gallon tank. The Elassoma gilberti are once again the only fish in the 55 gallon tank. I don't like this arrangement. The big tank looks empty. They aren't venturing out from the plants (so far) any more than they did when there were guppies in the tank. I'll give them until next Wednesday, and if I don't see a male dance by that time, then I can conclude that it's starvation that was preventing them from dancing and not the presence of the guppies. If that's the case, I'll think about buying them some blackworms.

Edited by EricaWieser, 29 May 2011 - 12:58 PM.

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#512 Guest_gzeiger_*

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Posted 29 May 2011 - 02:47 PM

I guess I kept a lot of fish that like to eat snails - darters in one tank, assorted sunfish in another, crayfish in a couple. I haven't figured out why I couldn't keep a snail population going with the pickerel though, except that it was very low light and had almost no algae. The fish certainly wasn't underfed though.

It's getting to be mosquito season if you need live food

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#513 Guest_EricaWieser_*

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Posted 29 May 2011 - 09:36 PM

It's getting to be mosquito season if you need live food

No thanks, I'm trying to prove that these fish will eat flakes.

Speaking of, the Elassoma gilberti males starting dancing again today, not 24 hours after I removed the guppies. I'm starting to wonder if a dither fish exists that won't scare these Elassoma males so much that they stop dancing. They're so shy.

But on the plus side, I guess that means the pygmy sunfish are eating enough of the fish flakes / snail eggs to color up and display. That's good.

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#514 Guest_EricaWieser_*

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Posted 30 May 2011 - 09:59 PM

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#515 Guest_gzeiger_*

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Posted 03 June 2011 - 10:26 AM

So far I'm really happy with this cat litter as a substrate. Initially I didn't rinse it at all and thought I had a disaster. It took two days to clear the water with two big sponge filters and a HOB going. I think the HOB probably stirred up more than it filtered out, but those sponges were sure filthy every time I pulled them out to rinse.

After that, though, the water clouded only briefly when I added the plants and cleared fairly rapidly. It has stayed clear through addition of some new tropical plants, an 8" eel and a hogchoker burrowing enthusiastically and stirring things up, and several rearrangements of plants due to the eel uprooting them before they've had a chance to establish root structures. The tank is now down to just one sponge filter with a 160 gph powerhead on it. It's more flow than I really wanted but it was the smallest I could find (the hardware store didn't have anything less than 350!).

Yesterday a bunch of the plants were pearling and streaming. It was really neat to see. Unfortunately the algae had started that two days ago, so it will be interesting to see who wins.

Thanks for the recommendation.

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#516 Guest_EricaWieser_*

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Posted 04 June 2011 - 02:09 PM

Thanks for the recommendation.

Sure, no problem. I'm glad it's working out.

Could you make a new topic and post some pictures? There aren't very many kitty litter tanks around and it'd be neat to see other setups.

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#517 Guest_EricaWieser_*

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Posted 04 June 2011 - 02:16 PM

Elassoma gilberti update:

I took some Elassoma gilberti, four females and two males, to my local Ohio Cichlid Association meeting last night. It was neat to see people's reactions, the biggest of which was, "Those are adults?!" (Full grown Elassoma are very tiny, smaller than the cichlid fry that were there.) I brought along pictures of the fully colored fish and care instructions, and hopefully there will be more people interested in pygmy sunfish because of it.

Update on the tank:
They're definitely eating flake food now. Some individuals are actively hunting it, and for the first time since they went off blackworms I'm seeing fully half the population with big, bulging bellies. It's very calming for me to see them with such bulging stomachs because I had been worried that I was starving them, and now my fears are assuaged, if that's the right word for it.

I'm still actively committing war on the cladophora algae. I bought a new container of Tetra Algae Clear and have removed the rock and anubias for scrubbing. Elassoma gilberti are more difficult to medicate than the other fish I've kept (swordtails, platies, guppies, etc) because they don't 'itch' themselves on tank fixtures like those other fish do when they're uncomfortable. Because they won't 'itch' as readily as other fish, it's hard to tell when they're being poisoned or getting uncomfortable. That makes me nervous, because I think they'd go right from swimming along as if they were fine to dropping dead with no signs of distress in between. Has anyone else who has Elassoma noticed this, that they don't rub themselves on tank fixtures to itch their scales like other fish do?

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#518 Guest_gzeiger_*

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Posted 04 June 2011 - 04:46 PM

It hadn't really caught my attention, but now that you mention it I never did see that behavior in E. zonatum.

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#519 Guest_gzeiger_*

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Posted 06 June 2011 - 09:20 PM

Is that light a T8 fixture? I've killed a lot of plants with my $200 T5.

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#520 Guest_skalartor_*

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Posted 07 June 2011 - 02:01 PM

as mentioned in another thread my e. okefenokees died all of a sudden. no signs of illness, no different behaviour.
maybe death of elassomas is a quiet one...