Are sleepers easy to catch?

Does anyone have experience collecting sleepers, such as the Fat Sleeper, Dormitator maculatus, or the Bigmouth Sleeper, Gobiomorus dormitor? If so, would you say these fish are exceptionally easy to catch?

I'm trying to decipher the etymology of the genus name Gobiomorus. Gobio obviously means goby, which sleepers resemble; morus traditionally means "stupid or foolish" (root of the word moron). Lacepède is rather vague in his 1800 description:

"Ils sont cependant très-voisins des gobies, avec lesquels ils ont de grandes ressemblances; et c’est cette sorte d’affinité ou de parenté que j’ai désignée par le nom générique de gobiomore, voisin ou allié des gobies, que je leur ai donné."

A potential clue may be in the gannet/booby genus Morus, in which Morus means "foolish" and like the English name "booby" refers to the ease with which they can be caught.

Sleepers spend a lot of time “resting” on the bottom waiting for a potential meal. This behavior led to the common name “sleepers.” Does this behavior also make them easy to catch?

Thanks,

Chris Scharpf
Baltimore

Chris,

I have caught many Dormitator and found them to be easy to catch. They hide in dense vegetation and detritus, so just scoop the veg with a dipnet and you get sleepers. As far as Gobiomorus goes, I have not caught them, but I attempted to. I observed some over a sand bottom and tried to dipnet them, but they kept getting away. So i did not find those ones easy to catch, but the water was a bit deep for an effective dipnet thrust. However, Gilmore and Hastings (1983) says "most large adults were collected near stream banks by hand, hook-and-line, seine and with gillnets". Hand collection suggests easy capture to me, maybe I'll find those easy ones next time.

Marcus

I did a quick check of my book of biological names and found morus to mean a mulberry tree, which probably is not right. However, moros can mean foolish or sluggish. Other meanings attached to moros include destiny, death, and the son of night. So take your pick, but sluggish looks good to me considering they like to sit on the bottom.

Marcus

Chris, my experience with D. maculatus is that they are not particularly difficult to catch, but neither are they just sitting there waiting to be scooped up. In the aquarium they don't just lay (lie?) on the bottom either - they are active swimmers; not like minnows but they do swim about. Kind of like sunfish. They can actually move quite fast when they want to. My observations are limited to young specimens however. They are neat fish.

I did a quick check of my book of biological names and found morus to mean a mulberry tree, which probably is not right. However, moros can mean foolish or sluggish. Other meanings attached to moros include destiny, death, and the son of night. So take your pick, but sluggish looks good to me considering they like to sit on the bottom.

Marcus,

Thanks for the information. I've checked Brown's Composition of Scientific Words and my handy Latin-English pocket dictionary, but neither of them include "sluggish" as a meaning for -morus. That meaning that could conceivably apply to the fish.

Morus is actually quite rare in biological nomenclature in that it's a valid generic name for both an animal (gannet) and a plant (mulberry). The latter name is sometimes referred to as a nomina falsa, since its etymology is opposite its meaning. According to Pliny, “the mulberry is the last of domesticated trees to shoot, and only does so when the frosts are over; for that reason it is called the wisest of trees”. Yet its name means foolish or stupid. Go figure.

The trouble with so many early Latin binomens is that the authors were classically trained in Latin and Greek and therefore used those languages far more expressively and expansively than users armed with pocket translation dictionaries do today. Gobiomorus being just one case in point.

Martin: Thanks for your observations. All accounts indicate that sleepers make ideal aquarium residents.

Chris

Moros/morus = foolish is Greek, Morus = mulberry is Latin. They are unrelated homonyms, though later Romans with knowledge of Greek may have retroactively formed some folk etymologies connecting the two words. Fun fact: Latin tree names such as Morus, Pinus, Quercus, and so on form the bulk of Latin second declension feminine nouns; they are indistinguishable in form from the much more common second declension masculine nouns, but take feminine modifiers, e.g. Morus rubra rather than Morus ruber.

I hadn't realized that Morus was also an animal genus; I used to keep a list of all such examples I came across, but I lost track of it long ago.

Morus, from the latin Mora, meaning delay... as in the delayed bud break.

We caught two different species of both Gobiomorus and Dormitator in Costa Rica. We also snorkeled with the Gobiomorus so we saw their habitat. As others have already stated, the Dormitator are found in and amongst vegetation, typically in relatively shallow water. They are fairly easy to catch and abundant where found. The Gobiomorus prefer a very different habitat. They are found right next to the bank in small rivers. They hug the vegetation and debris and appear to be very stealthy predators. They are very swift fish when need be and extremely difficult to capture. We caught very few of these even after seeing exactly where they were located by snorkeling. Not sure any of this helps with the naming conundrum, but these are my experiences.

I encountered Gobiomorus dormitor of various sizes in Puerto Rico. Juveniles up to around 2 inches in length were easily netted with blind jabs along the bank of the lower Rio Mameyes (tidal influence, very silty). A few hundred meters upstream, past a gently-sloped series of riffles, I caught several adults, depicted below, in a cylindrical trap baited overnight with dry cat food. The subadults I saw in a shallow artificial pond adjoining a hotel (without any apparent flowing outflow when I was there, but probably with an ephemeral connection to the Mameyes in the rainy season) were too wary to be taken with a dip net, even when abruptly transfixed in a flashlight beam at night.

Edited by Ouassous, 18 November 2008 - 12:41 AM.