Tangaroa Goby

minus9 · Mar 24, 2019

I would love to get a bonded pair, but they are hard to find as a pair. Anyone here know how to visually determine male and female? I would normally go with a size difference when buying individuals and hope they will pair up, but don't want to create havoc.
I have a Randall's pistol shrimp, so hopefully they'll pair up?
Current tank is a shallow 90g.

mort · Mar 25, 2019

As far as I'm aware they aren't sexual dimorphic. You might be able to tell which is female from the body shape if you had a pair but I think you'd struggle with single fish. The way I used to attempt to pair gobies was to get two young fish and put them in a tank with a divider for a week or two. I'd then remove the divider and see how they got on. Most in my experience would quite happily cohabitate if they were young enough but a few species would chase the other goby off.
In a 90g I would try it as there is plenty of space for them to get away from each other and they don put much effort into fighting. I'm not sure every goby species has been studied well enough for us to say with complete certainty how their sex works and I've seen yellow watchman gobies that hated each other, settle down and breed after a few months. This might mean gender isn't set in stone or that conditions have to be right for them to get along.

minus9 · Mar 25, 2019

mort said:
As far as I'm aware they aren't sexual dimorphic. You might be able to tell which is female from the body shape if you had a pair but I think you'd struggle with single fish. The way I used to attempt to pair gobies was to get two young fish and put them in a tank with a divider for a week or two. I'd then remove the divider and see how they got on. Most in my experience would quite happily cohabitate if they were young enough but a few species would chase the other goby off.
In a 90g I would try it as there is plenty of space for them to get away from each other and they don put much effort into fighting. I'm not sure every goby species has been studied well enough for us to say with complete certainty how their sex works and I've seen yellow watchman gobies that hated each other, settle down and breed after a few months. This might mean gender isn't set in stone or that conditions have to be right for them to get along.

Thanks! If I can find two smaller Tangaroa's, I would try your method of pairing them, but most seem to be the same size at my LFS. There are a lot of gobies (and fish) that are hard to tell the difference sexually and I think if there are difference, they're very subtle and something we humans would find very difficult to pick up on.
Thanks again for your help and input. Cheers!