Black toraja goby

Care at a glance

Overview

The black toraja goby is a little Sulawesi goby for the bottom of a warm, well-filtered tank. It is for experienced keepers.

Caring for the black toraja goby

Give a small group of black toraja gobies a tank of 21 gal (80 L) or larger, so they have room to spread out. They need plenty of broken-up floor space and a separate cave or crevice for each fish. Use a soft, fine sand floor, with smooth, rounded rocks and pale stone to form caves. A few hardy plants break up the open space and mark out territories.

Keep the water warm and stable, at 79 to 82°F (26 to 28°C), with a near-neutral pH of 6.5 to 7.5. Steady, gentle, well-filtered flow and clean, oxygen-rich water suit it best.

The black toraja goby rarely bothers with flake. It does far better on small frozen and live foods, such as bloodworms, daphnia and brine shrimp. It spends its time perched on the bottom, guarding a patch and darting out to grab food.

It is calm with tank mates but pushy with its own kind, which is why each fish needs its own spot. Keep it with gentle open-water fish rather than other floor dwellers that compete for the same spots. Its breeding in aquariums has not been documented. Gobies in general lay adhesive eggs that a parent tends until they hatch.

Good to know

The black toraja goby belongs to Gobiidae, the true goby family. Like other true gobies, it has pelvic fins joined into a small suction disc on the underside. The disc helps it hold position on the bottom. It is named for the Swiss naturalists Paul and Fritz Sarasin, who collected the first specimens, and it is also called Sarasin's goby. It is treated as endangered in the wild because of its very small natural range.

In the wild

The black toraja goby keeps to the shallow margins of Lake Poso, a deep, ancient lake in central Sulawesi. There it lives over silty sand, mud and gravel, along steep gravel banks and around large limestone rocks with patches of aquatic plants. The water there stays warm and stable all year.

Common questions

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