These are Pseudomugil gertrudae, or Gertrude's Rainbow. As you can probably tell, they're tiny fish, only about 2.5 cm (1 inch) long. I have three males and three females, and hopefully if I'm lucky I'll have some babies eventually! They tend to school loosely, like other rainbows, and if there's food available, the males always put on a show to scare away the other males, flaring their polka-dot fins. For the most part, they're very docile, but they are cunning little hunters and within hours after introducing them to my tank they had already eaten all the copepods (barely visible jumping specs) in the tank.Overall, they seem to be fitting the bill as a shrimp-safe planaria eater so far. Planarias are carnivorous worms that can eat baby shrimp and are just plain gross to look at. My tank was crawling with them, but now they're all gone.
I also got some Tiger shrimp. Hopefully these will breed as well! Also, since these are a different family than the Cherry shrimp (Caridina vs. Neocaridina) they won't interbreed.
I'll be posting a fish profile with more info on these guys a little later!
Lovely little gertudae. They're actually commonly called spotted blue-eyes here in Australia, and like most native fish are criminally ignored here in their own country.
ReplyDeleteGreat site, by the way. I've been stopping by weekly to see what added. Particularly enjoy the aquascape analysis. I've just set up my first attempt at a Nature Aquarium-inspired scape and have been getting some good tips on flows
Just dropping by to thank you for leaving a comment in my post Ways of putting searchbar, AdSense ad units, etc in the Header, above the post in every page and that I have responded to your comment.
ReplyDeletePeter a.k.a. enviroman
Enviroman Says
Hi, I love your Aquatic Eden
ReplyDeleteI've have RCS, CRS, Tiger srhimps and Malayans all mixed up in my tank, and I'm not sure if they interbreeding, but recently I saw in my local aquariam shop a red tiger shrimp. A tiger shrimp but having red stripes, I did not buy any of those from the shop, but I did notice there were some similar looking red stripe shrimps in my tank. not sure if they were the result of my cherry and tigers interbreeding, but you did mention that the two won't.
just puzzled, they sell shrimps I haven't heard of now and then.