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Roughhead blenny: the perfect pico fish?


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https://www.kpaquatics.com/product/roughhead-blenny/

This is the only place I've seen them for sale. I got one January 6th of this year, and I love her. Here's a few pictures. 

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This is the day I got her. She was probably about an inch long, and pretty white. I think it's a female because I found a source that says males tend to be darker, and can have a dorsal fin spot. 

 

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Here's a nighttime photo of my goby not knowing she's there, and her being smoshed by a hermit that also didn't know she was there.

 

 

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Here's a rare (blurred) look at her outside one of her hiding spots. She's a very skinny fish! Her body condition is good, she's just shaped like that. 

 

Behavior: 

Pretty much a tiny barnacle blenny. Finds a hole, sits in the hole, pops out to catch food. May go between a few different holes, or stay in a favorite. Surprisingly bold animal, not retreating at all from interlopers unless forced to do so. Only ducks in a tiny bit if you pick up the entire rock! If you need to dislodge one, bang on the rock with something metal- it's presumably very unpleasant for them, and is about the only way to get them out. She seems to like holes that she fits in pretty snugly, either in the rock or in the opening of an empty hermit shell. I've also seen her under a shell, in a hole that was already there. When crowded, she wiggles her head back and forth and opens her mouth at the problem, and might nip it. She'll completely ignore any non-food animals that are more than half an inch from her home. Might try to eat something further away. I've seen her go 5-6 inches to grab food, which is pretty far for such a tiny animal. 

Upside: because they know in specific holes, you'll always know where yours is. Downside: it might set up shop in a spot you can't see. Also, because they're tiny, they're hard to find when they move to a new spot. 

Oh, and she changes colors. Sometimes she's mostly white, sometimes she's got a lot of darker markings. Part of her is always transparent, though, I assume just because of how small she is. 

 

Interactions with other animals: 

She tried to eat part of a small squat lobster's claw, and did not remotely succeed. 

My porcelain crab tried to round her up with its claws and engulf her in its nets like they do with mysis. I think it mistook her for a mysis. She wiggled away, and it didn't try again. 

She nips the hermit crabs (and my algae scraper) if they get really close. 

Basically, if it looks maybe edible, she'll try to eat it. She can't hurt anything bigger than a pod. I assume these are at least a little territorial with conspecifics? Probably? But I bet they'd ignore any that weren't right next door.

Any fish of any decent size will try to eat this little darling. Seriously, she's barely bigger than PE mysis. She's the size of a long, thin krill. She's not getting much larger, either. Do not keep with predators. She hides in a hole, yes, but will come out for food, and could definitely be snatched up by an opportunist while coming out. 

 

Care: 

Pretty damn easy. She eats mostly pods in my tank, amphipods and copepods, and does well on it. I tried to give her frozen BBS, but she doesn't really take them. She wants pieces of mysis that look way too big. I give her pieces about half the size of her head, a couple times a week, and she gulps them down gladly. I'm sure she'd take live BBS, she just doesn't seem to want the frozen stuff. No idea if she'd take pellets. Would probably eat any other live food. In any decent-sized, mature tank, one of these could absolutely feed itself on pods. 

 

Summary: 

If you don't have anything that'll eat it, get one. This is the perfect pico fish. They don't need swimming space, and their bio-load is really low. Any tank that's not full to the absolute brim or inhabited by predators has a spot for one of these. Just provide some holes in rockwork, and/or some empty shells.  Heck, you could probably keep one in one of those little hang-on refugiums, if you made sure there were enough holes to choose from. 

It's too bad they're so rarely available. Somebody oughta get on breeding these. I imagine they're hard to collect in the wild, by virtue of being hard to find and harder to catch. Kinda suspect KP mostly gets them in on live rock. 

The only way this could be a better pico fish is if they were more colorful. Thing is, I've seen pictures- they come in yellow. So you might be able to get a more colorful one. And, hey, a super-camouflaged fish that does an appearing act when you feed it is a neat little thing to show people. 

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  • 2 months later...

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I mayyy have gotten more. They're so tiny, all of these guys add up to /maybe/ one antenna goby worth of mass. That one in the top is really skinny, you don't want to see them looking like that. The middle one is better. See the darkness on him? That's a male. 

(Ordered two, KP Aquatics sent me three. I'll take it!)

 

Males have a dark dorsal fin, and a sort of mottling on their underside, like how shading is done in pointillism art. I have two males now. One has a dark eyespot on its dorsal fin, just behind the first couple of rays. The other has a completely black dorsal fin with tiny white flecks, but no spot. That's the larger one. I'm not sure if the completely dark fin is because it's somehow more dominant? 

 

So far, these are NOT SOCIAL. They won't make a little colony group like I'd expected, like barnacle blennies will. They have to be at least four inches apart from each other, preferably with no line of sight, or they squabble. They'll dance at each other and steal burrows, and even lock mouths if the one they're trying to steal from won't leave the burrow. It's actually pretty funny- the aggressor will dance around and puff, and try to learn the defender out of the burrow in order to chase it away. It's like if the strategy for house theft was to dance around on someone's lawn and insult them until they came out, then dash around behind them and run into their house. 

 

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Here's the smaller male latched onto the larger male. It does seem to be a mutual thing, each holding onto the other. If both are out of their burrows, they dance around each other, puffing and lunging with open mouths, though one of them (the smallest, a female) wins fights by charging flank-first into the other's mouth. She scared the big male into cowering and stole the shell he'd been eyeing, seemingly by sheer attitude. 

There doesn't seem to be any pattern to which will go after each other- males and females seem to attempt house theft equally. If one has no home and wants a home from the other, it'll try puffing. I'm curious to see if they'll settle down, since it's only been a couple days. I took all the hiding shells and set them around the tank so there are plenty of separated spots, and I made a couple of tubes out of coral putty to produce more hiding places. I'm going to get a particularly porous rock (and drill holes in it if it's not porous enough) to add in soon. They all have full bellies, and the outright chasing-each-other-out-of-houses seems to have mostly stopped, so I'm not worried. 

 

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This is the bigger, darker male, posturing at something just offscreen. If you look, he's extended his gills downward and flushed them really dark. I'm not sure if the females also do this gill thing? I know both sexes will do an aggression pose where they'll slowly extend out of their house, back arched, head lowered a little, retreat, and bop back out. 

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I know, I love them! 

 

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It's been really fun watching them scout out where they like to live. The little reading I can find on them says that, in the wild, they're usually found in holes in living corals. In my tank, they seem to like the empty hermit shells. I'm not sure if there just aren't many good rock holes. They seem to like a hole they can fit into without any space to turn around, small enough that, if something bothers them, they have to pop out and stick their head into the hole to see what it was. It's very cute. One of the holes in the rock is apparently No Good, as every blenny that tries it out winds up jumping out of the hole multiple times until it eventually gives up. I think there's a worm in there or something. 

 

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