The male of my pair of wild caught Eretmodus cyanostictus 'Burundi'.

On 28 January 2008, I added a pair of wild caught Eretmodus cyanostictus 'Burundi' to the tank. I have got them from Dave Hale (Somethingfishyinc.net), who received them from an importer just four days before I got them. They are my very first wild caught fish. Dave said he had previously had Tanganyikan gobies come in pretty battered, but these guys looked happy and healthy. Unfortunately only the male did well, taking to food greedily immediately after arrival. The female was hanging in there, but never seemed to eat much, and finally died after a month. I tried to find another female in order to revive my breeding chances, but unfortunately in July a near disaster struck the tank, which unfortunately killed my last eretmodus.

The tank had been running for about 7 months, and everything had been going great. One night I noticed that the filter wasn't running at top performance. I cleaned the filter basket, which brought some improvement, but not as much as I would have liked. But it was late, and I decided to tackle the issue the next day. Unfortunately that day various things came up with my kids, and I was out of the house until 6:30pm - when I discovered that the filter had basically stopped running, the Eretmodus was dead as well as the male of my pair of multies, and the Tropheus were gasping for air at the surface. I immediately did an about 70% water change and a complete filter cleaning - to find some snails in the pump outlet directly after the impeller, which had completely blocked the water flow!

I was extremely worried about the tropheus, and wondered about preventatively medicating for bloat, but decided against it. At any rate, the tropheus pulled through just fine, but this accident ended my first attempt of keeping and potentially breeding eretmodus.