mangrove tank?

Hello! I am new to this forum and have been keeping fish for several years so i am not a newbie! I already have one 14 gallon tank running successfully (no deaths) and am buying a much bigger 60 gallon at the end of the year. I want to put a few mud-skippers in there and want to make the tank a mangrove, i have done research but dont know where to get mangrove "saplings". Can anyone give me a few suggestions?........

 

Hi there, and welcome to the forum

It is all very possible to have a true mangrove tank with real mangrove trees, but I cannot recommend it, from experience.

Mangrove trees are just that - trees. They can get huge! I am unsure if you are able to bonsai any of the mangrove species, but assuming you cannot, over time you will find that they simply cannot fit within the constraints of a typical tank. The last one I have remaining of my endeavours is now living outside, outgrowing the pot it is currently in, and standing at about 3 feet tall!

Secondly comes the nutrient requirements. These are much larger and bulkier than your typical aquarium plant, requiring much more maintainence in the form of nutrients. When I kept mangroves on two occasions, both times I found that my fish population alone was not enough to supply the mangroves with enough nutrients, and a lot of supplements had to be added. On one occasion it was just with a pair of mudskippers, and the trees did very poorly without assistance.

Not to discourage you from your ideas though - a quick google search finds several fishkeepers doing just as you want to! However, I ask you plan carefully for this long-term investment as incorporating a mangrove to a tank can be tricky and difficult.

As for where to get one, you may have trouble. I found mine as seed pods washed up on the beach, but as far as I'm aware collecting of mangroves is frowned upon (or worse) in most areas. Ask your specialist garden centres if they know of anything, otherwise do some extensive reading around the net.

Good luck,

 

thanks for your comment! I am not set on a mangrove.... but i would love to keep mudskippers. If you could tell me what fish can be kept with them and what their ideal setup would be, i would appreciate it.

 

PS!

I forgot to add the alternative, which is currently what I use now! Tree branches, or actual roots of trees, can be positioned effectively and made to look like very convincing mangrove roots. Even dried grape vine can serve this purpose.

 

thanks for your help! what fish can i keep with them...... i hear you can keep archer fish but they are rare..... do you keep yours with other fish or do you know of any?

 

As for tankmates, it entirely depends on how you set up the tank.

For a long time I was tied to the idea of only keeping mudskippers in a shallow, beach-style tank, as this catered entirely for their needs and I felt that was best. However, in such a setup water volume is limited and therefore limits your choice in tankmates to (perhaps) a few small ones. I had a very small school of glassfish in such a tank for a short period of time, but eventually moved them out as it didn't quite feel right.

Thesedays, and with experience, I see that mudskippers can live in typical, deeper tanks, and is the living place of my big male mudskipper now. The water in the tank is over a foot and a half deep, but I have plenty of protruding "mangrove roots" (the tree branches I mentioned above) for him to scramble up and down on. Due to his size (he is a near-fully grown male Periophthalmus barbarus, at almost 5 inches), he happily and confidently co-exists with some Monodactylus, and some archerfish, all of similar length. However, if you're going for the smaller Indian mudskipper (P. novemradiatus), then mollies, glassfish, gobies and chromides might fit the bill better.

Regards,

 

Archers aren't too rare, depending where you stay. If you ask the store owner of your LFS to get some, they should be available. Alternatively you could try out our sponsors on this website, who I have seen getting in archers every now and again.