diamond goby question

[darkslayer414]

i bought him 3 days ago and he is doing great, he is going through all of my sand...problem is he is putting the sand ontop of the rocks for some reason. i have a 90 gallon reef and so far he has covered the bottom 1/4 of my tank in sand. ontop of my rocks and corals. will he eventually stop this? or should i use my turkey baster and get it off?

 

[rebelprettyboy]

Ur gonna have to use ur turkey baster to get it off. thats why I dont like those kind of gobies make to much of as mess and would bother all my corls throwing sand around!

 

[wanabebell]

they usually dont cover the rocks but the ones that do dont stop and it can get really annoying....a fast moving fish will sometimes clean your rock off for you....
idk if it would work...but if you got another one...so that you got a pair...they stay very close to eachother... then maby the one you have wont swim high enough to dump the sand on the rock....or maby he would teach his new friend to dump sand on the rock....idk its a thought tho

 

[big]

Diamonds can at times become, lets say a little obsessive compulsive in their behavior.
My little tank-pod sterilizer I have watched in the past spend hours taking mouthfuls of substrate and dumping it onto some particular location in the tank. ( Most the time somewhere I do not want it to be too!) Only then to watch it trickle back down to where he got it from. It is just in their nature to do such things.
I see someone said a pair maybe??? I have a nearly 50 gallon fuge and my one keeps my substrate almost devoid of pods with just one of them.
Mine has learned to eat other foods , its a pig, but many will not eat other foods well. Even one can be a strain in a smaller tank system as far as eventual starvation is concerned. Good Luck with the little beast.......

 

[tdog7879]

I have a yellow face goby and he is always swifting the sand but he does it real low...never seems to get get it on the rock....if he does he seems to take it off later.....he also it whatever food i put in the tank. GREAT FISH!!

 

[big]

Another thought crossed my feeble little brain on this subject. To help more in answering the original question, "Will he stop doing this"????
Maybe once his cave system is established it will occur less.
But I still think their obsessions with looking for pods to eat and re "aqua-scaping" the lower several inches of the tank is a big part of their nature............Rottor-Tiller fish would be the name I give mine. Or look at the other shot "Is he looking, can I hide this frag now??"

 

[oceanlover]

My diamond goby moves sand constantly. He settled down to having a favorite place to pile the sand and I knock down his pile every few days just so he has something to do.

He sifts sand everywhere though and it is an obsession. Obviously, I don't put corals in his favorite area. He loves to collect his little trinkets from around the tank and take them to his favorite pile.
He is very social and is the first fish to go investigate what is happening.
If a fish gets huffy with him, he will spit sand on that huffy fish!
One day I had a fish die (sad- he jumped out of the tank and although I got him back in and he survived for many hours he eventually died) and his body slid clear into a cave where it was going to be very hard to retrieve the body without moving pounds of live rock. As the tears were flowing down my face over the demise of my favorite fish, Curmudgeon went and picked up the body and carried it to his little treasure pile. I had to laugh in spite of my sorrow. He didn't even get offended when I gently removed the body.
You'll enjoy your diamond goby once you get used to his sand sifting ways.