The goby white whale! Expensive, in demand, and hard to raise.
I was able to raise some of these, but I’ve never been satisfied with my results. In the article I wrote about Rhinobogius I asserted that if you ever see wiggler fry you’ve made a mistake and the fry are doomed… I have since learned (with this species, and with sp. Strawberry) that this is probably not right.
Zhoiu eggs are huge, bright orange, and (in my tanks) always hatch into wrigglers which stay attached to their yolk for many days and generally die before they’re ready to feed. Leaving the male with the eggs works a little bit better but still results in wrigglers that mostly perish. The best luck I had was collecting the eggs and raising them in a cichlid-style egg tumbler. The eggs were a /little/ too small for the tumbler mesh but I nonetheless had a handful of eggs survive and hatch that way.
My suspicion is that this is a colder-water species, and even my cool fishroom was causing an excelerated hatching that got the eggs ahead of themselves. I wound up giving away my adults in order to travel but I’d be very interested in experimenting with this species again, possibly with a chiller.
