Hi Matt, I raised a large number of greenband gobies, (we called them Christmas gobies because of the red and green coloration) back when we were doing neon gobies. I first reared them when we were located in Marathon in the 70s and than again in the 80s when we were on Walker's Cay in the Bahamas. We could collect them right on the rocky shore of the Cay. The north west shore was steep and rocky with many sharp depression carved out of the hard limestone by the rock boring sea urchins, Echinometra virdis. And in each urchin depression, usually occupied by an urchin, there would be one or two of the green banded gobies. They were very difficult to collect because the urchins were so strongly attached to their little cup in the rock that one needed a crowbar to get them out, and then of course, the goby was long gone. So we did collect them with a bit of quindline that stuned them and allowed us to quickly net them. But I digress. We found them more difficult to rear than the neon gobies, mostly because the larvae were somewhat smaller and needed a food organism just slightly smaller than the normal adult size of the rotifer that we fed to the neons. There were two ways to get around this, 1. feed a lot of rotifers along with micro algae so that a culture of rotifers was established in the rearing tank, which allowed the larval greenbands to find the smallest new hatch rotifers, and 2 sieve collected rotifers through, and I forget if we used 53 or 80 micron cloth, to separate the smaller ones and then feed these often. Both methods had their good and bad points. Eventually we stopped rearing this species because the market demand was not there at that time, and it was difficult to get the Bahamain workers to take the necessary care of the cultures that was needed to rear them. The larval period of the greenbands was also longer than that of the neons, which also added to the difficulty of rearing them. But they are neat little gobies and certainly worth the extra trouble it takes to rear them, and now with ss strain of rotifers, it may not be as difficult.
We hatched them the same way we hatched the neons, recorded the day of spawn, kept them in a bare tank with only a clam shell or piece of pvc pipe so we could see the spawn when it occurred, and then, as I recall, they had an 8 day incubation time, but I could be wrong on that, hatched them on the day of hatch by removing the spawn, setting it up in fairly bright lighting in a deep dish under water, and slightly stroking the nest with a long strong feather, usually a sea gull feather. The aggatation caused the eggs to hatch and if they were ready, they hatched off like popcorn. Then the hatched larvae were placed in the larval tank and the clam shell returned to the spawning pair.
Martin
