sleep swimming mandarin?

mingo

New member
i know this may sound a bit odd, but i think my mandarin goby drifts around when it's asleep. as if it was sleep swimming. during the day it usually roams around picking at rocks for pods and then returns to its usual spot in the tank.

but tonight it did the weirdest thing. it started swimming near the surface of the water and started getting blown all over the place by the powerhead. i thought the thing was dying so i put my hand in the tank to gently hold it in place. It didn't react much at first, then it gently swam out of my hand.

later on i see it gently swimming against the current of the powerhead near the surface of the water. so i thought "ok well he's strong enough to swim against the current."

then the light cycle for my lunar LED's turned off and the goby kind of woke up, and started swimming towards the bottom of the tank and then all of the sudden darted towards its usual hiding spot when i approached it.

i have a 60gallon that has been cycled for close to a year and the only other fish in the display tank with the goby is a lawn mower blenny. asides form that is a 40gallon refugium with three damsels in it and a red sea protein skimmer. I see it actively roaming the tank during the day since i got it (2weeks ago) and i do see pods walking around on the glass of the tank and on the live rocks as well. so i know it's food source is no where being depleted.

this is the weirdest thing i've ever seen. i know clown fish sleep. but i've never heard or seen a fish sleep swim.

has anyone experienced such behavior with their green mandarin goby?

I had my water tested a few days ago and everything seems to be in check.
 
I realize this is an older post, but the Sleep Swimming Mandarin is 100% correct.

We just had the exact thing happen, a newly added mandarin, about a week ago it was added to the tank. Over the past 2 days I've been working on our canopy led fixture and I've been doing it at night. Well tonight I did some adjustments to it, plus we added two new corals to the tank so I turned the lights on at about 3am to see how everything looked and to get a good look at the newly added corals for narrowing down their ID's. We had the lights on for about an hour, when all of a sudden the mandarin came out from the rock work and headed straight to the top. Here I am holding the mandarin under water fearing that it was a bladder issue of some sort so my girlfriend started searching for answers. She found your post and told me about it, I laughed and thought "no way", lol. Then she read something else about oxygen, I figured, well we did just put a canopy on so it's possible. I took the mandarin out of the display tank and put it in the sump under a plastic container with an air pump running in it. I also set a rock on top and the mandarin regained composure. Now the sump is lit on a reverse schedule to the dt so the lights were on in there, everytime I removed the rock the mandarin would start swimming straight up again. So, we shut off the display tank lights and figured maybe the above post is rite. A sleepwalking or in this case sleepswimming mandarin sounds odd, but in this hobby, I've seen some weird things, lol, so figured we'd try to put it back into the display tank. As soon as I dropped the mandarin in, it went straight to the bottom and then about a minute later went back to it's sleep spot.
 
Yes!

Yes!

Ours just did the exact same thing...lights had been out for a good while, and I shined my flashlight in the tank to take a look at things. I spotted a hitch hiker and called my husband in to remove it. He turned the lights on to get a better view and our red dragonet started floating at the top of the water, swimming a little and getting blown around. We watched it so this for a few minutes and decided something was wrong with it and it would probably be gone when we woke up in the morning. A few minutes later he just swam right back down to the sand bed and seems to be sleeping like he normally would... Weirdest thing ever! When we first got him he played dead and we left him alone and the next day he was cruising about the tank...he's seemed to be thriving ever since. Hopefully he is good in the morning.
 
I NEVER turn on the lights at night. I tiptoe around the tank after lights out to avoid disturbing the creatures in the tank. If there is a chore I need to do in the dark, I use a flashlight and WHISPER! Their world is a dangerous place.
 
I'm so glad I saw this thread!! I came in after dark tonight and checked on the fish I have in the QT - I saw a bunch of white dots on the front glass of the DT that were not there earlier when I cleaned the glass so I turned on the lights - it seems that my snails have reproduced? But that was less disturbing than my beloved mandarin floating through the water Solomon and getting blown about by power heads. I gently scooped her up to check her out and she's fat as always - she swam away but then resumed drifting. I turned out the lights before I started crying and then decided to check online and found this. Praying that she's back to normal in the AM
 
My mandarins wedge themselves in or under rocks. If they are floating around it likely means that you don't have enough suitable sleeping caves for them.

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saltey

saltey

Hi all, I am so glad to read this. I just put two Green Mandarins in a heated outdoor tide pool. The Refugium / Filter pours out lots of live food. These critters not only sleep after eating but they are almost in a coma. Just like everybody else, I thought they were dead. They fade away in color and just lay there. The Tide Pool has a Live Pumice Bottom. The Mandarins spend lots of time grooming the bottom and some Soft Corals. They will not sleep on the Pumice. Each one has found a face up shell and sleeps in it like a bed. The two Turbo Pumps only cause a 4 inch / second flow over the bottom and shelves. My mandarins don't blow around like leaves.
 
After reading this I laughed because my Mandarin floats around the top everyday! I used to think something was wrong but he snaps out of it he even stats doing before tank feeding time, when three pumps turn off there he is at the surface with all rest of the fish!

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