Hello,
Let me start off by saying I know now what I did was really stupid and I am ashamed of myself, but I was at a LPS and saw a dragon gobie and I just had to have one. I brought him home and dropped him in my 20 gallon. It's only until my 75 gets done cycling soon and he's basically the only fish in the 20 gallon right now. I know they are brackish fish, but that they can tolerate freshwater. I put salt in the tank before I put him in. Here is my dilema:
It will still be a few months until I am ready to get my cichlids that I plan to stock my 75 gallon with, so if I decided to keep him, I would only have him for a few months until I turned him in to my LFS with my bala sharks. I do enjoy him, but I found out they only eat meat and I can't really afford to buy expensive fish food for him. Not only that, but if I kept him with my cichlids the poor thing would be harassed to death(most likely). Should I try to take him and trade him into my LFS? or should I just keep him until I'm ready to change fish?

__________________
Frontosa Fanatic

I know they tolerate freshwater but the Dragon Goby [Gobioides broussonnetii] does best in brackish water. When you said you added salt to the 20 gallon tank I hope you mean marine salt and not freshwater aquarium salt because the freshwater aquarium salt will not provide the salinity level the Dragon Goby requires. 20 gallons is also too small of a tank for a fish that can reach a length of two feet. If you are not prepared to provide or unwilling to provide this fish the proper home it requires to be healthy then I would suggest that you return him to the LFS.

I was intending to put him inmy 75 gal. tank before I knew he was brackish, but I had some complications when I got him with the tank's water parameters, I have all straightened out now and am going to put him in there when I get home today. I called the only lfs in town that does freshwater fish and he says he would be puttng him in straight freshwater water anyway and that unless he sold it, it would probably die since he has problems keeping Dragon gobies alive. But I only put freshwater salt because I have a injured tiger barb in there with him

__________________
Frontosa Fanatic

As Tiw pointed out, the dragon goby needs marine salt to stay healthy.

I currently house my goby in a 55 gallon with 3 black mollies, 15 ghost shrimp, a few misc. snails that spawned from the sand substrate & numerous fresh water plants. The salinity is 1.008 & all occupants (including the plants) are doing extremely well.

The goby's diet includes more than meat. Mine primarily eats algae wafers & on occasion freeze dried blood worms. (They have a mouth full of teeth to allow them to scrape algae off of rocks.)

I'd suggest you try to find him a home outside the LFS if he intends to house it in FW. Maybe you'd have luck on Craigslist or something similar?

__________________
-Never put a Chinese Algae Eater in a Guppy tank unless you enjoy vacuuming little corpses out of the substrate.-

55 Gallon/brackish (1.009)-
1 dragon goby
5 black mollies
4 bumblebee gobies
14 ghost shrimp
2 snails of unknown species

20 Gallon/freshwater/planted-
3 zebra danios
2 snail of unknown species

10 Gallon/freshwater-
currently fishless

Sounds like you would be better off trading him in

__________________
"Being ignorant is not so much a Shame, as being unwilling to learn".-- Benjamin Franklin

Thanks for sharing a lot!