I find them to group together easily and not show a lot of aggression towards similar individuals. Have three different species in my 80 gallon and they really don’t ever see each other. They live in different parts of the aquarium. Even come out at different times of day. It’s kind of weird now that I think about it. It’s like they’re on their own little schedules.
Introduced together about a year and a half ago.
I have only tried mixing them 1 time and the purple became a huge bully. I could not catch him for the life of me and the one remaining red basically jumped into the net to get away. I originally tried to have 5 reds and the dominant "pair" chased the others out basically. Pretty much the only ones that will exist in more than a pair are scissortails and zebras. I do like the scissortails they are not as flashy but to see a group of them interacting is very cool. I will be trying a group of 8 to 10 when I set up my 180. I tried to get 6 in my current tank but they did not come in very healthy lost 2 in qt and 2 to the tang chasing them into the overflow or onto the overflow cover. I have since made a different overflow cover so if something jumps it will easily flop back into the tank. I have not tried to add any more since. I am far from an expert, but I have had many pairs of reds, a pair of helfrichi, some zebras (I dont like how they look when adults) and more recently the scissortails. Most will pair up pretty easy I have not tried it with the purples (I like the reds better), the one purple was a gift from my employees for my office tank until HR came in and told me to take it down which is why he went into my home tank and the resulting story above.
I would not.
Pretty sure this is incorrect, all the firefish breeders that I have talked to or seen talk about this consider Nemateleotris to be gonochorists. Breeders frequently talk about the difficulties in pairing because they are not known to swap sexes and are monogamists.
Sissortail dartfish exhibit very different social and reproductive dynamics than Nemateleotris and are not a good reference example for comparison and inferences on firefish.
Firefish are demersal spawners who lay their eggs in caves and guard the eggs untill hatch, Spawning is easier to check as they will have an egg bundle that one is guarding. They are not pelagic spawners but the larvae has a pelagic phase.
Like I said I was unsure and info may have changed since last I researched which was 20 some years ago. (wow thats quite a while when actually thinking of it) I did have 5 or 6 pairs for quite a few years that lived fine together from day one until death which was not less than 5 years. So like I said I guess I got lucky. When I tried a group of reds in the same tank that went very poorly after about 8-10 months as I stated further up in this thread, but seemed to always have luck putting 2 together (of the same kind). The reason for mentioning scissortails also comes from futher up, and yes I know they are different thats what I was stating.
