I've always been infatuated with these! Have you ever kept one?

[revhtree]

Any of you ever kept garden eels? If so what's your experience? Are they fun to watch or do they get boring? Tell us some pros and cons!

 

[Greybeard]

Cool critters. Bass Pro Shop's aquarium has a nice display of them.

Back in the DSB days, I had considered trying them, but never did. These days, I don't do sand, so it's unlikely to ever come up. Got a friend that is planning a deep sand mangrove setup, might be a possibility.

 

[TheOldSalt]

I used to run the aquarium displays at a public aquarium and marine park in Florida.
We were right on the beach.
Garden eels are very common just a hundred yards from the park, so naturally I tried to make a display of them. ( Most of the tanks in the gallery featured local species )

Well, the results were less than satisfying.

They are delicate, finicky, and skittish.
They're very hard to keep and to feed, and worst of all, they hide at the first sign of... anything, really. It's hard to display something that refuses to be seen.

If I had some one-way glass, or another way to observe them without them being able to see anyone, I'm sure they would have made an awesome exhibit.

 

[Bepis]

I know the aquarium of the pacific had to ask people to go on video so theirs got used to people. They stay out even when people walk by

 

[revhtree]

Bummer!

 

[piranhaman00]

The Shedd Aquarium has some that stayed out for people, I remember standing very close to glass observiing.

 

[Unholy_Rigatoni]

I tried three in my old DSB tank. One got spooked during a water change and swam into a sun coral, got stung, and eventually died. Tricky lil guys...

 

[Jay Hemdal]

I had written this up about 20 years ago, but it still has some useful information in it I think:

Garden Eels
Jay Hemdal

Diving off New Providence Island in the Bahamas 35 years ago, I swam above a sandy plain near a coral reef, towards what looked to me like a sparse field of seagrass. As I approached the area, the grass seemed to be getting shorter and the growth sparser. Moving a little closer, I stopped and blinked; what had been a field of seagrass was now just barren plain of sand. The fact that I’m a bit near-sighted probably contributed to what was obviously an illusion; The “seagrass” was in reality a colony of garden eels, the first ones I had ever seen. Based on their unique habits, I knew they would be extremely difficult to collect, much less to ever display in captivity. Moving forward to the present time, the next garden eels I saw were while touring a neighboring public aquarium. They had a small colony of Hass’s garden eels, (Taenioconger hassi) on display in a large seagrass / lagoon exhibit. Their visitors seemed totally enamored by the tiny eels. I had seen this species offered for sale by importers from time to time, but had always avoided them, thinking they would be impossible to maintain in an aquarium. Well, after seeing their exhibit, the gauntlet had been tossed down, and I was now determined to exhibit garden eels for our visitors as well.
The first step was to identify any unanswered questions which might impede our development of a garden eel exhibit. Although public aquariums freely exchange information between institutions, there simply wasn’t that much information about these creatures for us to share, so there were many unanswered questions:

1) Which species would do best in captivity? I had seen Hass’s garden eels infrequently offered for sale, but never any of the other 4 or 5 common species which are found in regions where commercial tropical fish collectors operate (The Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Red Sea and the Sea of Cortez). Over a period of three months, with a lot of searching, we managed to acquire 10 Hass’s garden eels, 5 gold-banded garden eels, (Gorgasia preclara) and 3 Caribbean garden eels (Heteroconger halis). Many of the gold-banded and Hass’s eels were never seen to feed, and the ones which didn’t feed died after 5 to 8 weeks. The Caribbean garden eels would feed, but they were very nervous fish, and had a tendency to vibrate their tails so rapidly while attempting to adjust their burrows, that the tails became abraded and infected - a subsequently fatal complication. Only one of the gold banded eels eventually began feeding, but it was found dead in its burrow two days later. Four of the Hass’s garden eels were seen to feed fairly well. It seems then, that the Hass’s garden eel is best suited for display, but at that they are very difficult to get to feed, and losses of greater than 50% can be expected during the first two months.

2) Could we locate a supply of healthy eels of the proper species? Because of the extreme difficulty in capturing these fish, drugs are apparently always used to extricate then from the substrate. In the case of collectors in the Caribbean, the drug of choice would be the relatively benign quinaldine. What drugs would collectors use in the Indo-Pacific region? Obviously, the use of sodium cyanide would be highly suspect. Would this chemical cause residual damage in the eels as it has been accused of causing in other fish? Collectors cannot simply dig the eels out of the sand, they can burrow faster than a person can excavate. While moving two Hass’s garden eels from their quarantine tank to the exhibit, we used tricaine methanesulfonate (MS-222) as an anesthetic. A 1000 mg/l stock solution of MS-222 was squirted down each of the eel’s holes. It was expected that the eels would emerge from their burrows when they sensed the anesthetic, but after 3 minutes, this had not happened, so each eel was carefully dug out of the sand. Due to the high concentration of MS-222, the eels had received an overdose, and neither was breathing. It took thirty minutes of manually pumping water over their gills to get them to start breathing again. Had their exposure to the MS-222 been any greater, they likely would have died.

3) Could the exhibit be constructed in only a 40 gallon aquarium? Other public aquariums exhibiting garden eels have done so in large displays, ranging up to 1500 gallons in capacity. As interesting as these fish are, we could not justify devoting one of our standard 700 gallon marine displays to this single species. We did however, have an empty 40 gallon “tall” exhibit. Experience while holding eels in our quarantine system showed us that as long as the substrate was deep enough, and of the proper grain size, the eels didn’t really need too much room. Up to eight eels seemed very comfortable in a 80 gallon quarantine tank. A 10” deep layer of crushed coral mixed with fine coral sand over an under gravel filter plate worked well as a substrate for small eels. We learned that crushed coral gravel alone was too large of a grain size for most of the eels to make burrows in. Fine sand by itself seemed to pack down too tight, also not allowing the eels to burrow properly.

4) How could we keep the eels from being frightened by our visitors? These fish are extremely shy, retreating into their burrows at the slightest hint of danger. To view them while they were being held in our quarantine system required a high degree of stealth on the part of the aquarist. By sneaking up very slowly, you might get close enough to get a glimpse at one of the eels before the whole group suddenly pulled back into the substrate. Obviously, our visitors were not going to be that patient. We installed a panel of “one-way” glass in front of the exhibit. This material only works if the area on the viewing side of the glass is much darker than the light level inside the exhibit. We installed the special glass on tracks so it could be easily removed to wash off any water stains. Kept behind this glass, the eels basically ignored any activity outside the exhibit, including moderately strong pounding on the glass by some younger visitors. They did seem to react to flash photographs, which proved to be a waste of film in that when the flash went off, the light/dark ratio changed, and the front of the exhibit became a mirror, reflecting the flash back into the camera lens, ruining every shot.

5) Could we supply the proper food? Prior to building this exhibit, all we really knew was that garden eels feed on zooplankton drifting by in the current. We did however, have good cultures of live brine shrimp and mysid shrimps, and we could supply the eels either of these foods at any size. We experimented with different sizes of mysid and brine shrimp, but found that many of the eels simply took no notice of the food at all. One of our aquarists discovered that many of the specimens (of all three species) would accept newly hatched brine shrimp even though common sense indicated that it was much too small a food for fish of that size. Still, it was obvious that some of the eels would accept the baby brine shrimp at the exclusion of all other foods, so this was fed to them after first being fortified with Super Selco.

6) Would the eels have any unusual medical requirements? During the quarantine period for the eels we acquired, we had the opportunity to judge their reactions when medicating them both preventively as well as to treat specific problems. Unlike some other species of eels, all three species seemed to marginally tolerate a copper treatment for 14 days at 0.20 parts per million. No eels perished during the actual copper treatment, although the feeding rate of all of the eels which were feeding was reduced. At another time, a group of eels was given a static bath of Praziquantel at 1.75 ppm with no visible side effects. One of the Hass’s garden eels which refused to feed, (but otherwise looked very good) was tube fed every other day for a week. Although it never began feeding on it’s own, the eel was sturdy enough to survive the rather stressful procedure of capturing it, anesthetizing it with MS-222, and tube-feeding it a mixture of antibiotics and liquefied food.

7) Would public find the exhibit interesting? Public aquarists should design and build their exhibits with the education and/or entertainment of their visitors foremost in mind. Occasionally, an animal is more selfishly exhibited simply because the aquarium staff finds it interesting. The prime example of one of these “curator’s exhibits” would be the deep sea isopod, Bathynomus giganteus. Growing to a length of over 14”, these true deep-sea creatures hold a special fascination for most public aquarists. However, exhibits of these isopods almost always fail to live up to the public’s expectations. The reason is very simple when you give it a little thought: most aquarium visitors are very familiar with live lobster tanks seen at seafood restaurants – and to them, a deep sea isopod display is just too similar to a lobster tank! Luckily, garden eels seem to be a bit more foreign to our visitor’s experience. That combined with the ability for people to get within a few inches of the eels (due to the one-way mirrored glass) has made this exhibit a good success.

Can garden eels be kept by home aquarists? The answer to this is a qualified “Yes”. If the home aquarist is willing to establish a dedicated tank for the eels, and is prepared to supply them with live foods (at least initially) then an intermediate or advanced aquarist stands a fair chance of success. On the other hand, mortality rates for garden eels casually placed into standard fish-only or mini-reef systems would be virtually 100%. As with other marine animals having unique husbandry requirements, (flashlight fish, cold water species, jellyfish etc.) many home aquarists are certainly capable of maintaining garden eels if these requirements are first identified, and then fully met. This means avoiding two common pitfalls; Buying a fish and THEN researching it’s needs, only to find you won’t be able to meet them. Almost as bad, some aquarist know the stringent needs of an animal in advance, but purchase it anyway simply because they can meet MOST of it’s needs, and they are willing to gamble at the expense of the animal’s life.