Archer Fish

[fatbobsufc]

Has anyone kept them? They sound like difficult fish to look after. How could you accomodate their 'peculiar' feeding habits.

 

[Lateral Line]

Archers are surface feeders, but will also eat suspended and live aquatic food. If there is not enough food, they use their abilities to increase the supply. However, if there is enough food, they don't. Thus it is not necessary to accommodate their shoot down ability to keep them.

There are other issues with Archers which I'm sure you've found in your research, but feeding per se, is not really one of them. They come from Mangrove swamps thus they are really brackish/full marine fish and are not well suited to freshwater tanks.

 

[CFC]

Lateral Line is correct, only juvenile archer fish are found in FW and once they reach around 4" they will need the salt content of the water slowly raised.
However they are a species well worth keeping and when i kept them they provided many hours of entertainment as i would get them to shoot various objects in exchange for treats like crickets and floating pellets ( a especially good trick is to leave the lid open when you have smokers in the house, archers are drawn to the glowing end of a cigarette like nothing else and will shoot it the second it comes close ).
They can be aggressive and do not tollerate other surface dwellers, they are best kept with fish such as scats monos and larger gobies like knight gobies (stigmatogobius sadaundio) which have similar water requirements. All tankmates must be too big for the archer fish to swallow, they will chase down and eat any fish that can fit into their mouths.

 

[fatbobsufc]

i would get them to shoot various objects in exchange for treats like crickets and floating pellets ( a especially good trick is to leave the lid open when you have smokers in the house, archers are drawn to the glowing end of a cigarette like nothing else and will shoot it the second it comes close )

Sounds fantastic! I wish they were freshwater and not Brackish. i would be interested in getting some then.

 

[CFC]

Keeping them in a brackish tank is not that difficult really, i kept mine with a salt content of 2 teaspoons of marine grade salt to 5 gallons of water although if you keep scats or monos with them it may have to be higher.
The only problem with keeping a brackich tank is it dose limit you to what tankmates you can add but with a little careful research you will find that many fish can be kept in brackish tanks.

A breif list of commonly seen ones that could be tankmates that i can think of off the top of my head would be:

Kribensis
Spiney eels
Most species of livebearers
Bumblebee gobies
Knight gobies
Figure 8 pufferfish
Green and orange chromides

If you have a empty tank and fancy doing something different then i highly recomend it, just one bit of advise would be to keep a spare 10 to 20 gallon tank just in case you see a great fish that can go brackish being kept in FW and need to acclimiate it to brackish water

 

[Lateral Line]

Would never have thought of a spiny eel as a brackish fish. I caught dozens of them in the Pearl River in SE China all about 800km from the sea. Water is a bit hard and alkali there, limestone gorges), but certainly not salty. Interesting.

 

[joshua]

unless i'm wrong, archers can grow pretty big

 

[CFC]

unless i'm wrong, archers can grow pretty big

Your right, the most commonly seen species Toxtes jaculatrix can grow to 12" or more but in a home aquarium 8" is about the biggest to expect, a 40 gallon tank would be sufficient to keep 3 archers in for life.

 

[smb]

( a especially good trick is to leave the lid open when you have smokers in the house, archers are drawn to the glowing end of a cigarette like nothing else and will shoot it the second it comes close  ).

LOL, that's funny. I never thought of that but it does make sense. How accurate would you say they are? Does age play into it or can they never spit water out and a few years later it being their first time, and they are dead on?

 

[CFC]

With practice i would say they are about 80% accurate and they have the ability to spit from a very young age, maybe even from birth? In fact younger fish are more likely to spit than older specimins, they quickly learn that food will just be given to them and stop spitting, that is why i used to make them work for their food. My favourite way of making them work was to take the tip section of one of my fishing rods and tie a plastic bug from our sons toybox to it with some line, i would then swing it back and forth over the tank (with the lid open of course) and not give them a treat until they had managed to hit it, not sure who enjoyed the fun more, me or them

 

[smb]

That is so funny CFC! Thanks for the info. They seem a fish well worth keeping. Hopefully I'll be able to try them out sometime.

 

[guppygirl]

I think I might try them too.. pretty interesting! I'll have an odball tank LOL

 

[Sondan]

Sorry CFC,
But I just had a mental picture of a grown man swinging a fishing rod in his living room trying to get some fish to spit at it !!!! OH BROTHER !!! I should send you some money for this laugh.
Signed,
Sondan