The blue-eyes Pseudomugil furcatus, relatives of the rainbow fish, originate from the island of New Guinea. However, there are never wild catches of the maximum 6 cm long, peaceful schooling fish on the market, but only offspring, all of which go back to a single collection in 1981. Since then they have been bred continuously. The natural distribution area is relatively small; the species occurs, as far as known, exclusively in the Sufia Valley, Papua New Guinea, where it lives in flowing waters. Together with P. furcatus the beautiful goby Tateurndina ocellicauda can be found (https://www.aquariumglaser.de/en/fish-archives/tateurndina_ocellicauda_en/). The water there is neutral to slightly alkaline (pH 7-8) and 24-29°C warm; accordingly, P. furcatus is suitable for care and breeding in most common tap waters.
The nutritional requirements of Pseudomugil furcatus are easy to meet, a good dry food is completely sufficient as a basic diet, in addition fine live and frozen food of all kinds can be provided.
The aquarium for blue-eyes should contain a lot of free swimming space so that the fish can swim out and the males can fight out their harmless show fights, but also have a good background plantation of fine-grained plants (e.g. Myriophyllum), in which they spawn almost daily. The young fish are very small, but apart from that they are easy to raise. Pseudomugil do not exercise brood care, but they usually do not significantly feed on spawn and juveniles. Males and females can be easily distinguished by their different colouring and fin shape.
For our customers: the animals have code 444001 (sm) and 444002 (md) on our stocklist. Please note that we only supply the wholesale trade.
Text & photos: Frank Schäfer
