Post by rainbowfish on Apr 14, 2018 18:58:42 GMT -6
This is one of the large signifers. In the United States we usually only see the small signifers, that usually top out at 1-1.25 inches. These guys are pushing two inches in my tank and perhaps four times the mass of the little sigs. Yeah we know that they are a separate species now but whether they are going to go by the species name signatus I guess still remains to be seen. I keep this fish at a specific gravity of about 1.011, about one and a half cups of salt per five gallons. Yes and you can keep them at lower salinities but every time I’ve seen someone keeping them at low salt concentrations the fish don’t seem to have very much color. They either throw a lot fewer eggs than their other saltwater loving Pseudomugil cousin, cyanodorsalis, or like most of the fish in this genus love to eat their own eggs. So this is a pick-your- mop-on-a-regular-basis if you want eggs type of fish. They are pretty big fish and can be aggressive especially the males. I would recommend probably the minimum size of 24”x18” to give them enough space to move around and for the lesser males to stay out of the way of the dominant ones.
Once they are adults they can eat a lot of different types of food. I feed them live black worms, frozen bloodworms, frozen brine shrimp, live daphnia, frozen mysis shrimp and occasionally some flake food. I think these fish need at least a two foot tank to thrive and a larger tank might be even better. They really look great in a school of 10-20 fish. As you can see from the photos they never stop moving. When I tried to shoot these with flash I have always lost the bright yellows in the fins and it seems to come out a dull orange. I don’t remember that being a problem years ago when I shot the same species with slide film. Shooting without my flash though meant having to use an ISO of 3200. That ISO is almost at the max for good clear close-up pictures. Higher ISO amounts just get very grainy even with a Canon 70D. High shutter speeds means less light gets to the sensor. When you use tighter/smaller (larger number apertures) you also allow less light to find the sensor. The problem with really fast fish like Pseudomugil signifer is that a 1/320 shutter speed is going to cause a little blur. And an aperture of 5-5.6 is going to give you a very shallow depth of field. One fish or a part of one fish will be in focus and the other will be blurry. This was true even with a shorter lens like my Canon 40 mm pancake lens. I’ll just have to get back to these fish with some overhead flashes turned way down to see if I can avoid washing out those wonderful yellows. I took these images with four Finnex FugeRay LED lights on top of a shallow twelve inch deep tank and it still wasn’t enough light. The aquarium was extremely bright but it still wasn’t enough light to really get the shots right. Anyway that’s the reason for the blur and these fish are just amazingly fast. They are certainly worth the extra pain of adding salt but once you’ve sealed the salt in (see my Salt Creep post) you’ll be set.
