Mormyridae (elephantfish): has any zoo or aquarium done an exhibit with them?

DavidBrown

Well-Known Member
15+ year member
I've been reading about the freshwater elephantfish of the river systems of West Africa. Apparently these fish have very large brains and a brain to body size ratio comparable to humans. They use part of their brain to generate electrical fields using for sensing their sometimes murky river environments, but reportedly they can count also and have advanced intellectual capacity for fish.

Mormyridae - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This seems like a cool group of fish that a zoo or aquarium might be able to build an exhibit around. Has anybody ever done it?
 
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I know the Toronto Zoo had them a few years ago. They might still be in one the African fish tanks, but I haven't seen them for a while. I'm going to the zoo on Friday and I'll be sure to check and see if they're still there.
 
Plenty of European collections have them (Chester has had a tank for years, with up to four different species at a time), and Gnathonemus petersi is reasonably common in the pet trade in the UK as well. Nice fish!
 
Taronga Zoo had a Mormyrid display in their aquarium for many years, with a little speaker and oscilloscope beside to display the electric current it was producing.

:p

Hix
 
I have never kept them, but I read somewhere that if you roll a small piece of aluminium foil into a ball and then put it into their aquarium, they will investigate it electrically and 'play' with it. Enrichment for fishes :)

Alan
 
Hallo David

I have seen mormyrids in a few zoos and aquaria.

Zootierliste lists the following species:
Aba (Gymnarchus niloticus) at Paris Aquarium
Bottlenose (Mormyrus kannume) at Leipzig Zoo
Ulenger (Mormyrus rume) at Hannover and Wuppertal Zoos and Liege and Paris Aquaria
Elephant-trunk mormyrid (Campylomormyrus elephas) at Berlin, Bernburg and Chester

Southern bulldog (Marcusenius pongolensis) at Leipzig Zoo (2009-10).

I think I saw some mormyrids at large aquarium shops, but they are not common in such shops.
 
In the Nehterlands they also used to be quite common in the pet-trade and I'm quite sure I've seen them both at Rotterdam Zoo and Artis Amsterdam at some time.
 
I think I saw some mormyrids at large aquarium shops, but they are not common in such shops.

AFAIK they have never been bred in captivity; therefore you only find them in shops (especially wholesalers) which deal in African imports. They may only be seasonally available. They tend to be given a range of tradenames, including the elephant noses (various species with long mouthparts), downpokers (with an extension below the lower jaw) and baby whales (with rounded 'faces').

Alan
 
I haven't done a count, but suspect perhaps half of the many aquaria I've visited with descent-sized tropical freshwater exhibits have a mormyrid. Zootierliste is generally good, but unreliable when it comes to smaller fish species; there are quite a few European aquaria with mormyrids not listed there. By far the most common species (public and private aquaria alike) is Gnathonemus petersi.

However, in "generalist" aquaria they're often hard to see, as they tend to be light sensitive. E.g. a few places I've seen "Congo River" aquaria with all the usual species, as well as a mormyrid; often not visible under those circumstances. (I should add that the few Campylomormyrus species I've seen have always been kept in aquaria with little current; members of this genus generally originate from places with fast current/rapids and may behave differently if kept in an aquarium simulating that.)

Kept in dimly lit aquaria, as done a few places, they're quite active, interesting and easy to see. The set-up described in an earlier post from Taronga Zoo is also done a few other places; most recently I've seen it at Blue Planet aquarium in Copenhagen with three species of mormyrids and African knife fish (though some may miss that, as only one of the four species had a sign on my visit a few months ago).

BTW: Gymnarchus niloticus isn't a mormyrid. While there are some behavioral similarities between this species and mormyrids, there are also some fairly notable differences. They're also rather unpleasant to other fish, either trying to eat them or just taking a bite of them for whatever reason. Though the largest mormyrids are piscivores too, they'll leave similar-sized fish alone if kept in a big enough tank.
 
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