Hungry, hungry mudfish



Brown mudfish. Photo: Angela Fox.



Our mudfish are masters of camouflage, can you tell there are 11 fish in our tank?? Mudfish got their name because they are often found in shallow, muddy waters such as those in swamps, shallow ponds and even drainage ditches. In the summer, these pools can dry up completely, leaving mudfish buried in the soil under roots and vegetation where they can survive out of water for 2 months or even more!

We don’t make our mudfish go through that stress. In fact, our mudfish live in very clear water so that we can share them with you. Our tank is filled with a generous amount of leaf litter, fern fronds and logs that you would normally find in waterways so that they have many places to hide and hide they do! If you have a keen eye, you might see a fin or a tail wiggling under the logs or eyes poking out from under the leaves, but the best time to see them is during our weekend public feedings.



Hand-feeding mealworms to the mudfish. Photo: Angela Fox.

Every weekend we feed our fish during public opening hours so our visitors can get a special chance to see our often elusive animals. The mudfish have been trained to feed from our hands and when they hear the top of the tank open and the water ripple, almost every fish starts to emerge from their hiding place. Sometimes they are very impatient and snap at the water’s surface to let us know they are hungry and sometimes we have to move our fingers close to the leaves to wake them up. The variable behaviour – being sometimes very active at feeding time and other times being completely uninterested – is a bit of a mystery to us, but we record behaviour every day in order to help identify what our fish like and what they don’t.

Two mudfish hiding in the leaves. Photo: Angela Fox.

Many people ask us if our fish are breeding. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen any signs of reproductive behaviour in our mudfish yet, but we also know that our fish are still relatively young. We will do our best to make sure our fish are healthy and happy and maybe one day we will spot a female with a belly full of eggs!

The elusive cave weta

Cave weta male. Photo by Erica Prier.

Yes, our cave weta are still alive! Cave weta are naturally nocturnal and like to live in dark, damp places like caves and forests. Yes - forests. Cave weta do not stay strictly in caves and may spend a good portion of their time in vegetated areas at the entrance of the caves where they are often spotted.

In fact, in our exhibit, the weta spend more time hiding in the trees and underbrush of the small planted section at one end of the enclosure than they do in the rocky cave that makes up the rest of the enclosure. When they do venture into the cave, they stay in the small crevices near the damp peat rather than on the ceiling in clusters as you often see in pictures in the wild.

One of the challenges of keeping animals in captivity is creating an enclosure that can replicate the environmental conditions that the animal experiences in the wild in order for them to display their natural behaviours. This is a much greater challenge than you may think! For example, our weta like their enclosure to be cool - about 13-14 degrees celcius - and damp - a humidity of 75-80%. How do we know? It was in this range of temperature and humidity that we saw very special behaviours such as socialisation and breeding.

However, even if we think we're doing everything, sometimes animals just don't cooperate, which means we just have more to learn! Cave weta have not been kept in captivity on a scale such as we have in Te Awa, so we can't just follow instructions in a book, we have to be scientific investigators ourselves. We have to keep asking ourselves questions like "Does the season affect the amount of activity we see in the weta?" and we have to investigate these questions so that we can keep making the necessary changes to our enclosure so that visitors get the most worthwhile experience.

So even if you don't spot one of our handsome weta, know that behind the scenes we are working hard to learn more about these elusive insects and bring more knowledge to our visitors and the scientific community.

Happy one year anniversary, Te Awa!

Common Bully Female. By Angela Fox.

A year ago, Te Manawa’s exhibition about the Manawatu River opened and this exhibition was the first of its kind at this institution because it incorporates live animals, or as we like to call them – live exhibits! We keepers have learned a lot since taking on the daily care of cave weta, tree frogs, and several types of native fish – some of the knowledge was passed down from our expert consultants, but most was on the job learning. Possibly our most successful component is the large 5000 litre native fish tank, where we have nearly every aquatic resident that started off the exhibition last year as well as several recent additions that have happily integrated into the tank.

We would like to kick our blogging into first gear now in order to share what we’ve learned about our animals in the past year, provide more information about the animals on display, and give an up close view of what it’s like to be an Animal Keeper at Te Manawa. Please feel free to post any questions you might have so that we can look at answering them in upcoming posts.

Happy reading!