Scientific Name
Gnathonemus petersi

Comments
A group of Elephant Noses, like the ones shown in the picture below with twenty or more young fish, can live in a bare aquarium.

We recommend you keep one Elephant Nose or several but not a few. If you keep 2, 3, or 4 Elephant Noses together in the same aquarium, the strongest one will often make the others miserable. In a group with 6 or more the stronger Elephant Noses become less aggressive.

Elephant Noses will do better, if each one has a cave or a piece of plastic pipe for a home. Be sure the rocks, pieces of pipe, and everything else you put in your aquarium are not contaminated. Click here for more about avoiding contamination.

Elephant Noses are very peaceful and interesting fish. The probe below their mouth is not really a nose but is a very sensitive electric organ that is very good at finding small worms in dark or murky water. If you put a small ball of tinfoil in the aquarium, the Elephant Noses will play with it. This may be due to the electrical properties of the tinfoil.

Elephant Noses are members of a group of fishes called Mormyrids. Click here to read a brief article from the Encyclopedia Britannica about this group of fish. The article has links on it to other interesting articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Appropriate Home
An aquarium with at least 29 gallons of water, an exterior power filter with a BIO-Wheel, a maximum of 1/4 inch of gravel, and an aquarium heater adjusted to a temperature between 78 and 82 degrees F. Click here for more about warm water aquariums.

Each Elephant Nose needs its own cave or piece of plastic pipe as a home. Be sure the rocks or pieces of pipe and everything else you put in your aquarium will not contaminate the water. Click here for more about how to avoid contaminating your aquarium. 

Be sure their aquarium has a cover because Elephant Noses are very active jumpers. You should also cover all the holes in the cover. Use pieces of plastic cut from plastic milk cartons and attach them with strong tape. If there is a hole that an Elephant Nose might jump through, it will find that hole and jump out of your aquarium.

An aquarium with a Eclipse Hood or a 12-gallon Galaxy Aquarium are ideal homes for Elephant Noses, because these hoods completely cover the aquariums and have no holes for an Elephant Noses to jump through and exit the aquarium onto the floor. Click here for more about aquarium covers.

Recommended Diet
Live Black Worms and other live or frozen foods. Click here for more about Black Worms. Click here for more about feeding fish.

Compatibility
Keep one or several Elephant Noses but not just a few as discussed above on this page. African Black Knife Fish, Synodontis Catfish, and Baby Whales are good tank mates for Elephant Noses, which are also often kept in aquariums with Clown Loaches, Gouramis, and Angels. Click here to read more about several other groups of compatible fish.

Size and Life Span
Elephant Noses can grow to be 14" long, but they rarely grow bigger than 9" in an aquarium. They can live for 6 to 10 years, and sometimes longer.

Click here for more information about electrical discharges from another Mormyrid fish, where it says, "The electric organ discharges of the Mormyrid electric fish may be described as having two parts: a relatively fixed Electric Organ Discharge (EOD) waveform, and a variable sequence of pulse intervals (SPI). The fixed EOD waveform is controlled by the anatomy and physiology of the electric organ; the variable sequence of intervals is controlled by the pacemaker in the brain."

Click here for information about the interesting Electrical Fishes of North-Eastern Gabon, where it says, "The EODs of the Mormyrid fishes shown here are all from the Ivindo River and surrounding streams of North-Eastern Gabon. Each species has a species-typical EOD waveform which is illustrated by one or two example traces."

Then we took a saw and cut the pipe into pieces about 10" long. So the pieces would be long enough for the Elephant Noses to get completely inside the pieces of pipe. Next we took medium grit sandpaper and sanded the rough cut ends of the pieces of pipe to prevent the Elephant Noses from getting cut or scratched by the rough ends left by the saw.

Our Elephant Noses usually stayed inside the pipes, and the pipes seemed to reduce the stress on the Elephant Noses. We kept at least one pipe for each Elephant Nose, so each Nose had it's own home.

But we have now decided to recommend ornaments for aquariums that are specifically labeled for use in aquariums. The pieces of PVC pipe don't have such a label, so we no longer recommend them.