Giraffe cat question?

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Mine never burrowed but they do sift through the substrate looking for food. Really enjoyed him.
 
What is being described as burrowing behavior is feeding behavior, they like to sift through gravel substrate to find food buried within it. You will have very clean gravel as a result. A good thing as it prevents a lot of funky buildup of junk under the gravel that can ultimately lower PH and other problems. If you have fine gravel in relation to fish size you will see the fish rooting through it and gravel exiting through it's gill plates, with coarser gravel they just suck it in and spit it out. At least one of my a. wittei used to suck in a marble sized pebble and swim around while rolling it around in it's mouth, a most interesting behavior...
 
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Just found a photo or 2 of my a. wittei female, snapped a shot of her with a pebble in her mouth, hard to see but it's there, she was a very special fish not only in looks but a great personality too, miss her very much, hated to sell her but she got too big for my tank, she survives today with a great keeper on this board…
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Yellowcat said:
What is being described as burrowing behavior is feeding behavior, they like to sift through gravel substrate to find food buried within it. You will have very clean gravel as a result. A good thing as it prevents a lot of funky buildup of junk under the gravel that can ultimately lower PH and other problems. If you have fine gravel in relation to fish size you will see the fish rooting through it and gravel exiting through it's gill plates, with coarser gravel they just suck it in and spit it out. At least one of my a. wittei used to suck in a marble sized pebble and swim around while rolling it around in it's mouth, a most interesting behavior...
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Do you know by chance how far down they root?

Also, do they eat snails whole, crush them and spit them out, suck them out while inside their mouth, or do they use the pebble to crush them inside their mouth (like some animals use stones in their gut?)
 
freak78 said:
I'm not sure about the snails. But my substrate is abouts two to three inches and it will dig through that quick.
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I think that in the wild they eat both crustaceans (shrimp?) and mollusks (snails?), I'm just unsure how it's done. Going down deeper in sand should be no problem, but I'm not sure if they do that.
 
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