Sexing matted filefish and sleeper blue dot goby

I've been meaning to sex him/her so I know which to look for when I go to my LFS, but I'm not 100% sure. I'm thinking it's a male.

Here are a few pics





Thanks!

 

Can't tell from those pix...you need to wait until the fish bends its tail (as in the second photo) and look right on the outside radius where the caudal peduncle begins. If it looks "fuzzy" (bristles), the fish is a male.

 

Mine looks pretty much like this one, bristle-wise. I'm thinking this one's a female

 

From that photo, I'd almost say male (looking at the little whitish "points" on its caudal peduncle), but you really need to see it with the tail bent. That's how I could tell the sex of the pair we kept. Someone more experienced with them may have another way tho...I'm a lionfish kinda guy.

 

Alright.. I'll get a few pictures with its tail bent. Bent which way, though? Up, down, to the side? Fanned out? Closed?

 

Regardless, that is a sexy matted filefish.

 

"I learnt something today"

 

Bent like your second pic in your original post, but you need to look at the "outer" radius, and it should be so you'd be able to tell if something it sticking up, so kinda of a 3/4-ish view if that makes sense.

Males are also larger than females if you have two fishes that are the same age.

I tried to find a pic on the web, but couldn't. Oddly, we have no photos showing the bristles, but we never really cared about their sex.

 

I used liveaquaria's picture to show where my filefish has bristles, since mine likes to look directly at people and not really let anyone get a side view. The red is where there are bristles, and the blue is where there are none. As far as I can tell, there are no horizontal bristles either.

Hopefully this is enough to determine the gender..



Also, I want to find out the gender of my sleeper blue dot goby. The only thing I've found about sexing them is that the second dorsal fin is more elongated for males, and that the females are larger. However, that doesn't help me much, since I only have one. Here are a few pictures.





I'm thinking this one is also a female. The ones I saw at my LFS were probably half the size of mine, but I don't know the age of any of them, so I can't be certain it's a female..

 

We're not on the same page here...the area in the red circle is what you need to be looking at. See the little off-white dots? When looking semi-head-on at the fish, these will appear as raised "bristles" if your fish is a male. As I mentioned, the fact that they can bee seen so easily suggests that the fish is a male.



Can't help you with the sleeper goby...in fact, I didn't know they were sexable.