Western carp gudgeons spawn in summer, attaching eggs to aquatic weed in the shallows.

Western carp gudgeon make superb aquarium fish: they are lively, interactive, attractively coloured, and hardy.

They eagerly take live or frozen brine shrimp, very small invertebrates, and commercial micropellet fish feeds.

The specific name honours the German physician and zoologist Carl Benjamin Klunzinger (1834–1914), who, in 1880, mistook this species for Eleotris cyprinoides.

However, male and female hybrids of Australian carp gudgeons (Hypseleotris) are fertile, but practice asexual reproduction and display uniparental chromosomal elimination without genetic recombination.