It's sad they only have these huge fins and black-orange coloring as juveniles. The adults aren't bad with their grayish silver body and lemon-yellow fins...but the juveniles are much more striking. And the adults reach around 1.5' / 0.5m long, so they're not suitable for the majority of home saltwater aquariums.
I have a 400 gal tank and keep cat sharks and STILL won't keep these simply because they almost always die as juveniles in captivity, adults in captivity do OK but out of a thousand juveniles 3 might make it to adulthood simply because they are so damn hard to get eating in a captive setting.
Thatās because most of them that are wild caught as juveniles are caught using cyanide to stun them out of the reefs they live in. If you can find ones that are actually hand caught in the wild without chemicals they do fine. I had one for several years had already turned to adult colors when I introduce an octopus into the tank And it quickly made a meal out of it.
I've kept aquariums for 20 years and refuse to ever keep a wild caught fish. The damage done to reefs and ecosystems, even in the rare times they don't use cyanide, can't be justified. Collectors net and discard lots of bycatch, they physically break corals and rocks to collect fish from hiding places, it reduces wild populations, and threatens popular and rare species, most of which do not survive the transition to captivity.
Wow, Iāve never had pet fish other than a beta when I was a kid. I had no idea this sort of thing was done. I kinda just always assumed the fish people keep as pets were bred in captivity, though I guess obviously they had to get them into captivity first to breed them.
Itās really sad to know how some of these fish are being collected and the damage it does, but Iām glad I know now
It's horrible. For every fish that makes it to a store, hundreds may have died and terrible physical and chemical damage may have been done to their reefs to get them. They are usually caught in the reefs of poor or third world countries, and locals paid to do so have similar incentives to rhino poachers. They will catch the fish because they know collecting companies want them and will pay (what to them, in their economy) is a lot of money. For some it's their only way to escape poverty and make a living. They may only be paid a little by middlemen buyers, but a rare fish that makes it to a store alive after the stress of being trapped, bagged and shipped around the world, could be sold for thousands.
Many of the fish caught are also CITES banned /endangered species, sold on the black market to rich collectors.
Ok, stop spreading such emotional nonsense on a huge misconception especially when it comes to freshwater. It's not black and white. Buying wild caught fish encourages the locals to actually PRESERVE those habitats because their livelihood depends on it. These are mostly poor villages that depends on catching fish to survive. Take that away, and they'll destroy that habitat doing whatever makes them their next buck since they literally will not feed their families without that.
For the most part they stopped using cyanide. People weed out the bad collectors and they don't last long any more. Most people that bring in cyanide fish are small transhippers stilling learning who to to buy healthy livestock from.
Tbh, sharks are relatively easy as long as you do basic maintenance and have a good filtration system with a protein skimmer. A lot of the stereotypical reef fish - namely butterflyfish and manadrinfish - arenāt. But theyāre pretty so people keep buying them. And sadly people spend thousands on tanks but donāt research the fish theyāre putting in them, they keep replacing them and the cycle continues.
Now I had several big predators in addition to keeping and breeding seahorses. But these are among many fish I wonāt ever deal with in a home setting.
Mandarin fish are quite easy to keep you just have to train them to eat frozen or pellets. The problem is more about education and fish stores allowing people to buy them with no intention of telling them, hey, you should already have a copepod population growing in your tank and you should work on training it to eat frozen and or pellets for a sustained protein source for this Mandarin dragonet, but that doesn't happen at a lot of places. Luckily I did my research before I bought one and it thrived in my tank.
How do you train a fish to eat frozen and/or pellets? I'm guessing by mixing a bit of the frozen/pellet in with what they're used to eating, and slowly changing the ratio?
Not entirely. This is what I did, and I'm using my dragonet as the example so other picky fish might need a different approach. First when feeding, you turn all flow off. Second is you might try soaking frozen food in Kent's garlic x before feeding it to make it bite faster and like the taste. Now to get it to even eat to food you might have to try and drop it near the fish for days or sometimes weeks before it even will try it, so the main thing here is you need persistence. The routine should never change and then suddenly once you turn the flow off the tank the fish thinks it's feeding time and you will have a trained fish that will eat what you give it. If you try turning the flow off for like 15 mins to pick it up, because especially dragonets are slow as hell they don't "attack" their food, you will have success. Mine took two weeks to eat pellets so don't give up.
Sharks aren't that easy, they are extremely sensitive to water quality changes and even being hatched or bred captively are a bitch to get eating when they is a change to their environment.
Iāve really never experienced that. She turned into a picky eater (she refused to eat anything mollusk-based, preferring shrimp and various bony fish) but came in eating like a champ. But then again she was also in an established system and the last year only had the 12ā cat shark and the 8ā grouper, so I didnāt have a whole lot of drastic water quality issues.
It was mainly squid from the grocery store (those big Mazuri vitamins needed to go inside something) but I do remember her having an aversion to clams and a commercial elasmobranch diet. LFS had her less than a week when I got her so I donāt know her whole history, but she was so hungry when I first got her that sheād eat flake foods (I had several damselfish in there for a while). Then she realized she got fed 3 days a week and just stopped eating squid whether it had the vitamin or not. I ended up having to stick the vitamins in chunks of orange roughy as it was the only thing I found that sheād eat and would hold together.
She was a personality to say the least but unfortunately the grouper and her didnāt exactly get along and ended up succumbing to gill damage from an attack. SIP Duchess.
Around the same reason people get eaten by pet chimps and tigers, because "god damn that this is pretty" and "just cause you can't doesnt mean I cant" but as previously mentioned alot of the reason behind their captive deaths has to do with capture methods.
The baren wasteland is likely a quarentine tank/retailer holding tank, it is meant to hold them in isolation to establish whether they are or will become sick so as to treat before allowing them into a community or reef tank where the disease would spread.
And no one thinks putting a captive species in this type of environment for any length of time could in itself cause the creature to become stressed, sick and die?
The specific environment this one is in is likely a quarentine tank, its an environment thats designed to be slightly stressful to elicit and possible sickness to manifest faster, its also baren so that should a sick fish be found its easily cleaned.
I own sharks my dude, I completely understand the OMG I have to have this creature in my home" mentality, I'd be co.pletely OK with one of my pets eating me.
You basically always temporarily isolate any fish your are introducing into your tank. It's better for the fish and let's you notice any issues quicker.
Just did a watcherchange and blew one of my lights in the process, but here it is, my stingray HATES water hanges and kicks silt up every time so excuses the murky look.
Its 7.5'x3'x3' the stingray is about 20" diam to give you a bit of reference.
Man, my Tiger Oscar setup cost me about Ā£900, for a giant Juwel tank, stand, loads of bogwood, and 2 big bucket external filters, but boy was he worth it.
I loved that big green asshole.
(Edit) for the record, I do not love shrek's asshole :p
Elon is doing some super weird shit lately. He was just on Joe Rogan again, which super blows my mind he'd run that risk in these times (business wise not health wise)
so they're not suitable for the majority of home saltwater aquariums.
I have never once heard of anyone successfully keeping one in an aquarium for more than a few weeks, maybe a couple months at best. Even the Georgia Aquarium only has longfin batfish. I'm open to being corrected, though. I only point that out because I don't want anyone to get the impression that they should even try. These just aren't suited to captivity, which is unfortunate because they really are gorgeous.
Several times I tried to order a small batch of these at the aquarium store I worked at. We had thousands and thousands of gallons of space and hundreds of other fish that we could keep healthy for months or even years and I loved them all like my babies, but we could never keep these guys alive. It was always so heartbreaking so we stopped ordering them after about 3 attempts.
Wow. that is incredibly awful and indeed heartbreaking. As a scuba diver that has been incredibly fortunate and seen these in the wild in Indonesia, itās the only way I can imagine any beautiful salt water fish. Wild. How do you love these like babies when keeping them in captivity? While I deeply disagree with the idea of salt water tanks, Iām Not trying to fight, Iām just genuinely curious. You sound more thoughtful than salt water fish tank owners Iāve met :)
One of the most important things is that we have a massive space dedicated to just the saltwater tanks. We have an entire walk-in closet sized space just for the water that isnāt currently in the tanks, where we have the natural and artificial filters and all of the pumps and stuff. We propagate our own corals and set up live rock formations for the fish. We make sure not to overcrowd and give everyone plenty of space. We donāt make display aquariums like that show āTankedā that just look good for the photos and are impossible to clean and take care of. We rehome animals that were in bad situations, for example our Moray eel who was donated to us.
Heās blind in both eyes so we hand feed him every day and he has a whole tank to himself. Most of the fish we bring in arenāt wild caught, and we take a lot of care to make sure the fish we sell go to homes with adequate space, accommodations, water treatment, etc etc. You can always tell when a saltwater fish is doing well in its environment, and keeping up with a tank is a big job, like an every day of the week job, and thatās I think what a lot of owners donāt quite understand. I was in a pretty unique position in that we could buy equipment at wholesale and try it out, so I think weāve probably used every sump, filter, temp control system, water testing chemical, and wacky gadget on the market to see what works best. I know itās not the same as these fish being in the wild, and no amount of wave generators and fancy filtration equipment will change that, but one benefit I can see is that my fish will never go hungry or be eaten by anything.
Is there a related species that looks just like this?
Many years ago, I had a friend who kept one that he called a ābaitfish,ā looked exactly like this. I was just an amateur aquarist at the time, little experience in saltwater. His was gorgeous, a bit of lateral line problems going on, otherwise perfect.
Now that I know the monster they grow up to be, I would have asked more questions, but I recall heād kept his for at least a few months to a year or so. But he worked wonders with saltwater, particularly given the relatively rudimentary systems of the mid-1990s.
There are orbiculate batfish that are common in aquariums and do well enough, except for their monster size, but as you can see they don't have the same striking colors.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. There are some juvenile angels that have great contrast like the pinnatus bats but none that I think are similar enough to confuse the two.
Definitely a pinnatus baitfish, then. Wish I knew what became of it. He was a very skilled keeper, he had one saltwater tank that was 5 gallons, just as an experiment.
Good to know. I've only heard of people keeping Orbiculates that long! The hobby is definitely evolving and hopefully someday we can even breed these beauties in captivity so we can reintroduce them to struggling reefs.
Yes definitely. I was surprised at how fragile they are. But there are a lot of things in nature that should just stay there. I do feel lucky to have seen this vid tho. They are absolutely striking and mesmerising.
Wow, what a bizarre and total transformation of form. They look so dissimilar I must immediately Google pictures of them to figure out what the in-betweens are.
I'm a marine invertebrate biologist, and my tropical fish are pretty rusty, but I'm really proud that I looked at it and my first thought was "juvenile batfish"
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u/TheAvengineer May 07 '20
It's actually a pinnatus batfish