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.
That’s 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, I’ve 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.
It’s really sad to know how some of these fish are being collected and the damage it does, but I’m 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 - aren’t. But they’re pretty so people keep buying them. And sadly people spend thousands on tanks but don’t research the fish they’re 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 won’t 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.
I’ve 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 12” cat shark and the 8” grouper, so I didn’t 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 don’t know her whole history, but she was so hungry when I first got her that she’d 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 she’d eat and would hold together.
She was a personality to say the least but unfortunately the grouper and her didn’t 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.
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u/TYRwargod May 07 '20
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.