75g w/ 33g frag tank system

Marinebreeder.org is an amazing site, I'm a member there. I plan to try and breed Centropyge argi this summer and they have been a ton of help to me. Also, if Wrasse's are well fed and comfortable the chance of them spawning in a home aquarium is good.

 

Yeah I've seen you post over there too.
Good luck with the argi's. I hope my McCoskers and my Yashia's will spawn in my tank. I'm hoping to keep my bioload light enough that I can feed heavily. I want fat, happy, spawning fish in my tank.
I doubt I will try and raise any of the them, wrasses are not easy apparently, or at least nobody seems to have found an easy way to raise them so I don't know if I'm up to that level of challenge yet. Maybe in 5-10 years.


So on another note I got a Salifert Alk test today and it's testing about 2 dkh higher than my Elos kit. I tested on both of my tanks and they both came out with about the same difference. I checked the Salifert kit against the included reference solution and it tested out almost on the dot so I don't know who to believe. Salifert probably produces against their reference so I expect that to be correct but is there any way to ensure that the reference solution is accurate too?
I hate test kits.

 

Well I have no idea what's going on in my QT right now. I was sitting down about to eat dinner tonight when I heard a splash from the tank and I ran over in case one of the wrasses found a way through the netting cover.
Strangely enough all three fish were calmly swimming around. Which is even more strange since after I fed them earlier the male was being extremely aggressive and chasing the two females around, but they they were doing kind of a weird semi-synchronized bobbing move with their fins all flared out. It was kind of eery, like glancing behind you on the street and seeing like 45 people all following you staring at you, or something.

Anyways I managed to get some video, unfortunately I hadn't cleaned the glass yet (it's just a QT, right?) so ignore the dirty glass and the algae everywhere, and any other unsightliness. Hopefully you can tell what's going on well enough, I just shot it with my crappy point and shoot canon powershot camera. There was one female that was hogging all the attention by being front and center the whole time, not shy at all. The male wanted to hide whenever I pointed the camera at him so I didn't get much good footage of him, but I think you can tell at a couple points that he's sort of matching the females bobbing around.

YouTube - McCoskers Dance 1
YouTube - McCoskers Dance 2
YouTube - McCoskers Dance 3

And the strange female display I took before, I couldn't get anything better because she stopped doing it after that night that I've seen.

YouTube - Female McCoskers strange display

And a pretty good (for me and my camera especially) shot of the male showing off. I ended up cleaning the glass because I was hoping they would continue doing the weird bobbing dance but they stopped after I interrupted them.

 

Hmmm. My guess is that they are all just trying to show their dominance. Whenever a single species of animal is introduced into the same space they almost always either kill each-other or determine a rank of dominance. Normal IMO .

 

Well I've been watching them establish dominance for a week now and this is something totally new. I assume it's part of that whole process because I don't know what else it could be. The male's been really harsh on the females so far so maybe this is them finally deciding that everyone's cool? I don't know.

I do notice today that the female that's been holding out (or that the male hasn't let in yet) is out and about more and is hiding less in the corner by the overflow or by the powerhead so maybe it's part of the process of integrating everyone into the harem?

I have to say though, watching the male flash with his full colors is pretty impressive, if I was a girl I'd want that too.
I need a new camera/lens to try and capture it better I think, some day. I would highly recommend getting at least a pair of McCoskers if you can swing it to anyone else considering this fish, it's night and day, at least so far.

 

I'm considering a pair of wrasse's for my tank but haven't decided the species. I'm thinking about C. jordani if I can find a pair at a decent price. I'll probably wait until I upgrade to a 180 gallon.

 

Yeah the flames are great looking fish, but for how big they can get I wouldn't want to stick them in my 75.
I've heard that a lot of the larger supermales don't take well to transitioning to captive tanks, but it's possible that could just be mishandling in the chain of custody or something.
If it were me I would probably start with a few females, or a sub-supermale and a female or two.
A 180 is a great size tank for them, my LFS has one with 4 jordani's in it, they're awesome although they have one female who might be trying to usurp the tank throne from the existing male hehe.

 

Well, one of my female McCoskers died the other day while I was cleaning the tank. I have no idea how or why, maybe it was stress, the water got a little cloudy from stirring up the very top of the sand and from scraping down all the algae from the walls of the tank. It froze up with only it's pectoral fins working and ended up gasping at the water surface, within maybe a half hour it was dead. All three fish had been fed an hour or two before I started cleaning and I didn't notice anything odd, they all seemed to be eating fine. So I'm not sure what caused it.

Now I'm about 1 week from the end of my 1 month quarantine period. I have the one female and the male left, the remaining female is still not really fully paired up with the male. The male still chases her around and she spends a lot of time almost as far away from the male as possible but does come out from time to time and eats heartily with the male without too many problems.

So it's getting close to decision time. Do I try and track down another female to make the trio which would start off another month of QT? Maybe the pair will be nice enough but 3 weeks after introduction and this female still doesn't seem comfortable with the male I'm starting to wonder if they'll ever get along fully. I don't want to put them in the display until I'm sure that they're comfortable together so I'm just going to wait and see, maybe one more week is all they need.

If I go with the McCoskers pair instead of a trio maybe I'll look at getting a Cirrhilabrus lubbocki trio instead, they're nice looking fish. I'm more seriously considering skipping the Tomini tang and going with all wrasses along with my yasha gobies. Maybe 2x McCoskers, 2-3x Lubbockis, and maybe another wrasse pair along with my goby pair. The tricky part is finding another small (~3" adult size) wrasse pair. We'll see.

Other than that everything is doing good, I've gotten some new corals recently for the new tank, I'll have to take some pictures one of these days but I'd prefer for some of my old coral to color up from the old tank days before doing that.

 

Decided to take the McCoskers out of QT last night. Everything went well once I got the trap placed in a way where they wouldn't try and eat the food inside through the plastic side of the trap.

They were out swimming around and looked nice and at home this morning before work. Pretty happy to have some active fish in the new system, I love my Yashas but they just aren't out and about all the time.

Now looking for a lubbocki trio!

 

Pics...I'm still getting used to shooting in this new tank under completely different lights etc so I need a little slack as far as quality goes.
They seem to be doing pretty well so far, exploring the tank etc.

The male doing a little display, probably to his reflection on the back glass.


Both, you can see the big difference in coloration when they're together, the male's belly is really yellow, that's the most obvious at a glance difference until you see him flash. He's also much darker orange on the dorsal side of his body and his fins are much fuller colored. I had trouble with the camera focusing on the rock while I was shooting, I have to get more used to that.


I just liked this picture because my female Yasha is peeking out back there.