75g w/ 33g frag tank system

Very nice collection of fishes

 

Thanks!

I put in my order with Vivid for a Cirrhilabrus lubbocki trio last night, should be getting those into QT next week, it's going to be nice having some fish movement in the tank.

The male should be this coloration, from Indonesia. Not my picture obviously. The females as far as I understand it should be solid pink/red. We'll see how they actually show up.
http://www.luizrocha.com/fish/C_lubbocki1.jpg

Also good to see that my Yasha gobies are not being adversely affected by the additional tank inhabitants so far. They get spooked once in a while by a wrasse flying around the corner at them but I actually think the female is a little more comfortable coming out with other fish around, or maybe she just knows she has to compete more for food now. Either way she was out and swimming around around feeding time a lot more than usual which was cool.

 

So there seems to be quite a lot of misinformation out there about sexing Cirrhilabrus lubbocki. There are lots of mislabeled pictures on the web and lots of people stating what I now believe is incorrect information about this.
Thankfully I managed to get a response from wrasseguy on RC who has kept a lubbocki wrasse that transitioned in his tank, and he has before and after pictures which is good enough proof for me. Not the best pictures and there's obviously no way to guarantee that they are the same fish but seems pretty likely to me. Also, on top of that, fishbase.org and Scott Michael's latest wrasse book also agree so I'm fairly confident in this.

Here is the wrasseguy's female picture:
http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee90/detguy212/lubbocks1.jpg
And this is the male it transitioned into:
http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee90/detguy212/My%20favorite%20wrasse%20pics/Fairy%20wrasses/lubbocki.jpg

The other male color variant I already posted, apparently there is one more color variant of the male but I don't know that I've seen a picture of it yet.

According to him to complicate things further the female coloration is pretty much identical to 2 other fairy wrasses. C. flavidorsalis (yellowfin) and C. adornatus (debelius wrasse I think). Fortunately the yellowfin is the only wrasse that lives in the same area as the lubbocki, the adornatus is from Sumatra so if you know where the fish came from you can at least limit it to 2 species.

Still looking for my trio! I'm talking with Vivid right now about trying to track them down, if they can't get a hold of them I'll have to try another place, I know BlueZooAquatics has had the females in stock almost constantly for the last couple months and I emailed them to make sure they have the correct sexing, unfortunately they seem to have just run out of the females, in the last day or two. Of course as soon as I'm close to considering buying them.

This whole match-making thing sure takes time. Hopefully it pays off in the end.

 

Finally got a better picture:

 

So I got my next batch of fish in last week. Been pretty busy, so I haven't put together an update. I was supposed to get a Cirrhilabrus lubbocki trio, a male and 2 females, but I'm somewhat skeptical of the females I received. I posted for an ID on RC for an ID and one of the guys out there with a lot of experience with female wrasses said they aren't lubbockis but isn't totally sure what they actually are.

Sorry about all the algae again, just QT.




I can't get a picture of the male lubbocki to save my life, even if I point the camera at him from across the tank he takes a dive behind the rocks.
I think I may just put the 2 females in the display tank after they're done in QT and see what one turns into. Then I have to decide if I want to try and search out a female for the male lubbocki, we'll see.

Also, I think I may need to get rid of my smaller McCoskers flasher wrasse. At best he was a transitional female and even in the 75g he's pretty stressed out right now I think with the big male running around.

So I guess I won't be trying to get specific fish from Vivid anymore. They are very helpful and tried to help me get what I wanted but I guess they just aren't very good at sexing these difficult fish. I might try BlueZooAquatics for a female McCoskers and lubbocki in a few weeks once I get the unknown females out of my QT. I've emailed with them a bit and they at least describe the females, what I believe is correctly, to me via email.

 

Well I stopped by an LFS yesterday and picked up some of the Rod's fish eggs to try out. Just with target feeding some corals.

There were some coral that didn't grab on to them at all, but most of them did. One thing I found is that the eggs are slightly more buoyant than mysis etc so it's more difficult to target feed because they are much more affected by even the slightest bit of current.

I think they are good for some LPS that have smaller mouths, like some chalices. The larger mouthed LPS like duncans etc will eat just about anything so I don't know if I would use the eggs over regular mysis or rod's food.

I tried for the hell of it with some SPS too, larger polyped SPS like seriatopora and a prostrata and a millepora and none of them really took it I don't think. The seriatopora did grab on to an egg or two but it didn't look like it was doing anything with it, I waited for a while and then had to go to bed so when I turned the flow back on it took a little time but eventually the eggs were dislodged. Maybe given an hour or two it would have eaten it but I don't think it's the best option, just too big.



Also, I grabbed a very small, female-looking McCoskers wrasse that was hanging about. It's one of the smallest McCoskers I've ever seen and has very little color in the dorsal fin and just a little purple in the anal fin so we'll see how that goes.
The downside is that resets my quarantine clock for my fairy wrasses, oh well. May 4th I'll start moving fish into the 75g!

 

Just another note about the Rod's fish eggs. I fed them to my fish yesterday and all my wrasses and goby liked them.
One thing I thought was nice is, since each one is a nice little package of food, there was nothing else left floating around the tank like I usually get with cyclops, rod's food or mysis. There are no spare heads/legs/misc little white things that the fish won't eat. Kinda nice.

 

Couple updates.

My next batch of fish is coming out of QT into the display tank! I will be doing this at some point in the next 24 hours or so.

Unfortunately one of my female fairy wrasses (unidentified as of yet) managed to find a way to jump out of my QT last week even through the mesh cover on my tank. I'm considering just putting a regular screen on the top because I have had way too many jumpers in the last year and a half, I like wrasses too much I guess. Hopefully this will be seen by other people considering keeping wrasses. You need VERY fine mesh to keep them in the tank, even if the fish look pretty large, they can find a way to squeeze through.

The rest of the fish are looking good though, I'm considering getting a female lubbocki from BlueZooAquatics along with my tomini tang for my next QT job.

Also, I've noticed recently that my "sub-adult" McCoskers wrasse that is in my display right now with my definite male McCoskers has changed quite a bit in behavior and coloration. It has been assuming more female coloration consistently, keeping a white belly most of the time and rarely displaying fins. The extended dorsal filament has also somehow shrunk. Literally shrunk. This is maybe the most interesting part of this pairing. I was very curious whether this was even possible but it seems to be. I guess it's also possible that it was nipped off by the male at some point but the rest of the sub-adult's fins are in good shape so I don't think that is very likely.

Along with all of this the male has taken to displaying, more obviously, not at it's reflection. He still sometimes gets a bit uppity and takes to flashing at the air-fish on the other side of the glass, but he has been spending more time with the sub-adult/female swimming side by side or hanging out under an overhang etc.

So I'm really happy to see these changes and hope that it holds out as they both age. I'm very curious to see how the new McCoskers coming out of QT is going to fare, it is MUCH smaller than both of them. I'm planning on introducing it to the tank in an acclimation box with a lot of hiding spots.

Another thing that I'm pretty sure I've seen a handful of times in the last month or so is the male McCoskers eating small stomatella snails off of the glass. It has always been very quick or out of the corner of my eye until today where he grabbed a larger one than I've seen before and actually spit it out a few times and chomped on it a bit in the process of eating it.
This may explain why my frag tank that is plumbed in is crawling with small stomatella snails but my display tank is relatively free of them, although there are still a good number of them.
I don't see either of the wrasses in my display regularly hunting/pecking at the rock so I was sort of assuming that maybe they were subsisting mostly off of the variety of frozen foods that I'm feeding. They're both pretty fat and healthy looking to me so it looks like they're eating well and they both eat when I feed very enthusiastically, but I had no idea that wrasses even ate snails, period.
Another interesting development.

So that turned out to be a little longer than originally intended. I'll try and post some pictures or maybe a video even once I get all the fish introduced into the display.

 

So I got my old pistol shrimp out of this big chunk of rock it was living in in my old tank last night. I had read that you can flush them out with a hyper-saline dip. So I did that, I took the rock out of the temporary tank it was in (it was just some rock from my old tank which is now my QT), put in a bit more salt, let it mix for a bit, then put the rock back in. In a few seconds I noticed the shrimp had come out and was sitting in the corner of the tank, so I scooped him out and threw him into the new display tank. Worked great!
Hopefully a minute or two in slightly excessively saline water was not too harmful to it. I had read that it shouldn't be bad for them, and I had to get it out of there some how.

 

Nice updates

You are becoming a great source of info! I am saving this for reference.

thanks +K