Multiple sapphire damsels ?

I just pulled my coral beauty out of my 57g mixed reef and now I feel my tank is missing some color. Current live stock is 2 b/w ocellaris, mystery wrasse, royal gramma, mandarin goby, orange spotted goby, and sapphire damsel.... I was thinking about getting two more sapphire damsels to fill the gap of color. My LFS said 3 would be better the 2 but they also said coral beauty's would be ok in mixed reef (which I knew may not be the case) so I'm a little hesitant. Right now the damsel is very timid around my other fish and will dart away at any sort of stand off... I damn near had to break my tank down to get the coral beauty out so I'm not looking into going down that route again if it has any chance of being a bad idea... As always thanks for any input!

 

Personally, I wouldn't recommend it. Multiple damsels won't school in captivity, and each will need it's own territory. Also, since you already have one established in your tank, it most likely won't accept newcomers of it's own kind very well.

 

I was looking for them to school so that makes the decision easier

 

I hear that multiple chromis will school a bit.

But I have read they don't school a whole lot in a smaller tank. I am not real sure about it either way. I just know what I have read about.

 

I caught seven sergeant major damsels and they school, my inlet has thousands of damsels.
Your best bet is to get wild blue-green chromis, I would suggest five to seven.

I have four wild blue-green chromis in my 20g long, mine love swimming in my acros.

 

I've seen them school in a couple of larger systems. In small tanks, they're more likely to go through a pecking order- eliminating the smaller/weaker individuals one by one until only one (sometimes two) are left. I bought two small juvies the same size with the hope of having a mated pair; only a month later, I only had one. He had bullied the other so badly that it didn't have hardly any scales left. On occasion one may get lucky at keeping multiples together. Works best though with a large school in a giant tank.

 

I read somewhere that if you get chromis for schooling you need to get 5 or more.

 

You can read a lot of things that aren't necessarily correct, unfortunately. Perhaps someone got lucky once and thought they'd found the magic number. It's really hit-or-miss with the blue-green chromis. I read of one case where someone 'maintained' their school of 10 by replacing the dead ones periodically.

 

That is good to know.... lol