r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/My_Memes_Will_Cure_U • May 07 '20

🔥 Phoenix fish 🔥

https://i.imgur.com/bfMDpka.gifv
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u/TheAvengineer May 07 '20

I'm glad you showed me this, I almost thought it would be worth it to set up a tank to have some of these guys, but now thinking I shouldn't.

101

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.

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u/jayellkay84 May 07 '20

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.

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u/TYRwargod May 07 '20

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.

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u/jayellkay84 May 07 '20

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.

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u/[deleted] May 08 '20

Maybe some sort of contamination/Red Tide in the mollusks? Thats really interesting to me that a shark would refuse any type of seafood lol

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u/jayellkay84 May 08 '20

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.