FileFish? - Mimic Filefish with my reef.

[chicagophil]

Reefers -
So i am putting a Mimic Filefish in my 28 gal Reef and was wondering how quickly it will go through my inverts? I can feed it alot- 2 a day to mitigate the impact. The file fish is 2 inchs long and ... I have 3 Large snails - larger than golf balls, 1 2 inch Scarlet Shrimp and then i have a plethora of Hermits and Nassarius.

Thoughts? Should i just sell off my entire CuC? Wait it out and see?

anyone else done this before?

The data i have on the mimic supports it's non aggressiveness and partiality to shrimp.

Thanks,

 

[SDguy]

A friend has a Paraluteres prionurus and a Canthigaster valentini in her reef. She also has tiny trimma gobies and sexy shrimp.

 

[treylane]

Oh, is that my cue? Well here's some ranting about keeping the two in a reef.

So I've had a mimic filefish a little over a year now, and the valentini puffer ~9months. Both were small (1.5-2") when I picked them up and have grown to subadult size at this point. I've got a 100g mixed reef with small gobies, misc reef fish, sexy shrimps, anemones of various sorts, sps, zoanthids, etc.

They have small mouths (they even need to slurp down PE mysis like spaghetti) and don't swim especially fast, so I don't think they're much of a threat to anything >1" that can move with decent speed. I've never seen them pay any attention to snails, and scarlet shrimps are WAY bigger than their typical food items. It's possible (?) that they pick off a sexy shrimp once in awhile, but I'd be surprised - I've never seen the fish even acknowledge the shrimps, and the shrimps are VERY fast and protected by mean little anemones. I *HAVE* seen them show interest in the tube-feet on an urchin, but what (if any?) damage they do, I'm not sure. The urchin still cruises around and does his job.

The filefish in particular seems to do *MUCH* better when fed twice a day. His belly kinda takes on an angular shape and the rest of him thins out too on only one feeding a day. I don't notice any diffs in the puffer when fed once vs twice a day, though the changes may just be more subtle.

As for being reef-safe... welllll... it depends on your tolerance. They definitely DO take bites out of acroporas and montiporas sometimes. They'll harass plate corals to the point where it's not worth trying to keep them. They'll irritate favias, but don't seem to do noticeable damage to them.

The mimic filefish is one of the coolest fish I've ever owned, so when I first put him into my brand new, primarily softy/lps reef, and noticed he had a taste for sps - I chucked the lps and got more sps to spread the damage around. It's a strategy that's worked very well, and my corals are growing and happy.

Filefish:

Two "puffers":

Poor, abused corals:

 

[chicagophil]

SWEET! That is the best news i've heard all day.

 

[halpink]

Hello,

I read with great interest your post about your valentini puffer mimic filefish. I bought a 4 inch adult from liveaquaria about one month ago, for my mostly lps reef. He has been a model citizen: The first thing he did was completely eradicate flatworms! He simply doesn't bother any corals or my giant clam. My only complaint is that he won't eat frozen mysis, peellets, or Rod's food. Since he loved the flatworms we tried frozen bloodworms, and he greedily slurps those up. So at least he'll eat those. (Wow, this is the longest preamble ever--I'm sorry.) So we plan to fortify the bloodworms with selcon if we can't get him to eat anything else. He's active and seems happy, but he always seems hungry. I give him a full cube of frozen bloodworms each day, slowly dispensed from a baster over 12 hours. So he's eating every single one. Yet he still seems hungry. How much do you feed your fish? I absolutely love this guy, and want him to be happy. A cube per day seems like a lot to me, but I'm no expert. I'd really appreciate your thoughts--

 

[halpink]

Hello,

I read with great interest your post about your valentini puffer mimic filefish. I bought a 4 inch adult from liveaquaria about one month ago, for my mostly lps reef. He has been a model citizen: The first thing he did was completely eradicate flatworms! He simply doesn't bother any corals or my giant clam. My only complaint is that he won't eat frozen mysis, pellets, or Rod's food. Since he loved the flatworms we tried frozen bloodworms, and he greedily slurps those up. So at least he'll eat those. (Wow, this is the longest preamble ever--I'm sorry.) So we plan to fortify the bloodworms with selcon if we can't get him to eat anything else. He's active and seems happy, but he always seems hungry. I give him a full cube of frozen bloodworms each day, slowly dispensed from a baster over 12 hours. So he's eating every single one. Yet he still seems hungry. How much do you feed your fish? I absolutely love this guy, and want him to be happy. A cube per day seems like a lot to me, but I'm no expert. I'd really appreciate your thoughts--

 

[treylane]

Frozen mini+PE mysis works well. Mine eventually started eating pellets too, but she was never very good at it. When they're full (and try to get them to this point ~2x/day), you'll see them continuing to eat food, but they'll start to consistently spit it back out within a few seconds. As for getting them to eat something other than worms, what's worked for me is this:

1) They're a bit calculating about what they eat. They have to be a little bit hungry or very established in a tank before they'll randomly sample new foods from the water column. So if your file doesn't take to food X right away, you may have to stop offering their preferred foods for a few days.
2) They're also a little bit competitive. Having other fish in the tank with them that are fairly bold eaters, and already eating what you want to feed, will help. If they see other fish in the tank gobbling down mysis with no ill effects while they're going hungry, they start to get a bit grouchy and grabby with the food.