fish acting as gardners/bulldozers

[eastlake]

Well, I came home from work and looked at my tank to notice an oddly bright circular patch on my live rock. "What frag was glued there?" I say to myself. Wouldn't you know it, its was the foxflame :debi:. Obviously I was not going to let the abyss have this one so tearing apart of the rocks began. Well, 45 minutes of spitting and cussing later all of the rocks are back the way they once were, kind of, and all corals are back to where they once were. Come back 10 minutes later and a 1/4"-1/2" tip of my blue tort has broken off, there are monti cap pieces lying on the substrate, yellow tort separated from plug, miagi tort separated from rock, and my blue hippo tang has a big scratch on her nose. While I can't prove she did it, the scratch and her tendency to dive for cover makes me thing she was responsible for the dislodging and "pruning" of some of the corals. As a sidebar, everything that came dislodged was glued down with ecotech coral glue, this stuff has never worked well for me and after I'm done going through my free samples I'm going back to Loctite gel and the bulk reef supply stuff. Anyone else have fish that did/does coral fragging for them? I'd be interested to hear other stories.

 

[Burgman]

Hi,

Yeah I have a Velvet Damsel that likes to re-arrange some of my corals from time to time.

Dave

 

[eastlake]

My allen's damsel male did that to all of the corals on the substrate near his beloved clam shells. I witnessed him picking up entire plugs an swimming them to the other side of the tank. He now has me trained to keep anything I care about away from the shells where he's dug his pit and him and his girlie tend to their eggs.

 

[brad]

Try and Indian black trigger and Harlequin tusk. I sometimes get good sized rocks or small colonies flipped. The tusk does it a lot more often, but the trigger can flip bigger rocks. But I'd rather keep the fish and deal with it.

 

[eastlake]

Have you ever witnessed them doing this? Sounds like a really interesting behavior to watch albeit really annoying having to go shoulder deep in the tank to rescue a colony every so often.