My C. marginalis

By Sunday evening, the Aus cbb must have decided it had enough chasing and just started swimming around the whole tank, which it continues to do. Maybe it was hungry because it started wading into the fray during feeding time. There was a small amount of chasing early in the week that seems to have stopped.
 
My marginalis continues to frustrate me. He will only eat live blackworms for the past couple days. His breathing and behavior are weird. Not a spot on him, but his gills open more than I would think normal. Call it heavy breathing I guess? Possible I have a pathogen of some sort in the tank that doesn't affect any other fish?
 
I had a regular CBB that I had for a good 8 months. It ate exclusively blackworms for a while and I slowly add in mysis with blackworms and it ate mysis by accident and slowly ate all frozen. It became the most eager eater in the tank and I stopped blackworms. Then one day it slows down eating and in a few days stopped eating and died in 3 days. The weird behavior happened only a week or two prior before. They are definitely like most people say, they will be fine and died without much effort.
 
SDguy said:
My marginalis continues to frustrate me. He will only eat live blackworms for the past couple days. His breathing and behavior are weird. Not a spot on him, but his gills open more than I would think normal. Call it heavy breathing I guess? Possible I have a pathogen of some sort in the tank that doesn't affect any other fish?
Click to expand...

After posting this I remembered I still had some venus clams in the freezer. Thawed and chopped some up. He ate! Guess I'll go buy some more today. Maybe he just gets bored with food types easily? :lol:
 
Get him off the black worms.............they are fine to get a new fish eating but that's it.
I know everyone is into using these worms right now but I don't think they are a long term benefit to BF's.

Raw clams, mussels, shrimp, scallops frozen & chopped to size will get him fat and healthy & I doubt he'll go on those hunger strikes. Some of the frozen Formula 1 & 2 foods(or similar brand) can be mixed in if they'll eat them.

This is based on my experiences keeping BF's thick bodied & alive long term.
 
Big E said:
Get him off the black worms.............they are fine to get a new fish eating but that's it.
I know everyone is into using these worms right now but I don't think they are a long term benefit to BF's.

Raw clams, mussels, shrimp, scallops frozen & chopped to size will get him fat and healthy & I doubt he'll go on those hunger strikes. Some of the frozen Formula 1 & 2 foods(or similar brand) can be mixed in if they'll eat them.

This is based on my experiences keeping BF's thick bodied & alive long term.
Click to expand...

Hey Ed, I agree with you, somewhat. If you read through the thread, you'll see he's not "on blackworms" :)

I only usually feed blackworms occasionally as a final treat in the evening, after they are already stuffed on other foods (starting with pellets and moving through seafood meats).

The only issue I've read regarding blackworms is that they are very fatty, which would obviously be a problem if fed too much to fish that eat regularly and have normal body weights. My marginalis is not in this category ;)
 
Yeah, I get it & understand................I'd prefer to add Selcon or Zoecon to a seafood homemade mix for the small amount of fat the fish need.

My suggestion of getting them off the worms is that they are a freshwater food, too fatty as you mentioned & there seems to be some evidence that some fish ignore other foods if fed the worms too often.

I was thinking that if you could ween him off those worms he'd be more agressive towards the marine foods he needs.
 
Yeah, sorry, I guess I wasn't clear in my previous posts. He was aggressively eating scallop, shrimp, clam, even PE mysis and Hikari plankton on occasion. No worms at all. Over the past couple weeks, less and less so, especially after what I think was a snout injury. I broke out the live blackworms now to see if he'd at least eat those, especially since I thought he injured his snout, thinking they are much easier to swallow.
 
Got it..........makes sense. I've read the whold thread, but have forgotten all what has been going on with this fish.

I commend you for keeping this thread going, cause it's the only one giving us good care info on this BF species. I'd be hesitant to buy one from your experience.

My views on traditonal CBB are that they need to be the alpha fish without competition form aggressive eaters. Smaller type dither fish would work a lot better than keeping these fish with tangs & such.

Maybe the Marginalis is similar....................stressers from the more aggressive BF's might be causing his finicky eating habits too.............just thinking out loud.
 
I begrudgingly agree with everything you said in that post :o

I would not recommend this fish to others. And you are correct, even though he is large, and competes for food well, perhaps the simple act of having to compete for food is the problem. He was easy to keep in the 15g QT :) Hopefully once the 240g is up, the extra space will work better for him. If not, I'll have to search for an appropriate home (which won't be easy, based on what we are thinking here).
 
Yeah.............I was looking at your videos earlier & you can see how deliberate his eating habits are.

Another good thing to do is to train these guys to eat in a corner where you can drop the food in front of their nose or literally hand feed them.

I did this all the time with my muelleri when I had a lot of anthias in the reef with him. They were so fast & gobbled up all the food before he even realized there was food in the tank.
 
My solution so far has been to stuff the other fish on pellets, then add the seafood meats so they sit on the floor of the tank for a bit, giving the marginalis and collare opportunity to eat.
 
Well, looks like I'm just going to have to try really hard with this one. Direct feeding...many different foods, as often as I can. He is worth it, and damn if I'm going to lose such a beautiful fish because I can't deal with some difficulty.
 
After several days of really watching the fish for long periods of time, it became clear to me that the marginalis simply doesn't compete well with the other butterflies, especially the collare, which is getting HUGE BTW. Every time the marginalis would slowly look at food and go for it, it would stop and swim away at the first site of another butterfly heading toward him, regardless if the other fish was even going for the food or not.

So, I made the executive decision to transfer the marginalis to the reef, where the only butterflies he'll have to deal with will be the two yellow longnoses. Guess this means my pother plans are changing too...
 
Hmmmm......many moons ago I had yellow long noses in a FOWLER and I found them to be the fastest in the tank around feeding time. Do you find them to be fast in your reef? I watched the video a few days ago and they look stunning. Once again something you wouldn't have done twenty years ago :celeb1:

BTW you made me look for "pother" thinking it was a subspecies I never knew about :fish2: :spin1:
 
They are not terribly fast... they usually fill up on food the ends up stuck between stuff, not straight out of the water column. That's where the anthias rule!

LOL, sorry... I am the typo king.
 
Peter I also hand feed my Butterfly, it just makes me feel better to know how much he got and keeps him fat.
 
aquaph8 said:
Peter I also hand feed my Butterfly, it just makes me feel better to know how much he got and keeps him fat.
Click to expand...

Which is great, but unfortunately I need a more practical solution. I've worked so much before that tank lights were never on when I was home. Or how about a month in Europe... I can't expect my tank sitter to hand feed a fish for me twice a day.

I do have some good news. The marginalis is looking great in the reef. Zero aggression from the other fish. I was nervous... I could have been ugly. Something about long noses on butterflies apparently makes them non-threatening to other fish, like tangs. The same thing happened each time I introduced a yellow longnose butterfly.
 
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