New powder blue and other pictures

Sonicblast12

New member
I brought the powder blue home on Tuesday. Eats well, you can still see the outline of the spine but not nearly as apparent as it was. The DT is at hyposalinity thanks to the Tomini bombing the tank with ich. (My fault, of course.) Everything is cleared up now except for the powder blue which is on about day five on hypo.

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Yep, he does look a little skinny but that will clear up with time and proper feeding.

Your tomini looks like someone took a bite out of his dorsal fin.
 
This is an awful picture, but it took me a week to get anything decent. I trashed probably 100 pictures just like this one...such a fast fish.

But you can see how skinny it was.

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Eats pretty much everything. A little picky with pellets. Eating nori, formula 2 flakes, and every kind of frozen I throw in. Eats the flake better when mixed with frozen and selcon.

I'd guess about 5", the largest fish I have by a substantial margin.
 
Had the fish for about 10 days now, ate a ton of pellets the first two days when I was feeding everything in an attempt to get as much food in the fish as possible. Now it won't take them, lets the pellets go by patiently waits for me to break out the frozen or pin up a fresh sheet of nori.

Normally I would skip feeding for a couple of days but I don't want to do that with an already skinny fish with a racecar metabolism. How can I get this fish back on pellets? Need to fatten it up.

Probably just smarter than me and knows I'll break down and feed frozen everyday.
 
I put my frozen mysis into a shot glass, let it thaw almost completely, then mix in enough pellets to soak up the juice in about 5 minutes. Then I feed that mix and most fish will eat both pellets and mysis at once and once they realize the big red hunks are much more filling they go for those first every time and let the mysis float around until all the pellets are gone.

Then you can slowly increase the ratio of pellets to mysis and get the fish back onto pellets in pretty short order if that is your goal.
 
I was hoping you would respond, from what I've seen your goal seems to get everything on pellets. I was actually going to post the question in your PBT picture thread and thought I probably shouldn't put it there.

What size pellets do you feed? I recently bought some 3mm NLS pellets and was a little concerned they would be too big. I have some formula 2 pellets that are too small, they seem to go ignored. Of course it didn't take long for the triggers to figure out they could break up the NLS and eat them. My little undulated swallows them whole somehow. Need to post some updated pictures of that one...very fat and happy little trigger. An unintended benefit, my volitan eats the 3mm NLS pellets. Awesome.

The PBT remains skeptical of the NLS. I'll try soaking tomorrow, don't see why that wouldn't work with a little patience.

One thing about the PBT, it ingests an incredible amout of nori. I refill the clip four times a day. Looking closer I'm probably concerned about nothing. It's only been ten days, hardly enough time to be worried about a fish not putting on weight. Especially looking at it's fat belly full of seaweed.

I'd post an updated picture if the thing would hold still.
 
anyone with negative experience copper treating PBT's?

i think those 3mm NLS pellets are too big for a 5" PBT. I'd go with 1mm or 2mm.
 
That's good it is eating a lot of nori. However, if you look at things like horses and cows... it takes an incredible amount of vegetation to keep something alive. So I would definitely not stop trying to get it to eat something else, I wouldnt think a diet of only nori would suffice to get it real nice and fat.

In the wild the seaweed they are chewing up has little critters and other "stuff" mixed in with it, so they get at least a somewhat varied diet. The nori we feed is straight dried seaweed and most likely little to nothing else, so I'd like to think feeding only nori isnt meeting all their requirements.

Anyway, my 4" PBT will eat the 3mm pellets but it's pretty hard for it and I'm not sure exactly how it does it. It can only eat like 2-3 and then it doesnt eat for a while, so I think it probably just gets them past it's teeth then holds them in it's mouth for a while until they get soft enough to go down easily. Just a guess though.

My slightly larger lieutenant tang eats the 3mm pellets with gusto though, so I bet pretty soon the powder blue can as well.

And yep, my goal is to get everything onto pellets. My main food source for the fish is pellets. I mix up NLS (3mm and 1mm) and Ocean Nutrition #1 and #2 in about even parts, plus the good NLS flake. The flake is new, I have never fed saltwater fish flakes before but they really seem to like it and since it's a NLS product I trust it to be good for the fish. Anyway, I mix all those 5 things together into my auto feeder and let it feed 4 times a day, basically once every 2.5 hours. I sometimes supplement with frozen mysis, but that's about once a week, twice at the very most.

I have only had most of these fish 3-4 months so I cant comment on their long term health on a diet of only pellets, but my old 210 I had for over a year and my fish only got bigger and bigger fast and got healthy fast. At first I was feeding a lot of meat to that tank but the water quality was so hard to maintain I switched to pellets which made it a lot easier and the fish grew faster, if anything.

Tangs really seem to do good on pellets... my dussumieri went from 10" to 12" in about 2 months, only eating pellets. My little clown tang is getting bigger every time I look in the tank, it's crazy how fast he's growing and he just mows through the NLS pellets.

I have a chocolate tang which was skinny and I was a little worried about and within a week of eating pellets every day he has filled out really nicely and looks to be a good healthy fish...

Anyway, I really tout pellets as being a wonder food, nutritionally I think they are great but also for convenience. Say you get sick or hospitalized, what do you think will be easier to get someone to go feed your fish? Mysis which they have to thaw, strain and put in the tank? Or tell them to go dump 50 pellets in? And oh yeah, you can autofeed pellets to :)

I'm not saying dont feed other foods, by all means do, but I would definitely try to make the staple of their diet be pellets.

As far as your pbt being skeptical, give it time. Most of my fish wean over to pellets within a week, it's usually a pretty quick process, especially if you stop feeding frozen and the only thing they can get to eat is pellets. Dont let them starve, but if you keep feeding frozen a lot then they wont bother making the switch, imo.
 
First attempt soaking the pellets I'd call a success.

Pellets sunk immediately to the bottom and were ignored while the tang cruised around snapping up the frozen. The pellets gathered in a small pile in the corner of the tank and the tang went and investigated after the frozen was gone. Probably even sucked a couple of them up.

Just swam over to the empty nori clip, flared its fins in outrage, swatted the humu, and went back to the pellet pile to investigate further.

Now I can see the powder taking laps around the tank and eating pellets off of the bottom when it thinks I'm not looking. Keeps hopefully returning to the clip only to turn around dejected. Maybe the key to weaning this fish is to not allow it to be constantly stuffed full of seaweed. It's eating them, but only as a third option right now.
 
I just killed my camera battery trying to get a decent picture of the PBT again. Completely gave up trying to get a picture without flash.

Since I can't get a picture of the fish, figured I'd post some outtakes and show some of the co-conspirators that won't allow it.

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And now the grand finale, I have about thirty of this same picture.

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That's hilarious. When I used to use a point and shoot camera I had the same problem :)

Try shooting not directly at the glass, like be 1' below your fish tank and take a picture upwards, or sideways or whatever, this will cause the flash not to bounce straight back at you. You only really need to be off sideways a couple inches but the more you do, the less flash bounce back you have.

The only downside is you start getting distorted pictures due to diffraction of light through the glass when you arent shooting straight on.
 
Yep, the flash bounceback is an easy fix, the problem is that this fish is so fast I lose my angle to the glass chasing him around. Panning right to left I always end up with half a fish behind a rock and a giant flash in the middle.

Without the flash I end up with little more than a blue streak. (For example, post #4 of this thread)

Just tossed in some small formula 2 pellets without soaking them and the tang went nuts for those. Hadn't tried those in awhile.

Seems to prefer the size of these and really doesn't want anyone else to have any. Flared up and swam laps around the niger before the trigger even knew what was going on.
 
Yep, the Formula one and two pellets seem to be a hit with all my fish, at first normally more so than the NLS but once they start taking NLS readily then they seem to prefer those.
 
These are a little better. I hate the scratches on the glass. Wish the last two pictures turned out better, but I still like them.

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Looks good. At least he has a full belly, so that means he will continue putting on some fat and thickening up, slowly. I think powder blues gain weight slow, more so than my other tangs do anyway.
 
i just picked up a legit 5" PBT too. he was kept in copper(Copper Power) at the LFS. i've started him on cupramine already and am shooting for 3 weeks. hopefully i dont run into any trouble. hes eating pellets, mysis, and some flakes. nibbling lightly on the nori thus far. i got him in there with a flagfin angelfish.
 
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