New Waspfish for my small collection

very, come right out and swim around when you come near the tank. They are very fun to watch! They are easy to train to eat frozen too, I put a mysis on a piece of fishing line, shake it around in front of it's head and good to go. Mine eats like a regular fish too, gets food right out of the water column.
EDIT: if you have meat-eating nassarius like mine were, get em out! They'll try to eat it. I use conches for sandbed sifting and cleaning.
 
I wouldn't call them "active" (they mostly sit on the bottom or in the rockwork someplace, but they will definitely come out and greet the "food god". Be careful pairing them up, as I've seen larger, established males be a bit bullyish to smaller females until the girls get some size on them, and your newby is pretty small. We currently have a

I've never had Nassarius go after any of our smaller specimens. My first thought would be that they're starving (do you feed them?), or that you might have Ilyanassa obligata (mud snails/olive snails), which are predatory, and I've seen sold as Nassarius sp..

Do post some pix of your fish!

HTH
 
no i don't feed the nass snails, occasionally i take out all of my hungry cleaners, hermits, nass, etc, and feed them outside the tank. it keeps my clown from stealing food from them. Also, my male wasp is only 2" nose to tail tip.
 
A cool thing about these fish is that they change color, and you never know how the fish is going to look from day to day (there's a "basic" coloration, but they vary the theme).

We have a little 1" female in a grow-out tank (actually a HOB fuge), and once she realized the stick means food, she's voracious. She's so small, that we have her rooming with a juvie dwarf stingfish (Minous pusillus) that's even smaller than she is.
 
oh lord it's small.

Yeppers...these fish can come in pretty darned small. The small ones are best started on super small ghost shrimp or even live mysis.

IME, the small specimens do tend to train to a stick pretty readily, so make yourself a "stealth stick" and offer it super small bits of salmon, yellowfin, shrimp, even frozen mysis. The real key here is SMALL bits (about the size of its eye or just a tad bigger) so the fish doesn't get intimidated by the size of the food.

Pix are compulsory, BTW!
 
okay, i'll try but my camera sux. my method is to just soak the foods in my special concoction (garlic, omega amino acids) stick that mysis on a piece of fishing line, and shake it in front of it's face. Why is it's tummy full on two measly mysis? lol yeah i got her feeding on mysis, she tried to jump out of the water when she saw it!

Also, should have her on free floaters by late tomorrow.
 
my male waspfish is very interested in her. He's going up to her breeder box and just hovering in front of her, staring at her, it's kind of weird. Hope it's not aggression.
 
"Hope it's not aggression."

He's probably looking for a lil' action......... ;)

I have been considering this species for a smaller tank of mine for a while.
Lets see some pictures!

~Michael
 
Back
Top