Reef Compatible

joaquin1119

New member
what do they mean by Reef Compatible?? these fishes

Raccoon butterfly
Heniochus Black & White Butterflyfish
Auriga Butterflyfish

are not compatible....

and the Tang fish is compatible..does that mean those butterfly fishes cant be near live rocks?? i dont understand..im trying to learn as much i can
 
those fish will pick at corals and harass them to death. mostly the sps coral, but I have also seen them decimate anemones, corallimorphs, and lps corals as well. live rock is good for everthing and should be included in every tank. just my .02
 
Stykthyn is right; there's reef compatible (there are a few corals it won't eat), reef safe (may be true at one phase of its life, then it grows up), and that's about the tale of it. The only fish you can trust with corals are those that never grow mouths big enough to nip a polyp, IMHO. Even algae eating fish may decide your, say, green tentacled candy cane coral is plantlike. The gobies and blennies and dragonettes are the most reefsafe. The lawnmower blenny does not in my experience graduate to eating corals, despite his huge mouth and reckless feeding: we had one for years that was perfectly well-mannered. Butterfly fish and angels survive by grazing along the reef and moving on, never doing enough damage that a coral can't repair itself---the only problem is, in a tank, they keep revisiting the same coral, again, and again, and again...and pretty soon it's irreparably damaged and the reef undertakers move in. Keeping a contained reef means we have to be really careful what we put into it...and what a dealer will tell you when trying to sell you a fish is generally a hopeful estimate of its behavior. Individual angels, for instance, can be perfectly well-mannered for months, until the day something clicks over in his fishy brain and he decides, while you're gone for the weekend and you haven't fed him, that your expensive goniopora looks enough like lunch.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7242358#post7242358 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Sk8r
Stykthyn is right; there's reef compatible (there are a few corals it won't eat), reef safe (may be true at one phase of its life, then it grows up), and that's about the tale of it.

I've never heard that as the description for "reef safe". Overall these are very vague terms, and there's a lot of difference of opinion as to what they really mean. That's specifically why Scott Michael's newest book wasn't call "Reef Safe Fishes", which was the original working title.

For example, I consider lionfish and Xanthichthys triggers to be reef safe, because they're not going to eat my corals. The lionfish may eat my shrimp and any tiny fishes, and the triggers may eat shrimp, crabs, and such. For that reason, some people consider both of those definitely not reef safe, because they feel the small fish and crustaceans are a part of the reef. The extreme would be to say that any fish that eats amphipods and copepods would not be considered reef safe, since those are also a big part of a thriving reef ecosystem.

Dave
 
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