Matt, Good luck with your pair. They seem to be extremely skittish at first. I collected 6 myself a while back, lost one, an old female, but the other 5 are doing very well, getting very big also. I then got 2, a mated pair from a collector friend, and set them up in a separate 30 gal tank, I prepared a deep substrate and a cover rock in one end of the tank, so of course, they set up housekeeping (burrow maintainence?) at the other end under a different rock. I didn't see them for a few days after introduction to the tank. Then they came out and began feeding, but within a day or two, only one came out to feed, usually they are always out and about above the burrow. I got concerned after a 4 or 5 days and serched for the missing jawfish. Couldn't find her/him anywhere, evern serched the floor... I guess she/he died and went the way of all flesh... I hope the same fate has not befallen the lost jawfish in your pair.
The remaining jawfish did well in his/her tank for a couple of weeks, then after the loss of the female in the big tank, I moved him/jher to the big, tank, I think I went over that before, but the newly introduced jawfish immediately disappeared, where it went I have no idea. I gave up on him/her after almost a week, then there he/she was again, but under agression from the others, then I rearranged the tank and he/she was gone again. My "rearrangement" was probably similar to bad storm on the reef, but the old guard 5 were unfazed and came out and fed normally after an hour or so. Then several days later the "newby" came out again and has now extablished a burrow deep in the back corner, next to the smallest of the 5, and is feeding normally. I'm hoping for a spawn soon, I still don't know who's female and who's male. Sometimes I think I've got it figured out, sometimes I think they're all male and sometimes all female... I just hope that they know who's who even if I don't. The blackcaps, three pairs?, are still doing fine, it will take a while before they get into spawning condition, it took Bill Addison's pairs a year before they started spawing, but I'm hoping that temperature control and good feeding will shorten the wait.
On feeding, the way I handle the shrimp, and I started using shrimp many years ago for plankton pickers. My rational was that most of a plankton pickers diet was copepods and copepods being crustaceans, were similar in nutriional characteristics, to shrimp, which are also marine custaceans. So to turn a shrimp (basically pennaid table shrimp) into a copepod like food what I do is to peel the shrimp, freeze them into a ball a bit smaller than a baseball, and then grate the shrimp into cold water. The grater is one of those with the cup like holes not the bend out points. You can easyly control the size of the grated bit by selecting the large, medium, or small grater and also by the pressure of the frozen shrimp on the grater, hard pressure produces larger bits. I grate the shrimp into cold water and then feed some and hold the rest under refridgeration for the next few feedings. I used to use fresh water for this but then did some experimentation. The shrimp bits take up the water as they sit in it and I found that when I used fresh water the bits tended to float and stay near the surface, and when I used salt water they tended to sink more quickly, now either of this may work out fine in a particular situation, but I found in my situation that putting them into a half fresh, half salt solution worked best because then they are about neutral in bouyancy and float about the tank in the mid depths simulating very well a planktonic particle. Works good for me..... Admittedly this may not be nutritionally complete food, so I supplement with myscid shrimp. More on that later if you're interested.
Martin
Fingers crossed...
This is jawfish loss #2 for us...I think jawfish are just NOT gonna happen! Good luck with yours Martin!
If I ever saw that in my tank I'd flip !!!!!
