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 State of the Tank: (cont.) |
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weeks and if doing very well on a diet of PE Mysis, Formula One, Formula Two, Pro-V vegetable diet, and Prime Reef, as well as fresh frozen Clam and Oyster meat. I've also been trying to get it to eat nori (Seaweed Selects) and fresh Gracillaria with no luck so far. Now, if you've been even a casual reader of this site for the past several months, you know a Regal has always been off and on my radar screen. Every time I was ready to pull the trigger on one, I'd read one or two (meaning several) threads where someone would find a perfect specimen only to have it die under completely mysterious circumstances in just a few days. I would also hear tales of reefkeepers who would somehow make it beyond the 'few days' mark to the 'few months' category and THEN meet with the same result. But every so often, I would hear about someone who had kept their Regal for years without any problems and amazingly, without any special care. It would be a model citizen and do everything but fetch the evening paper...if there were such things anymore. So finally, I put the word out that I was going to try one and this time I was serious! I don't care where they had to ship it from or how much it was gonna cost to get here. I was determined to succeed with this beautiful fish.
Enter Greg Schiemer, author, speaker, reefkeeper, and guy who constantly gets me into trouble regarding fish. A few weeks after I put the word out that I was looking, |
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| Greg sends me an email and says that he found one, a good one. Of course, I'm prepared to next hear "The bad news is it's in the back room of a Mosque in Dubai and the owner will only trade for a diamonds or his weight in White Castle hamburgers". Instead though he tells me that it has already been at my LFS for over a week and it's eating flake food! Oooookaaaay! So I head down and meet him there and sure enough, there it was, not only eating, but also actively harassing a pair of saltwater catfish to boot! Greg, by the way, is one of the people who had gone beyond the five-YEAR mark with his Regal so I figured I could take his word that this one had potential. |
| Now, I've heard from several sources that it's a really bad idea to put Regal Angels into quarantine tanks, particularly stark and barren ones like I have. So the fish is now in what used to be my refugium. This tank is still connected to the main system and contains some LR, my old brown frogspawn and several other 'LPS' and 'SPS' frags. He (Greg ID'd it as a male. I don't want to know how) really seems to like it there, which is good because I plan to keep him in it for at least a month. During this time I plan to continue to experiment with his diet and see if he has the potential to wreak havoc in my main tank. I fully understand that it is not uncommon for Regals to take out zoanthids and such. But there are cases of them picking brain corals (and other 'LPS') to death too. I've even heard of some specimens nibbling on acros, which, understandably, is what I'm on the lookout for. |
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