Originally Posted by jostafew (Post 662788)

I don't agree with the above posts. While damsels as a whole are known to be scrappy I believe that certain species can be placed in a community tank. I had an established Royal Gramma and a smaller clown in my tank for a few months and added an Azure damsel (very similar to yellow tail), and while there was some showing and standing off the Gramma eventually put the damsel in its place. Clown just ignored the damsel's shows. Sadly about 6 months after that the Gramma went carpet surfing (had it just over a year at that point). The damsel is still there, and continues to play nice with the since added Canary wrasse, tiny clown goby, neon goby, and the original clown.

That being said I wouldn't recommend placing even a relatively peaceful damsel in a smaller tank with similarly behaved fish as it's important that the inhabitants have their own space. My tank is approx. 70gal (30x24x24). They shared space in the tank, but the Damsel would always give way to the Gramma who occasionally reminded the Damsel who's boss and they each had their own cave to rest in. Now that the Gramma's gone there's essentially zero conflict between the Damsel and any of the other fish.

Originally Posted by jostafew (Post 663050)

Gobytron, that's a fair assumption (that the Gramma jumped due to the Damsel), but if you watched the behaviour in the tank for any amount of time you'd see that if anything it was the Damsel that should've jumped. As for physical damage, it was the Damsel that had some rips in its fins for the first week or two, not the Gramma. Now of course every fish is different and maybe I was just lucky but that was my experience.

Originally Posted by intarsiabox (Post 662943)

I had a royal gramma and yellow tail in my old tank. The damsel chased the gramma for about a week then gave up and lived peacefully after that. This was the only fish my damsel ever chased. The yellow tails are usually not as aggressive as other damsels but each fish has it's own personality.