)Well I was not going to dive into this one at all but I have to say a few things.

We all keep fish because we think they are cool. I hope that we also care enough about the enviroment that we do things like buying from reputable LFS and getting as many frags as we can and enjoy watching them grow and make our tank look great. Doing a little reading about any live creature is important and should be done for everything be it fish or not (my wife is pregnant right now, and you think fish are expensive!).

All I am tring to say here is that enjoy the hobby try to make it fun for you and others and learn a bit on the way.

Now just to make sure that I am not going off topic :smile: I did keep a manderin with very little live rock (30lbs in a 135gal tank) and it did very well and got very fat.

Everyone have a great DAY (PS I am also very slow at work and did not like the out come of the oilers game oh crap I am in the Calgary forum...well mabie the flames will make it next year :sad: )

is that a hard fish to keep i had one a while back it was really heathy, and one day it was dead and i tested the water and it was prefect. not to sure why it died.

Pete, yes, they can be difficult to keep due to food requirements. I think the beginning of this thread mentions that.

hey guys thanks for all the replys i am just sitting down now to read em but i see tons so thanks :)
also i dont think they will return it

well the general consensus here seems to be that it has a good chance. tell your friend to review their options and take the course they see as most fitting. just watch to ensure that it stays fat. when they're staving they look like you would expect an anorexic fish to look, you can see their bones and such. go down to pisces, they have a few case-in-point mandarins. good luck to them!

I too have some free time, and enjoy a good discussion. So I will jump in by saying that you are applying human values to an animal with the brain size of a pencil eraser. Therefore the term "Happy" is misplaced. My feeling is that fish live their lives by instinct, and if the animal is well fed, and placed in half decent surroundings its comfort level is satisfied. As we are unable to talk to the animal, we can only look at behaviour to determine if indeed it is "happy". I would be so bold as to say that the size of the glass box we keep it in is of very little concern to most fish (except Tangs, which even I will not try to keep in a tank less than four feet)

All this in my mind was verified by a 10" French Angel, which lived in the large display tank at Pisces. One day that tank broke, and that fish survived. They put him into a 72 gallon tank, where he spent the next year. The fish looked quite comfortable in that small tank. When the big tank was repaired the angel was put back in. To this day he still looks "happy"

As I said this is all very subjective as the objects of this discussion can't tell us anything. :agrue:

i am in agreeance, except perhaps in the case of the larger fish, especially puffers and triggers, who to me seem extremely intelligent. my main concern here is not the comfort of the animal as much as it is the survival of the animal. the idea is to reduce losses in captivity, and thereby reduce captures from the wild. but of course you are correct in saying that we cannot know how the fish feel. however developmental psychologists will confirm that behaviour is influenced by environment, and therefore we can make deductions based on the actions of the animals. in the psychological sense, one could almost define dying as a behaviour (in the same way that a plant growing is classed as behaviour). we can assume therefore that dying prematurely says something about the environment the lifeform was contained in.

dear god, someone please help us. :eek:

Again you are partially correct, but to go into this deeper would defeat the whole purpose of the thread. Therefore I will leave it be until a more propitious moment. :mrgreen:

come on bob, you obviously know something about the philosophy of ethics. let us in on it! :cool: maybe a lounge topic?