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Old 05-16-2014, 06:51 PM
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asylumdown asylumdown is offline
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He's a slow eater, but I find the current is more his enemy than other fish. If you turn the pumps on your tank down when you feed he would be fine. I've got a large doliatus rabbit, a powder blue tang, and a blue throat trigger that he competes with no problem.

His main staples are:

clams on the half shell (LOOOOOOVES those)
Ocean Nutrition Formula One gel cubes (he's the only one that eats them, so whoever takes him takes my supply)
Nori
Pacifica plankton

He also eats both PE and mysis (the large ones) and rarely the smaller hikari mysis.

Basically he prefers to eat larger food, which is why he doesn't pay much attention to the small mysis or brine shrimp, and he generally only goes after the big mysis if I've skimped on the pacifica plankton. At feeding time I thaw out one or two cubes of the Ocean Nutrition and drop them in the tank whole with the rest of the frozen. They sink straight to the bottom and he always bee-lines for them. He can consume an entire cube in about 3 slurps. Then he'll wander about slowly picking off the plankton and any large mysis that are left (those go quick) until the pumps come back on at which point the food moves too fast for him to catch it.

I feed clams in the morning, though I've recently switched his morning feed to another cube of ocean nutrition and a sheet of nori on the suggestion that the cheap manilla clams I've been buying might come from water that doesn't exactly meet reef standard, and that daily feedings of them over time might have contributed to some of my recent problems. When I do feed clams, the other fish go nuts and it takes a bit for him to muscle in, but once he gets there he can polish off an entire small to medium clam in a single slurp.

If you feed nori to your tangs on a daily basis, I think you'd find that he would be the one out competing them. He's not fast on the draw, but once he makes it to the sheet, he can literally hoover an entire 6 inch piece of nori in 2 bites. What he lacks in speed and aggression, he makes up for in volume.
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