Pencil wrasse pick on sps

riceboy · #1 04-23-2011, 02:39 AM

Has anyone ever experience this, noticed one of my acro to have a solid 2 inch growth and ever since I added the pencil wrasse some of my corals are slender and a bunch of bits are missing. Its like he's looking for food but in doing so he's taking chuncks out of my acros. Any idea or solution?

fishoholic · #2 04-23-2011, 04:48 PM

You could give the wrasse to me, I like pencil wrasses

and I am in Calgary right now

Honestly though I've never heard of a wrasse eating sps before but seems suspicious that it happend after you added it. Usually once a fish gets a taste for coral there isn't much you can do about other then live with the damage it causes or re-home the fish.

riceboy · #3 04-23-2011, 08:01 PM

Lol ya I never heard of that either until I saw him take a chunk out of my acro. But he wasn't eating it. Just took a chunk of and spat it out. We'll see what happens if I decide to give him away I'll let u know lol

riceboy · #4 04-23-2011, 08:21 PM

My theory is that he's hungry for more mysis so he's looking for them in the corals. Gonna try feeding him more and see what happens

fishoholic · #5 04-23-2011, 11:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by riceboy

Lol ya I never heard of that either until I saw him take a chunk out of my acro. But he wasn't eating it. Just took a chunk of and spat it out. We'll see what happens if I decide to give him away I'll let u know lol

Well......I do have a nice big tank he could go into

Good luck though as I think they are pretty cool wrasses.

kien · #6 04-24-2011, 01:30 AM

It could be that he found something else tasty that just happened to be hanging out on your SPS, like a 'pod or worm or something. My wrasse do that all day long, they hunt critters in and among rocks and SPS. Sometimes they do get overly jealous with their hunting and gobble up their prey along with whatever their prey was attached to (or hiding on). They will then spit out what they don't want to eat (the sps flesh), so it looks like they tried to eat the SPS but really they were after the copepod that was on it. I have never actually seen any of my wrasse (including my one pencil wrasse), actually try to eat SPS.