Copperbands Valentine's Day Lovefest - Not

[daniella3d]

I am not a big expert but no one needs to be an expert to see your fish are stressed..duh...

I have one for a few months now and it is fat and healthy. it is not stressed by any fish and no fish in my tank ever harrased it from the begining. I would not have tolerated this.

I do not tolerate aggression in my tank. It surely can be done to put a yellow tang in with a copperband but there are ways to do it. yours seem that it harrassed your previous copperband and will most probably do it again (very predictible). The proper way to do it is to introduce the yellow tang AFTER the copperband has had a chance to acclimate, like one month after.

My copperband is now with a niger trigger and both eat side by side when I put a mussel. Acutaly it is the trigger that showed the butterfly that a mussel was food. There is no competition for food at all and my copperband gets his white worms a few times per day and I feed it with a pipette. He's totaly rotten spoiled but I love that fish.

The only yellow tang I ever had ended up killing my mandarin so I sold it long before I got the copperband because he would have killed that one too.

Copperband are hard fish to keep. They are sensitive (you can lough now) and have a sweet personality. It,s already hard to keep them in good health with a perfect setup, never mind having them harrassed by other fish and putting 2 of them in competition together in a too small aquarium.

When I got my copperband it was only skin and bone. It was infested with flukes and was breathing very fast. Was only eating about 3 PE mysis per day. It was really on its way out. I fatten him up with white worms and that took about 10 days, did a 4 weeks quarentine and on week 3 and 4 I treated it with prazipro. It was not an easy task to get him back to health and any fish harrasing or fighting it would have meant a failure for sure. When it was in quarentine it was alone, with no stress, until it was fat and healthy again. I did not even treat him for flukes until I felt he was strong enough and fat enough (prazipro cut off appetite).

what tank did you see with more than one copperband?? petshop bare tank? very large tank? Maybe some copperband could get along together but hey...yours are fighting and obviously they wont be ok together. Seem easy enough to see.

If you want to read my story and read the reply and see how hard they are to keep:

http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=71617

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

Daniella, since you seem to be the big expert on this forum about Copperbands, I would like to know more about your experience.

How many have you owned, and how long have they lived? How did they do once you put them into your main display tank? Were they bullied at all, and were they able to successfully compete for food with the other fish. Did you ever keep a Yellow Tang with a Copperband?

I have seen other display tanks with Yellow Tangs and Copperbands, and they all seemed happy, so I know it can be done. But it couldn't have been all peace and love, right at the introduction. And I have seen tanks with more than 1 Copperband.

Reef Pilot