Cleaner Wrasse? - Update

[reeferaddict]

Originally Posted by naesco

Your cleaner wrasse will last about as long as your powder blue tang.

Both fish are almost impossible to keep.

The cleaner wrasse's diet is unknown and as a result it starves to death in our tanks.

The powder blue tang, prone to disease and infections and often caught with cyanide rarely survives as well.

While some reefers with large tanks and perfect conditions are lucky enough to keep them, the reality is most become ill for no apparent reason a few months after we put them in our tank. They get ich and other stuff, decline, die and frequently take many of their tankmates with them.

I understand what you are saying, and agree with you on most points. My Powder Blue is healthy and fat after 9 months, and the Cleaner is still thriving as well... maybe I should restate the purpose of the thread while it's up top...

I keep a 135 and a 72 reef - a 3 year project, and an "advanced" system by most standards. I work hard at this hobby and endevour to keep things living, corals, inverts and fish. I tend to hover on the edge of stuffing my fish and battling the inevitable algae, but my hard work keeps more or less ahead of things.

I'm not encouraging anyone with a 20g nano to run out and buy one of these, rather I am looking for comments and observations from people that have had successes keeping these critters so that we may unlock the secret and keep healthy specimens in the future. Remember a scant 20 years ago keeping ANY coral was virtually impossible. Hobbyists observations have now brought coral keeping, AND propogating to the masses - which may be good or bad... but the advent of maricultured and home aquacultured animals has me convinced we're on the right track, as does this thread, because I don't see LFS stopping importing these guys any time soon. So we might as well use this as a window to figure out whether or not we can keep these guys alive, and maybe even captive breed them one day....

Just my two bits... (.10 US)

Jim.