hi,
dave's filefish story...
I bought one 3 or so months ago and have returned it last weekend, the reason it took me so long to take it back was that it was such a great fish!
It looked like this:
http
/filaman.ifm-geomar.de/Photos/Pictur...mp;what=species
even the girlfriend thought it was cute! she called it monty
it was a sort of drab greeny brown, but it could (wait for it) change colour depending on it's mood. When it was 'hunting' it would stick it's dorsal fin out like a shark fan it's tail out and go all stripey like camo.
It moved by rippling it's top and bottom fins in a mexican wave stylee and seemed to like to hover/hide/poke at rocks in equal measure.
It was always quite docile unless it was hunting or there was food in the water (it loved marine mix!) then it could put on a huge turn of speed to dash across the tank and beat a confused clown to a bit of shrimp.
Because it was such a unusual fish i started a thread on reeffrontiers to ask about it and how best to look after it. The advice that came back was that it really needed snails/crabs/seaweed in it's diet and that a 180 litre tank was the absolute bare min that it could be happy in (I would have liked a larger tank still for it).
It had a great appitite for aptaisia and I started a little farm of them in a spare tank so I could take a rock out of the main and swap it for an infested one out of the 'farm tank' I thougt this way it could have some variation in it's diet. It could clear a rock of all the but the biggest of aptaisia overnight.
but...
as well as liking aptaisia it eat all my zoo colonies - It took me a while to figure out why they were declining till I caught it in action.
and it would go for the snails - I never saw it actually eat one, but I saw it peck them off the glass and saw nass snails with really short trunks and bits missing off thier shell (it's teeth were very very strong).
One day the heater in my farm tank malfunctioned and I came back in and it had cooked the tank. It was about this time that I noticed the filefish wasn't all that happy. I'm guessing that he had hunted all the stuff (polyps on rocks etc) that he could in the tank and with the aptaisia all gone there wasn't anything 'natural' for him to do. He'd just sulk in a corner sometimes he would go up an down the glass with his nose in the corner off the tank. He didn't seem to go camo or go hunting as much as before. I was pretty sure that he needed more space or fresh live rock to hunt on.
I took him back last weekend like I said, it was a hard choice cause he was a great fun fish to watch but he just didn't seem happy in the tank anymore.
Since he has been gone i've noticed a tiny fan worm on a rock and I think that kinda sums up what you don't get with a filefish all the tiny bits of life that will eventually turn your rocks into a reef.
Anyways the moral of the story is that in my experience filefish at least the sp. that I had are a lot of work. If you can handle this and you have a big enough tank with lots of live rock for hunting then they are a really entertaining fish. If you however want a fish like a clown or a pajama that doesn't really need any 'extra' care and would like polyps and 'life' on your rocks I would guess that either you or your filefish aren't going to be totally satisfied.
dave.
