Monsterfish (thalassophyne Amazonica)

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ghostknife

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Hello its gk, i'm back!! Yeah i hav't been around for ages because i kind of forgot about fish forums and i have lots of coursework to do.

Yeah anyway.
Yesterday i visited a couple of shops with (1 inch) monster fish for sale. So i have ben researching themn and have discovered that you can keep two in a tank measuring 2ft (according to PFK magazine), so i was wondering could i keep one in a 1.5ft tank.
Iknow that they often dont eat anything other thna live fods and need a deep sand substrate to bury in. is their any other info i should know?

One shop was selling them for £22.95 and the other£24.95 are these god prices to pay?

The shop was also selling Freshwater pipefish, pink paddletailed eel and tulip eels any info on any of these?
 
Hi dude,

You could maybe just about get away with keeping ONE in a 1.5 footer (how wide is the tank?). If the fish is only one inch now then that should be ok for the time being but I recommend you upgrade in the future. A sand substrate is an absolute must in order for it to feed properly.

I suggest you question the shop people and if any of them have managed to get their monster fish to accept frozen and even dried foods then get that one! Otherwise make sure that you can provide it with a good, varied live food diet.

Give it some shade and a current and watch out for its venomous spine thingies!

Cheers,
Luke.
 
Thanks for the info. The tank is 10 inches wide. I will ask the shop next time i go about feeding.

Can anyone answer this
One shop was selling them for £22.95 and the other£24.95 are these good prices to pay?

Or got any info on these
-Freshwater pipefish,
-pink paddletailed eel
-tulip eels
 
Someones had a trip to wildwoods then. ;)

Tulip eels are more commonly known as swamp eels and are rather nasty characters that reach several feet in length and will attempt to eat or dismantle anyhing they can fit their jaws around, all in all best avoided unless you have a large tank you can dedicate to a lone predator.

FW pipe fish are very delicate fish which need perfect water quality at all times, tiny live foods and a fairly large tank dedicated to them alone.

Paddle tailed eel is a new one on me but i wouldnt be suprised if it was a morph of the fire eel.
 
Yes i have been to wildwoods but i only saw two of the fish that i mentioned there (monsterfish and a species of pipefish)
The others (and another pipefish) i saw at the maidenhead aquatics@St. Albans, Hertfordshire.

I don't think that The paddle tailed eel was a kind of spiny eel as it had no fins at all unlike spiny eels wjich have dorsal pectoral and anal fins. It lloked like a very small pink moray eel with a rounded tail ie, paddel tail.

cfc do you have any more info on monsterfish

Thanks

gk
 
I always recommend against pipefish. As CFC says, they can be picky about water quality, but the bigger issue is food. Almost without exception, they need live foods. This causes the same problems as with seahorses: brine shrimps alone aren't adequate, so you need to source a variety of foods such as bloodworms, daphinia, and so on. If you have a pond that you can regularly plunder, then that's fine, but weaning them onto frozen foods is extremely difficult. Possible, but difficult.

The species at Wildwoods is Microphis deocata, a freshwater species. The ones at Maidenheat Aquatics @ St Albans are an unknown species. I suspect that they are juvenile Syngnathus aculeatus, a brackish to marine species.

In my Brackish FAQ there is a link to a PDF on maintaining them in public aquaria. In such places, these fish are regularly kept, and bred. Large, healthy specimens are stunning animals and make a superb exhibit.

Cheers,

Neale
 
I always recommend against pipefish. As CFC says, they can be picky about water quality, but the bigger issue is food. Almost without exception, they need live foods. This causes the same problems as with seahorses: brine shrimps alone aren't adequate, so you need to source a variety of foods such as bloodworms, daphinia, and so on. If you have a pond that you can regularly plunder, then that's fine, but weaning them onto frozen foods is extremely difficult. Possible, but difficult.

While this is certainly true of wild caught specimens, whom have pretty much the same care issues as wild caught seahorses, the same cannot be said of captive bred pipefish. These are trained from a very early age to accept frozen foods and are considerably more robust, healthy and harty eaters than their WC counterparts. Due to this their level of care is on par with CB seahorses and the husbandry techniques of the two are practically interchangable (apart from the obvious, such as salinity levels, male pipefish being agressive towards eachother whereas seahorses are not, etc).

On the flipside, WC pipefish are possible to keep with enough patience, diligence, attention to detail and knowledge to boot much as WC seahorses are, but this is best left to very experienced Syngnathid keepers and IMO even then, only with the intention of breeding captive bred stock.
 
Dragonscales --

I agree entirely with your post. The fact that there are multi-generation exhibits of freshwater pipefish in zoos and public aquaria underlines the fact that there is no magic to keeping them alive in captivity. It just takes the right approach and, as you say, patience.

The problem is that (in the UK at least) freshwater pipefish are rarely traded, and when they are, the fishes seem to be invariably wild-caught. So the argument above wild versus captive bred specimens is rather and academic one.

A good 15 years or so ago, I did keep a seahorse, or at least my dad did, and my feeling was that it wasn't an especially delicate fish compared with other marines. Once feeding, it actually seemed quite robust, in the sense of being tolerant of various active tankmates and fairly basic filtration (a canister filter plus a skimmer). The fish lived in the tank for a good couple of years before the marine tank was broken up and the livestock returned to the store.

What complictates things with pipefish is that while (virtually) all seahorses are exclusively tropical marine fish, the freshwater pipefish may be fresh, brackish, or marine fish. Almost no aquarium book covers pipefish in any depth, so the aquarist will have a hard time identifying the species. In some cases, even within a species, there are look-alike subspecies with radically different requirements as far as water chemistry. Syngnathus aculeatus is the classic example -- there are at least 4 subspecies, some of which are temperate water marine fish, while others are tropical freshwater to brackish.

I'd love to see pipefish better studied by aquarists, but right now, I just feel that the wild caught, unidentified species are fish for the very advanced hobbyist only.

Cheers,

Neale
 

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