Orange Spotted Filefish eating flake food. Trying to figure out why.

[HingleMcCringleberry]

So I’ve decided to launch an investigation. 

 

I went to my LFS a few weeks ago and saw they had just received a school of orange spotted filefish. Always an optimist, I asked  the store if they would feed them frozen mysis for me to observe. Miraculously ALL the filefish in the tank began to eat the frozen food. The filefish has just arrived the day before and were in a system running heavy copper so this made absolutely no sense to me.

 

not thinking twice, I asked them to bag up the one with the best appetite and took it home. I put it in an observation tank for a week but it didn’t eat so I added it to my display to reduce its stress and hopefully have more luck. 

 

I used a dead acro skeleton with mysis and grocery store shrimp smeared on and it picked at it. A few days later I happened to feed some flake food to the tank and crazy as it sounds the orange spotted filefish swam all around the tank gobbling any piece it could find that would fit in its mouth. 

 

Since then ive been crushing the flakes to a smaller size and giving tiny feedings to the tank 3x a day and the filefish’s belly is perpetually bulging. 

 

But the story doesn’t end there. I told a friend of mine about my crazy luck and what I had seen in the store and he asked me to grab one for him and hold it until we meet up at reefapalooza next week. Although a few weeks had passed I went back to my LFS and saw they still had several of the filefish remaining and all with fat bellies. Amazing!

 

the store confirmed that they had only been feeding the tank frozen foods. Also no coral or copepods present in the tank either. So I grabbed two more. One for my friend and one to hopefully pair with the filefish I have.

 

that was yesterday. This morning I found my male and female filefish sleeping together. They woke up when I added flakes and the new filefish picked at a couple while the established filefish raced around gobbling up pieces of any size it could find.

 

the one I set aside for my friend was really stressed alone in the observation tank I had put it in. It needs a water change. But I added a little frozen mysis and again even the third filefish woke up and raced around gobbling the mysis. Even chewing and spitting the pieces that were too big until they were small enough to swallow. 

 

 

This all seems too good to be true. It remains to be seen if these fish will survive long term but the fact that they’re all eating prepared foods from the water column, with little or no training, immediately after being introduced to a new system, is ridiculous.

 

I need answers. I am not an very experienced aquarist. I research as much as I can and I will jump through hoops and spend hours each day monitoring and providing for my tanks as best I know how. I still make impulse buys. I still try things I shouldn’t (this may be one of them). But even I seem to be doing something that is rarely possible for veteran reef keepers.

 

im not stroking my ego here. It can’t be me. It has to be the fish. Perhaps they were trained by the fish distributor? Perhaps it’s just a massive coincidence of fish personality? But my favorite theory is that it’s the collection site that makes the difference. 

 

I got the details of where my LFS got that batch of filefish. I called them and am waiting for a call back from their head of sales to answer my questions. 

 

Heres what I’m most interested in hearing back about. From you all. And from the head of sales. Does the collection sight determine success or failure for these filefish in an aquarium environment? It stands to reason that slight deviations in environment throughout the region where these fish live could effect how they behave. I know they went extinct locally near japan when the specific choice species of acropora died out. That population couldn’t even adapt to eating other acros. Maybe another reef has fish that are more opportunistic. Maybe one area has orange spotted filefish that have adapted to eat copepods as well as coral. Or montipora ad well as acropora. (These are all things I’ve heard orange spotted filefish (OSFs) will eat in captivity when not accepting prepared foods. 

 

And finally maybe there is a small region where the OSF has adapted to eat whatever smells good. A place where, for whatever reason, the filefish have evolved to lose the instinct to be so picky. 

 

If this is the case it’s huge news I think. Imagine what an expert aquarist could learn about OSF husbandry it they had access to the opportunistic specimens I just got. What if everyone had access to the opportunity to have a filefish that will feed. We could all learn how to truly care for this fish once the hurdle of food rejection is off the table. 

 

So im determined to learn where these particular filefish came from. I will ask if any more are available from that area. And if I can manage that. I will try to recruit as many people as I can to join me in the experiment to learn what drives this fishes behavior. 

 

I would love love to hear any thoughts and feedback. Any questions. Or even any requests. If I can manage to organize another set of OSF from the same reef to my LFS I am willing to buy and ship them on behalf of any determined experienced aquarists out there.  I may be getting way ahead of myself but I feel this could be an opportunity for the whole hobby to learn and grow and I don’t want to think I missed the opportunity to share it with everyone by keeping my theories to myself. 

 

Sorry this his is so long. Really hope somebody reads it all...

[malex530]

Thats amazing, any chance you'd be able to get your hands on one or two more?

 

[HingleMcCringleberry]

On 7/8/2019 at 10:31 PM, malex530 said:

Thats amazing, any chance you'd be able to get your hands on one or two more?

 

I should follow up haha. I called the store i bought the fish from. they were willing to tell me their distributor they got the fish from. QUALITY MARINE. remember that name. It seems that Quality marine is an excellent place to source fish for your tank.

 

I called quality marine to ask about the filefish and after bouncing me around from reception to sales rep to manager I eventually ended up speaking to their own marine biologist who oversees care for all their specimens. Apparently this guy AJ has a great education and prior experience working at a major aquarium. He goes above and beyond what the job requires just because he's passionate about the fish. He explained that when they receive the filefish he personally uses his expertice to train all the fish to accept prepared foods before he will offer them for sale. Thats not protocol. Its just what AJ believes in. What a great guy. The same goes for all the fish sold by Quality Marine. As long as AJ is working there I believe you can get your very own trained Orange Spotted Filefish if you find a store that gets them from Quality marine.

 

Not an advertisement for this company. They mostly seemed to have no clue they were doing anything special ahaha. But if youre going to get one of these fish definitely get one from that place.

[BlennyBoi]

wow! ive never heard anything like this before! good luck with them!