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I am always attracted to highly predatory fishes since many seem very intelligent. I currently have 2 leaf fish and 2 anglerfish and in the past have kept several species of lionfish. The owner of my LFS also has a soft spot for these kinds of fishes and usually has several of them when I visit. He has Rhinopias several times each year. About a month ago he received this specimen, which is about 5 inches in total length. Usually he sells Rhinopias within a few days but for some reason (price was excellent, several hundred dollars less than I have seen on any online vendor's site) this one has stayed, "walking" back and forth at the front of the tank displaying. I finally succumbed and bought it yesterday. It had been trained to each frozen krill and silversides. I could not resist this specimen due to its coloration. The orange/red is very striking, looking fluorescent. I have placed Jimmy (Durante) - since Rhinopias translates as "appearance of nose" - into a thirty year old 29 gallon Marineland tank that I keep set up as a quarantine/hospital tank. How can one resist that face! Certainly the resemblance to the much more common lionfishes is unmistakable. Please pardon the quality of the images. They were hastily shot under 6500k LED lighting with no filters. I need to figure out how to get around the apparent "fluorescence" in the coloration when making images (and clean the glass and tank more thoroughly). Now that the tank has a permanent resident, I will expand this as Jimmy's tank journal. I am thinking about decoration. Most times Rhinopias are observed by "muck divers" wandering across muddy bottoms covered with exuberant fluffy algae and other crud (branches, bottles, apparent plastic debris and metal scrap). In watching a number of YouTube videos produced by divers, there are few corals visible. In one video the Rhinopias was traveling through mud with lots of fluffy algae and many large Goniopora colonies. My first thought is not to use a mud bottom but perhaps a thin layer of dark-colored gravel. Rather than allowing algae overgrowths, I am considering macroalgae as surrogates and have ordered some red and green species to try out (hopefully they will make it here alive given the cold weather right now). There will undoubtedly be a few pieces of some kind of corals down the road as well but this will be a fish-oriented tank. Based on what I have seen in videos of these creatures in aquaria, it should be possible to house another specimen in this tank if filtration is kept robust, or to add a large angler or other species of scorpionfish since like Jimmy they don't move around much. If I want to add a lionfish I will have to provide a larger thank than this since even dwarf lionfishes attain good size and with their large finnage they need considerable space.
