Many of the most beautiful fish available to home aquarists have question marks, especially the rarer ones. Maybe they're very hard to collect or come from prohibitive depths and thus super expensive. Maybe they're an “experts only” level of difficulty. Once in a great while a rare fish comes a long that is take-your-breath-away gorgeous, and yet easy to keep and achievable price wise.
Today is your lucky day, because we're going to highlight just such a find, and that fish is Cypho purpurascens. It's more commonly called the Oblique Dottyback, or the Oblique Lined Dottyback in North America, though our friends down under sometimes call it the Lavender Dottyback. If you look up the word Oblique in Webster's Dictionary it says: something having a slanting direction or position, neither perpendicular nor parallel to a line or surface. There is definitely nothing about this fish that is square or parallel, but there's also not much that is a line.
Cypho purpurascens are as easy to feed as any wild caught fish could be (though they are sometimes aquacultured too). In the wild, these opportunists will grab any morsel that floats past of edible size and feeding them in an aquarium is about the same. The only hiccup you might encounter (if it can even be called that) is getting them to recognize you as a feeder and not a threat, which they work out fairly quickly. In house we feed them a mix of meaty food from Gamma that changes every day; on any given day it might contain three to five different products like Mysis, Rotifers, any of the Brine Plus products, Chopped Mussel, Chopped Prawn, Bloodworms, Mosquito Larvae, you get the picture. Your home diet should feature as many foods as you can, but it doesn't need to be as varied as ours on a meal-by-meal basis. We feed twice a day, and at least one of those meals will also feature a healthy dose of Nutramar Complete in either the Pellets, the Crumbles or the Shots, which is loaded with protein and has excellent mineral / nutritional value. Click here to learn more
Today is your lucky day, because we're going to highlight just such a find, and that fish is Cypho purpurascens. It's more commonly called the Oblique Dottyback, or the Oblique Lined Dottyback in North America, though our friends down under sometimes call it the Lavender Dottyback. If you look up the word Oblique in Webster's Dictionary it says: something having a slanting direction or position, neither perpendicular nor parallel to a line or surface. There is definitely nothing about this fish that is square or parallel, but there's also not much that is a line.
Cypho purpurascens are as easy to feed as any wild caught fish could be (though they are sometimes aquacultured too). In the wild, these opportunists will grab any morsel that floats past of edible size and feeding them in an aquarium is about the same. The only hiccup you might encounter (if it can even be called that) is getting them to recognize you as a feeder and not a threat, which they work out fairly quickly. In house we feed them a mix of meaty food from Gamma that changes every day; on any given day it might contain three to five different products like Mysis, Rotifers, any of the Brine Plus products, Chopped Mussel, Chopped Prawn, Bloodworms, Mosquito Larvae, you get the picture. Your home diet should feature as many foods as you can, but it doesn't need to be as varied as ours on a meal-by-meal basis. We feed twice a day, and at least one of those meals will also feature a healthy dose of Nutramar Complete in either the Pellets, the Crumbles or the Shots, which is loaded with protein and has excellent mineral / nutritional value. Click here to learn more
