Ornate Wrasse

[justmee]

What's the difficultly level of having one of these fish? I have read that this fish can wipe out your aquariums population of copepods, is this true?

 

[ca1ore]

Are you saving the pods for some purpose?

 

[PDR]

I keep multiple wrasses in my DT (including an ornate wrasse until recently) with a mandarin and they have not decimated my pod population. I have always been told they will, it just has not been my experience. FWIW I don't really recommend the ornate as it is quite aggressive, especially towards other wrasses.

 

[justmee]

Are you saving the pods for some purpose?

Yes, I have a mandarin.

 

[ca1ore]

Leopards are pod hunters, and will eat them; but once you have them well acclimated to frozen foods most seem to get pod ‘lazy’. Generally, unless you have a really huge tank, adding a pod competitor to a mandarin is not a great idea.

 

[justmee]

Leopards are pod hunters, and will eat them; but once you have them well acclimated to frozen foods most seem to get pod ‘lazy’. Generally, unless you have a really huge tank, adding a pod competitor to a mandarin is not a great idea.

Thanks for the info!

 

[jsvand5]

I agree with the above. I have quite a few different types of leopards and I actually rarely see them hunting for pods after the first few months. I just recently upgraded to a 210g but until then I had a Blue Star, Choati, yellow tail tamarin, yellow coris, and an ornate in my 90 gal all for over a year and they all stayed fat. I also had a mandarin in there with them that stayed fat as well. I feed a bunch of PE or Cobalt mysis daily. My only issue was the oranate got aggressive as it aged. I’d go with a blue star if you can find a healthy one.