Purple firefish in the return chamber of my AIO... How in the heck do I catch him.

[Townes_Van_Camp]

About 2.5 months ago my purple firefish vanished during a 3 day dino blackout. There wasn't a trace of him, zero clues. I assumed one of my dogs ate him off of the floor. I filled his space in my tank with a McCoskers Wrasse.

Last night while doing some equipment cleaning, I glanced in the read chamber and saw a purple flash. I started pulling equipment and sure enough, he's not only alive, he's healthy.

Two part question.
In a 25 gallon IM lagoon.

1 Flame Hawkfish
1 Black and White Ocellaris
1 Chalk Bass
1 McCoskers Wrasse

Do I have space for this guy. It's an active and pretty full little tank. I can't just let him live back there. Too small of a space.

Also, how in the heck do you catch a dart fish in the back of an AIO?

 

[KrisReef]

Shut the circulation pump off and use a 1” flex hose to siphon it out into a bucket.
Otherwise leave it where it is since it is healthy?

 

[saltnut]

Fire-fish are pretty timid. You are the only one who knows the other fish and how aggressive the other fish are. If it was my tank. I would re-scape the tank, at least make a new cave or add barnacle cluster. The new fish has to have a couple places with some coverage.

 

[Townes_Van_Camp]

Fire-fish are pretty timid. You are the only one who knows the other fish and how aggressive the other fish are. If it was my tank. I would re-scape the tank, at least make a new cave or add barnacle cluster. The new fish has to have a couple places with some coverage.

Plenty of caves and hiding spaces. It had a really nice cave before it made it's move to the back.

As @KrisReef says, it's an extremely timid fish. But was coming out and getting into the water column more than at just feeding time. I love the 1" syphon idea. Syphon his tail straight in to an acclimation box..

If I can catch it, I may try it in an acclimation box for a while. Then let it loose the heathens. My heathens are relatively peaceful, the clown maybe not so much. But she's being nice at the moment.

Resurrected firefish isn't a problem that I ever figured I'd have to face lol.

 

[Townes_Van_Camp]

I decided to net him. I pulled all of the equipment from the back
I turned this net:

Into this net:

With everything out of the way he swam right up to the top. On my first try I got him. Once he was startled he had nowhere to go but my net.

Here he is now:

Gonna keep him in the box for a few days/a week, unless he's thrashing about. But if he gets comfortable in a week I'll try him out with the crew. I run a oversized skimmer and a drop in algae scrubber so I'm pretty sure I can handle the load.