Scooter Dragonet Pecking behaviour

[Shilpan Patel]

Hello team!
I just added my first dragonet, a scooter blenny to be exact, along with a bullet goby to my main tank.
In quarantine the dragonet was eating pellets and brine shrimp. While only nibbling and 70% of the time spitting out mysis and carnivore mix. It ate well for the while quarantine (copper tank and in the sterile tank).

Now that it’s in the DT it’s started searching the rocks. It keeps pecking at what appears to be nothing. I mean I have lots of tiny white particles in my tank but I dunno what is a tiny crustacean and what isn’t. Now it’s still eating brine shrimp with gusto (as long as I feed to other fish first and only at evening strangely...), but it’s not very excited about pellets anymore. It’ll eat 4-5 pellets then stop.

My questions are:
1. If a dragonet is pecking does that mean it’s eating something? Or will they peck even if there is no food there?
2. Tips on encouraging it to resume eating other foods again like it was in QT?

Thank guys!

 

[James M]

Eating pods on the rock

 

[eatbreakfast]

It's eating pods, it's preferred food, and quite necessary, since they need to eat almost constantly.

 

[kirstyflash]

I have two black and just got a ruby which is still tiny (less than an inch in length). The red is only eating pods but the two black eat mysis and a spiralina mix and the tiny baby frozen mix I feed to the corals and worms and whatever pods they find in the tank. They swim up to the tip of the pipette and eat out of it no trouble. But no luck on pellets

 

[Shilpan Patel]

Ok thank you guys!
I just can’t really see anything but I suppose it must be just hard to see pods on the rocks and glass. I do have a 2.5 year old 105 gallon with heaps of live rocks and a refugiun full of amphipods. So I assume there must be tiny stuff I can’t see around there. No wrasses.
Also it started eating pellets again, it was watching my sailfin tang eat the pellets and then it seemed to remember haha...

I’m going to try mixing brine shrimp with small amounts of other food next to see if I can trick it to eat other foods.

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

It’ll get used to the foods you feed.
Quite the personality on them. You’ll know what it likes and doesn’t like soon enough.
Sweet easy lil fishies.

 

[Shilpan Patel]

Thank you my plan is if this guy does well for 4 months, I’ll consider getting a mandarin dragonnet. I’ll also see what my pod populations are doing in 4 months time. I have a 105 gallon plus refugium.