Strange behavior from Mandarin Dragonet

[Enad]

Hi everyone,

I've had a pair of Mandarin Dragonets for about 2 years now and they've always been perfect little citizens in the tank, friends with everyone, never been bothered by anything, even super friendly with me, letting me hold them briefly when I'm cleaning the tank.

Over the last few weeks, I've noticed a few odd behaviors from my female mandarin - she has been spending almost all her time at the very top of the tank in a particularly high piece of rock where my SPS corals live. She will also race across the surface of the water, splashing and acting as if she wants to jump out.


She still does move around the tank a bit but she's spending far more time in the rocks at the top of the tank than she does exploring the rest of the tank. She's still eating normally as far as I can tell. I see her go after frozen food, live blackworms etc when I'm feeding the tank.


Her male counterpart is acting normal, he scoots around the whole tank doing his thing. They've been doing their mating dance a lot recently and I actually saw her release some eggs a few weeks ago, shortly before this behavior started. Not sure if there could be some correlation there?

I'm just a bit concerned about her behavior, so I wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts here?

 

[Enad]

Bumping this.

 

[Enad]

No replies but I figured I'll keep this updated in case anyone needs to reference it in the future.

Ended up moving her into an established 1 Gallon Small in One tank that's been loaded with copepods for months. She seems much more at peace and spent much of her time scooting around eating pods, and I tossed in some live black worms for her which she happily ate.

While I know this is very small for her, it's the best option I had and she has been pretty low energy lately anyway so I figured this would give her a small, peaceful space and guarantee she gets ample food.

I'll keep her in here for a while and monitor her progress.