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A Pain in the Wrasse
Her name was Sister Mary Benigna and I was in first grade. She called me Sarah Berhardt (after the actress, not the comedienne). Not knowing any better, I thought it was nice that she had a pet name for me. Little did I know, that at age 6, I was already marked as a ‘Drama Queen’. At least I can laugh about it now...well, when I’m not caught up in some drama that is…
So yesterday I went to a local fish store, okay it was in Jersey, but I like the place and wanted to pick up some cleaner shrimp. While looking around the store I came across the prettiest fish I’d ever seen…a Coris gaimard. Sleek fish with lightning bolts of green on his face, and a royal blue body covered with iridescent light blue dots that were electrifying. His fins were an orange-ish pink with dark blue spots and trimmed in the same iridescent blue as hit dots. I had to have him.
When I got him home I acclimated him to my water and grabbed my camera in hopes of getting a picture or two to show my reefing friends before he dove into the sand-bed as many wrasses usually do. Into the tank he went but instead of hiding he stayed out and swam around! Great I thought, I’ll feed the tank and distract the other fish. He chowed down with his new buddies and seemed the perfect reef citizen even though the book said he might be prone to rearranging my aquascaping. Out came the camera and 765 pictures later I had a few I was willing to post on my favorite fish forum. The pictures drew lots of ohh’s and ahh’s and a word of caution from Randy, one of our local wrasse experts, about their tendency to move rocks and things in the tank that aren’t glued down. No problem Randy, this guy is very laid back and perfect in every way!
The fish has been named.
Peter.
Not your normal Peter.
More like Betty Davis would say it…like this…PITA
As in,,.Pain in the a$$
About the only thing that has stopped me from stomping on him until I can see through him is that he is soooo pretty. (Did I really just say that?)
He created a ‘gang’. He is the leader. The other members include my Dusky Wrasse and Yellow Coris. Pita, umm, I mean Peter… woke up about 11ish today and immediately started turning over my Aussie acan frags…and then he moved onto turning over some zoas frags that I still had on the sand-bed. His next attack was on my watermelon chalice frag. This did not go over well with me.
I grabbed my handy acrylic stick…the ‘magic wand’ (that’s another story), and pushed the acans and zoas a little deeper into the sand bed, fixed my watermelon chalice and scolded the fish. (Not effective but I felt better.) Sat back down at my desk to do some work and resigned myself to having to do some gluing in the afternoon. Not two minutes later he was at it again flipping over the acans and now the Dusky wrasse had joined in the fun! Out came the magic wand and another warning to P-e-t-e-r… Again I tried to work but each time I sat down, he would find something else to turn over, so I fed the fish hoping that if he was full he might be content to just sail around the tank for a while. Peace lasted all of 10 minutes and now he’d enlisted the Yellow Coris in the gang! Clearly Peter was the ringleader as he’d choose the target, flip it over and grab anything he found there and then move onto the next victim. The Dusky echoed every move and his M.O. was rolling the frag. The Yellow Coris just added insult to injury by pecking at the bottom of the rock and smashing the frag facedown into the sand.
By this point, I was tapping on the glass to get them to stop and that worked for about ten seconds. Again I whipped out the magic wand and after up righting the frags decided I had no choice but to glue down everything immediately.
Three entire tubes of glue later and my frags were safe. The ‘Fins’ gang had lost! Peter and his gang swam around and checked out each piece they’d had fun with earlier and finding that they weren’t movable anymore he began to use his snout to push the sand from around my base rocks. This guy was determined but I knew my rock goes all the way to the bottom of the tank and he’d have to move three inches of sand to get down there. Maybe I’ll try and weigh down a ping-pong ball so he has something to search under that won’t do any damage. I just might end up the winner here…if nothing else my sand bed doesn’t look like a frag junkyard anymore!
But I’m not changing his name…
photo by KathyC |
