Elliot Shares Why These 15 Saltwater Fish Are Expert Only... Or Not!

All right Elliot from Marine Collectors with us this time we've got the top eight difficult fish that are actually easy to keep which I would actually say normally labeled expert only but if only you knew a couple of things about it expert just goes in the trash but there's also seven that are really justified in having that expert only and you should reconsider or at least go into it eyes wide open. Starting with number one of actually easy to keep that are called expert only uh and I can't believe it we're gonna say blasphemy on every one of these and we're everybody's gonna chastise us but we're gonna do it anyway. Number one Moorish Idol. Yeah I mean I think the uh the proof is in the pudding the one that you've got doing great it's doubled in size and uh what have you been doing anything special? Not really. I just fed it the fiber uh that you told me to feed it. Fantastic. Uh and so like when he said I was going to send you I'm going to send you a couple of cool fish yeah I'm not going to tell you what they are I went to the airport I picked them up opened the box and I said F you Elliot uh I'm like oh my god no publicly I'm gonna kill this fish right uh and then I called him like why you send me this thing man he's like dude only thing that goes into a Moorish Idol is finding a healthy one getting it from a good source and then feeding it a high fibrous diet. Yep. I did those things man there's no difference between that fish and any other fish in the whole tank the only thing that's different is I put those algae pellets on an auto feeder and it feeds it like by the hour a little teeny bit all the time and then they just like to throw some into uh this tank is double of this animals doubled in size very very healthy so why is it people think that Moorish Idols are typically hard? Uh I mean I think most of it has to do with the way that they're handled a lot of times they won't eat but if you get them eating then usually the next concern is okay long term why is that fish not doing well and some people say it's stress some people say it's because they don't have enough sponge personally I think it's because they get constipated and they end up getting blockages that stop their organs which is hence why we do the fiber because it'll help push everything through and keep everything moving. Fiber is like more important than it is like a human being here in this case because this is an animal that like only eats fibrous material it's dependent on this in its biology it's different than just like a benefit man it's required. Yeah but I mean other than that that's really it's just get a good one that's came in good condition get it eating once it's eating feed it the right food easy done. You just used the word that I wanted to use actually which is in a different episode of this you used the word conditioned and so conditioned meaning this animal is conditioned to tank life yep right okay that means that it's used to living in a tank it's used to artificial foods it's surviving and we've that means that coming out of the marine collectors facility that the marine or the moorish idol is eating it's healthy it's been living in a tank environment for at least a few weeks and it's ready for your house I've got an animal that is conditioned into tank environment and now I also know what to feed it to keep it alive to match its normal diet and then bam and lo and behold I'm successful whereas everybody else is like no this is one of those fish you should never get because they only die well this is just not true right and so like I again people I can feel like the the hatred coming through the camera already like why are you telling people to go get this expert only fish and I'm telling you all you got to do is get it from somebody that you trust it will get it conditioned to tank life and then feed it algae and you're probably not going to have a problem yeah I mean is that really as simple as that yeah and then I think the one that's in your office is kind of uh proof enough well we're going to keep keep going down that alley okay another one here is uh eight difficult fish uh that are actually easy to keep and one of them is called the regal angel fish which is one of the coolest fish you could put in there sometimes reef uh uh safe sometimes a little edgy uh but always looks really cool but us consider it like being one of the challenging fish to make sure that they thrive in the tank yeah uh I mean now that they're available captive bred like you've got a captive bred one in your tank uh the difficulty is kind of removed but if you're going to go with a wild one it's not impossible to keep it just needs to come in a good condition most of these fish that are difficult to keep it's because of how they're handled you know and the uh steps along the way to actually get to you I don't think it's necessarily because the fish themselves can't adjust to captivity um like regal angels we've developed a pretty strict protocol that we always follow um you know we do still lose a couple here and there but it's not like every single one's doomed uh you know getting them eating sometimes still take immediately to prepared food sometimes they take a little coaxing um but honestly it just comes down to the collection uh I just heard conditioned again uh uh uh and so like it's a really interesting thing but also in there I didn't really expect this because in the 160 we actually have a wild uh caught regal angel has been doing really cool yeah he's been here for about three years now okay and then I have this uh captive bred regal angel in the 360 that was probably the size of my thumbnail when I got it yep okay and I mean it was tiny tiny tiny uh and now he's doing really fun and so the captive bred like don't really have the same problem transitioning to tank life because they've been conditioned to tank life from the beginning so actually really cool uh fact about the captive bred ones they're actually seventh generation captive bred no really so that means that so they come from bali aqua rich but they bred wild ones and raised babies bred those again seven times down the line these are now the seventh generation that are we're finally seeing on the market okay I think of that like all the or a corals which are like bulletproof if you kill the or a coral man shame on you uh we couldn't kill those things if you wanted to uh because those things have lived in captivity for so many generations man they have adjusted to whatever garbage every throw at them yeah yeah and so I like it just super robust coral I didn't really think about the regal angel fish is the same thing so some of it about getting a wild one conditioned but also you can just buy them now that were born conditioned to this for seven generations there's your go that's the way you go yep okay this one I don't know a lot about actually which is a difficult fish that's easy to keep number three leopard wrasse yeah what makes this a challenge uh most of the time they don't want to eat prepared foods um but I actually find that they will it's just more a matter of you need to get the fish in good condition um actually sorry there's a lot of things that go into leopard wrasse one they have a really really strong internal clock so wherever they were collected that's when they wake up is on that time schedule and it takes a really long time for them to adjust to stateside we're never in a million years like even thought the other thing though is that they also have really sensitive gills and they don't tolerate ammonia and medication very well and a lot of times if you have like for those of you don't know when you get a fish from overseas a lot of times those fish will be in the bags for 36 hours two days etc and a lot of times the ph will go down then it'll come back up they don't like a lot of parameter swings whether bpa salinity ammonia medications whatever it is so typically what we'll do is we'll bring them in uh we'll get them acclimated uh we'll sit in methylene blue for two days and then we'll slowly ramp them up with copper like over a week the more like more a lot much longer process yeah but the thing is that uh it's about allowing the fish to recover from shipping before putting them into really harsh medications because if you have a fish that's already has gill problems and then you go to put it into copper that's a gill irritant it's like well of course the fish isn't eating you know and if the fish was you know maybe not in the best condition to begin with then yeah you know it's no brainer of course it didn't make it but i mean we've just recently started bringing leopard wrasses in after five years or so and the first batch we did like i mean we got them on frozen pellets and like that's something that most of them don't even take to so i ask a question here is the leopard wrasse then nothing about caring for it afterward and 100 about sourcing it because after if it if it's eating and stuff and you get it it's no problem yeah it should be fine because that's kind of like the cleaner wrasse uh if it's eating it'll probably be fine yeah cleaner wrasse need to be fed a lot though we'll get to that in just a second uh okay i'm gonna i'm gonna be real frank with you like uh i didn't see this coming but this is sounding like 100 a commercial for marine collectors uh because yeah i know i know you don't want that uh but i'm just saying is like it like sounds like it is uh about less about like what you do in many of these cases and about getting a healthy one to begin with and making sure that the person that is going to get it for you knows what they're doing what to look for and it's not just like this commercial operations it's just like pushing eight million fish through as fast as humanly possible and treating them all the same it's no this one has a unique you know need yeah that we need to address um yeah so with those uh purple queen anthias oh that's uh number four number four as anthias queens and ventralis etc uh it's it's more about not understanding the fish and i think that it's that way with most difficult to keep fish um one of my friends uh dave palmer he's been around for like the past 30 years in the industry he's like oh elliot i just uh came across this video uh matt wandell's giving a talk at like a local reef club or something and it's like on how to keep difficult fish and i watched it and i was like oh my god he and i think the same way and he was going on to say that the uh purple queen anthias is specifically designed to eat really micro particulate food it's not that they won't eat food it's just that they don't see it because that's not what their eyes are designed to see i've never thought about it that way yeah if they're gonna eat micro particulate food they'd have to be able to they're focusing on super super tiny stuff yeah and he goes on to say like you know you could take purple queens and they'll almost eat right out of the bag but they want to eat like freshly hatched brine shrimp which are you know microscopic but they'll eat it right away and he actually he's got a lot of really good uh we'll put the link in the description but we'll um he's got a lot of really good tips and a lot of them that i've been using for years like oh hey that's exactly what we're talking about you know so do you think it needs to be live or can you feed like things like planus and stuff that's so really tiny i think it's a weaning process uh like maybe you start them on live brine get them eating get them aggressively feeding create that feeding response so that they are comfortable in a setting where like okay i know that i'm gonna get food that's gonna be fed to me i'm gonna eat that and then wean them onto something that's dead then wean them onto something that's a little bit bigger a little bit bigger and then you know it might take two months but then you have them on like pe mice or something that's larger oh wow i wouldn't have thought you could even get there okay so this is the piece that like when we say all the time man expert only and we say i don't know the evil in the tank just killed it or whatever goofy thing you know like it just isn't true it's you've got this animal that's like designed to eat these tiny little organisms and from a previous episode we talked about how when they're collected a lot of these fish actually sit for a week without being fed so they can clear their digestive tract so they don't pollute the water and transport okay well now i've got this fish that is used to eating these tiny little microscopic particles all day long right and now i mean constant because it's high energy fish and now i've starved it for a week with many fish that probably wouldn't have mattered this this one it probably won't matter right there but if it starts compounding with longer and longer transport times man the you know results go down and now this is why this is probably an expert only fish but if you're willing to you know do some hatch some brine shrimp and feed the brine shrimp to it and then transition into things like colanus well you know like this isn't that hard and you might say well i don't want to do brine shrimp well that's the reason why this is a hobby yeah is because we're constantly perfecting it we're constantly finding out where we made the mistakes of the past and then we're trying to do it better man yeah because that animal doesn't just die so actually what's the difference you think between then the queen anthias and the ventralis because we were talking about putting some ventralis in my tank yeah i mean ventralis they're just a really small anthias you know they're really delicate they don't like to be touched like you should really be using a cup to move them as opposed to nets they do take to prepare foods a little bit easier than purple queens though like you can get them on brine shrimp almost right away but most of the time they don't like to eat large like pe mysis sized particulate foods right away it just takes a little bit of time to wean them onto that but what's the purpose of weaning them onto mysis when like there's foods like colanus or fish eggs i think it's probably a convenience thing just just because that's what you're feeding the rest of the stuff well because i mean if you think about it you got to feed so much more of small stuff and like it's probably not all going to go to the fish that you want it to feed um the other thing with like ventralis is that they also like cooler water warmer water metabolism speeds up probably lose body weight a lot quicker yeah interesting okay uh next one uh difficult fish that are actually easy to keep i can't wait to hear how you explain this for me number five is powder tanks powder blues powder browns um i personally think they're incredibly easy to keep fish um with the caveat of if you don't have pathogens in the tank they're as easy to keep as a yellow tang or a purple tang you know it's uh it's not a sensitive fish you know they can handle a myriad of uh water parameters it's not uh you know like it's oh you know it's got to have this type of food it's got to have this type of flow you know it needs this type of habitat no they're pretty robust you know it's just a parasite aspect yeah right okay so this is interesting because the uh 900 behind us has a powder blue in it right and 100 that tank has there's there's no debate about it we've seen it on there man there's no question yeah okay uh but what like eight months now that's been in there but and you don't see any on it you were looking at it today trying to poke your finger in my eye uh and uh one of the things though man is we have this 80 watt high output uv you know plumbed into it to keep the parasite load down yeah i'm not gonna tell you that like i can guarantee 100 the reason for that but uh not many people not many people will tell you that you can have a powder blue that has very obvious signs of ick on it and then it just miraculously goes away and never comes back again it usually goes back i think there's also something to be said about starting with a tank that even if it does have it it doesn't have a really high population density you know like if you obviously have an outbreak already occurring and fish are like constantly getting more and more spots don't put that fish in there well very frequently the powder blue and powder brown will serve as like patient zero oh yeah like it it won't just be that like it could get it it will be the one that gets it and reads it and then there's so many of them that it overwhelms the rest of the fish as well it just needs a patient to be the host that it takes off on uh so i can't tell you we see it just i i will never set up another tank that doesn't have a properly sized uv on this because i i'm not willing to quarantine every last coral that goes in there no i know that that tank has ick in it and i know that i don't see it it doesn't matter yep there you go okay uh another one man top eight or top most difficult fish they're actually easy to keep this one's near and dear to my heart man mandarins people say those are hard yeah they're probably the easiest fish to keep alive you know put it in there never think about feeding it ever again caveat that you have a good pod population and that you have a really healthy established system other than that that fish doesn't need anything else that is the thing like i get this is this reminds me of the like the clown harem thing where it's like you told me i couldn't do it it's impossible you can't be doing like no you just need to like i didn't need to go do these eight steps and i did these eight steps it works just fine and we did it for five years man so like i don't know proof's in the pudding and this one the one step i'd say is yeah wait 18 months then put in done man done it's not an expert only fish it's it's a put it in after 18 months fish yeah yeah it's cool because uh like mandarin gobies have poisonous skin like create a poisonous slime coat and they like are actually very resistant to parasites too like it's not a difficult fish to keep that the common joke that we say all the time is if you stop feeding it today uh if we came back 18 months from now it'd be the only fish that's like actually doubled in size and alive uh because they will feed it like this is the easiest fish in the whole thing man how dare you say it's expert only yeah it's put it in day one uh okay uh this one is interesting too because i've had a couple of different results of this one eight difficult fish they're easy to keep uh uh or well expert only fish tile fish are presented as expert only but easy to keep what what makes a tile fish hard i think it's just that most tanks aren't suited for those fish okay tile fish are usually in like deeper water it's not in bright light it's not with a lot of flow uh usually they're in an area where they can make a burrow um like do you think about like how a jawfish will make a burrow it's very similar or they'll like make a little rubble mound uh that they dart in and out of but it's not this like super bright turbulent environment like most reef tanks are i watch mine they spend a lot of time on the top uh but then you watch them dart and they shoot their little heads into the sand they bury themselves in like an instant it's really cool uh but yeah like they spend a lot of time serving and one of the interesting things is uh we had a couple in here the purple ones which are super cool yeah uh they are known jumpers and literally one day we left one corner off then a jump uh go figure uh but i have a couple of a rainy tile fish that you sent me and you say those are different and i will tell you i haven't seen them jump once yeah uh something about purple tiles they're so skittish and they jump so much but the iranians are so calm and they don't they're not skittish they don't jump that much uh it's like one of those incredibly rare combinations of like rare fish really pretty and also really easy to keep yeah i would say they're not cheap man but the arena ones are cool the purple ones i actually think visually are probably cooler but yeah you better care for that uh that screen yeah that lid dimmer tank you know lots of open space lots of sand lots of rubble yeah probably better for an lps tank than an sps tank for that reason uh okay uh another one man uh difficult fish they're actually easy to keep is sand sifting gobies this kind of fits the mandarin thing for me yeah your uh your twin spots too will fit into that kinda yep um i don't know it's just most of the it's um it's one of those things where it's like the fish that you're keeping is not being cared for not having its needs met right that's a fish that eats food off the bottom in the sand it's sifting the sand to find food but when you think about when you put food in the tank it just drops in goes everywhere in the water column all the fish that are swimming up top get it and nothing gets to the bottom you know um if you have a really really established sand bed large tank it's probably fine just living off just the sand what grows in the sand so you're thinking like sinking pellets and stuff like that doesn't those look real valuable okay i mean turkey baster with mices into the sand right in front of their burrow either ride it up okay so when i was feeding the the the twin spots it was like that it was like i would mix up like uh colanus and like a doc's fish eggs and stuff like that just stuff that would normally settle out and then you're just kind of spraying it just a little bit underneath the sand and before you know it they would actually come up and they would eat it right out of the turkey baster yeah right and it would fall around it's really fun uh but you know another one that i saw like when we had the diamondback gobies in the uh tank with the clown harem tank okay so part of keeping all those clowns happy was we fed the hell out of that tank right so it did really well yeah it did really well because there was probably massive amounts of turds and stuff you know going down there and you like hate to say it but like the ocean like recycles everything so everything eats something so i don't really want to call it a turd eater but i'm gonna call it that anyway uh the reality is is like most of these things like digestive tracts are really poor so they're pulling out like 30 percent of the energy and nitrogen and phosphorus and stuff out of this and the rest just goes undigested so that something else can digest it ends up settling out in the sand they sift all that energy and amino acids and proteins and ---- out of the sand uh and like there you go they you know feed themselves out of that as well i don't swear on camera very often but i just let one go i don't know if you caught uh there you go blooper uh all right so uh now we're going to get to the difficult fish that are actually difficult uh every one of these can still be done but i mean you should really think about this for a little bit one of which is the copper band i think earns the expert only uh yeah uh i think this one's just because it's a combination of the way it's handled the way it's collected uh where they come from how they're packed and coupled with the fact that it's a very selective eater and that it wants to sit there stare at something on a substrate not out of the water column look at it okay maybe decide to eat it when you know it's not a competitive fish naturally um obviously if it's by itself and you're conditioning the fish and you're making sure that's adjusting the captive life you know you can get it to be there but it's not something that just like comes out of the box like that so my experience doesn't like super high flow so sbs tank probably a bad choice yeah and there's always caveats to all this stuff but like this is one of those fish where if you're hoping for caveat like you're willing to probably kill you know 30 of these to find the one yeah okay so high flow would you agree don't like that yeah yep so we're going to chase food that's the thing they want to like uh you know see something on the floor go over look at it look at it for a second before they actually take a bite they're really thinking about this okay also a terrible option if you have a high bio load meaning a lot of other fish they get really spooked and they will just forgive about the food and let everything else eat and forget about it yeah uh and so if i were going to do this i'd probably have a low flow be like a 120 that had like three fish in it and one of them is this okay well then man i think that you could actually do this that just that combination of stuff i just gave you isn't really all that many people yeah you know who wants really only three fish there's more people just raise their hand and then there was 96 and said no you know so uh i will tell you though like one my buddy had an sbs tank and he had success with his copper man for a pretty long time and one of them is he did that little feeding apparatus i'm talking about he had like a little disc and he made out of acrylic and then he drilled holes in the top of it were which were enough for a snout to go through but not enough for any other fish to go through and when he dropped the puck in originally the other fish would come around and try to pester it but then they figured out they couldn't actually get any food out of this thing yeah and then he would stick a snout in there grab the food like you're saying just kind of like look at it for a while decide maybe this is good maybe it's not and then puck one out yep okay uh you also had to round the edges man so you don't mess up this snout so it's an apparatus this is one of those things like the 3d printers of the world and the uh uh like a you know cnc at home kind of guys you could make a cool product out of this so if somebody's listening go make this thing the copper man feeder uh it would be really cool uh the next one on here we just talked about sand sifting gobies being a couple that you know are actually easy to keep if you just have enough nutrients in the sand yeah or you go out of way to feed them but twin spot gobies i feel like step outside that or even more of a challenge in your typical sand sifter yeah uh well i do think that there's probably a way to circumvent it it's probably along the lines of putting that fish directly into the tank from as close to the source as possible uh i'm skinny a lot yeah they do not like medications at all we actually used to have them on the website and like a year ago we took them off just because we were killing so many of them and they just weren't handling the medications um you know and that's just now the fish that we just don't sell you know yeah i've asked you we talked about this yeah uh the one of the things that i found that made it even more challenging so a like it's a tough eater you know you're definitely gonna have to hand feed it or have a really established sand bed you're also gonna have to have the right size you know grains for it like you know we were looking at pictures of it and like it looks like comes from like most of them were taken where it's kind of like a really fine sand maybe even silty yeah right and it's sifting through that stuff kind of murky water okay that was a good tip when you told me to do that you could if you're interested in where your fish live and what they eat what they look like google the fish and look for all the things that it's doing naturally hopefully on youtube but also just even the pictures you can kind of see where it's you know living and what it's doing uh but on top of that man these guys are really skittish and so if you guys have been following i finally lost those things when we added a six-line wrasse to eat the aquarium flatworms and the wrasse six-line wrasse is this big decided to kill him you know that's a bummer i know just harassed him to death inside of just a couple days like you know it's funny because he didn't even like even eat them you know it's just it's just pestering literally to death i don't like you in my territory like i'm trying to imagine like how somebody could be so annoying to me that you die but that's how bad the six lines okay another one man is difficult that is legitimately difficult is chromis as much as i love them yeah so chromis uh they are the number one carrier for urinema uh sometimes it's called green chromis disease but basically it looks like red sores on the body of the fish uh let's just put it this way i think that 99.999 percent of green chromis are carrying urinema and i think it's a hundred percent due to how they're handled you know they sometimes come like a hundred per box uh i mean we're talking you know bags with fish this big the size of a golf ball the reason for that is because it costs three bucks yeah you know they have to put them in there otherwise it would never be profitable i mean the box itself will be like 120 dollars that means that the fish are landing you know and then to be able to sell them at a cheap price they have to be packed really tight um but uh not only that if you have a big school of green chromis eventually they'll start picking each other off like you could start with 10 you might end up with two after like a year you know i think that is again habitat and probably diet and stuff because uh fat people with lots of homes tend to be pretty happy you know take one you know like if you're not really worried about where my food or shelter is gonna come from i tend to be a little less aggressive but if it's limited supply uh different i can't say that's for sure with all of these things but uh the chromis though hard to get through quarantine hard to really get for sure you're rid of urinema uh very very very cool fish but man should you quarantine the hell out of these things yeah i mean it's uh like i get requests for them at marine collectors all the time and i tell people i don't want to do them just because i don't want to put those fish in our systems uh it's like just putting a really high density uh infection rate into you know systems that we're trying to keep clean um and for us it's just not worth it but if you're going to do it um hydrogen peroxide is probably going to be the safer route we use formalin at the marine collectors facility and then chloroquine phosphate for quarantine instead of copper it's probably going to be the best route to go if you're going to do green chromis okay uh this one's interesting uh the next one here hard fish that are really actually are hard because you just told me you had really good luck with one it's the cleaner wrasse yeah so cleaner wrasse i think are uh fish that should be left in the ocean um it eats parasites for a living right yeah with the exception of like the blue street cleaners that come out of the indo-pacific um we've had really good success getting them to eat uh the only thing is that they need to eat holes like those fish have such high metabolisms i would compare it to like purple queen anthias metabolism in warm water and it's uh you know a fish that it's really cool to watch uh you know them clean other fish and that dynamic and it's awesome but most of them uh like pectoral cleaner wrasses peachy cleaner wrasses um you can't get them anymore but the ones out of hawaii those three almost never do well um bicolor cleaner wrasse occasionally do well but they typically will start removing scales as they grow from fish um but yeah it's uh the majority of them should be okay so the message here and i hate to give it this way but i'm gonna give it this way anyway which is just skip the cleaner wrasse but if you were going to avoid all of our advice and just say screw it i'm gonna do it anyway there is one that is better than the rest it is the indo-pacific one the blue street cleaner um there you go go with that one uh all right number five actually expert only fish it really is expert multi-bar angels yeah so uh that genus of paracentropides just as a whole are difficult um it's the same genus as peppermint angel and venusus i was going to ask that question yeah uh those fish they're just not meant to be in like bright display tanks like if you look at where they're naturally collected they're in dark areas under caves under ledges uh between cracks like they do not like a lot of light and they're super super shy and super cryptic like you know you would expect the normal angelfish you know flame angel bicolor something to come out for food this fish will like run away from food uh because it's like afraid type of thing um i wonder what happens down deep where things uh like are they getting chase cars yeah i mean uh it's really cool though because now there's actually captive bred versions of them um oh do they do better oh really uh the behavior of being shy though is still there unfortunately but they do eat prepared foods which is also an issue with that fish so look for the multibar captive or captive bred multibar angels if you're going to go after that what was the genus again uh paracentropides okay so look for that uh the tail end of the scientific name of all these uh first part the first part yeah second part will be the species name my friend my bad reverse uh okay but like a lot of these are really shy so if you really wanted to do that like the reason this is expert only is because you're going to have a fairly big tank that is fairly dark and really doesn't have any other fish in it so that it feels safe yeah so if i was going to do them i would look for the ones that come out of marshall islands they typically adjust better to captivity they're also usually collected more uh ethically we'll say they are identifiable by a yellow line on the white bands on the body other than that i would do them like either observational quarantine or do tank transfer and i'm even hesitant to recommend that just because they won't eat during that entire period and then into a tank by itself no other fish no competition where you can just target feed a couple mice to shrimp a couple brine shrimp a day if it's not eating frozen you might have to do live but yeah you're gonna have to like really baby that fish okay so this gets back to it's not the evil in the tank man it's like this is just a giant pain in the butt to do so you could do this you could have success with it but man would you have to have a love affair with that fish like i need that fish like i would do the work for peppermint angle oh those are beautiful yeah but you know multi-bar is just not as exciting to me so i mean there's things that look pretty damn close to a multi-bar they like aren't as big of pain in the butt like at least close enough uh anyway uh next one uh this one i learned something about today and i didn't know about which is an expert only fish and it really is expert is uh box fish like cowfish and stuff like blue boxes um cubits stuff like that um so first off they're poisonous if they die they can possibly nuke the tank like would you say a soapfish yeah like a soapfish yep um the main difficulty though is that their entire body is rigid and you can't actually see if the fish is skinny or not or if it's getting enough they got like a shell yeah it makes it look dead shape yep and then it's just starving from the inside out yeah and most of them will eat only algaes or corals or you know stuff that's not necessarily uh what we would normally feed them um yeah it's just it's such a difficult fish to keep plus you have all the risk of if it dies and you don't know that it's not doing well because you can't actually see what uh the body of the fish is transforming if it's not getting enough food or if it is you know it's just a high risk fish i also think of like this is a flow issue too this is not a fish that can like swim up current through well like it needs a specific environment you know uh probably not best for everybody uh all right i got one everybody wants one uh i don't know a single person hasn't looked at one of these things and said god i'd like one of those uh and it's obtainable you could get it but you should really think about it it is the achilles tang why is the achilles tang worse than all the other tangs or at least in the top echelon i mean we're talking like virtually zero percent chance of uh parasite immunity um i've personally never seen an achilles that had a confection ever recover um okay wait i want to i want to hit on that sentence you just said sure okay how long you been doing this how many times how many years have you been 18 years or so 18 years and you just said i have never seen a uh ick all right achilles tang with it that recovered meaning even with treatment or you're just talking about on its own on its own like immune response so that thing that we're all kind of hoping for is like uh we'll just clear up never once has he ever seen that happen in 18 years i've heard stories of it happening you know i've had customers saying like oh yeah you know i noticed a few spots of dick on my achilles and then you know we've had a bunch of uh you know garlic and seaweed and i increased the flow and i put a uv and now it's fine i'm like really i've never heard of that happening once ever yeah but i heard it happen again i'm like i want to think it wasn't to begin with like it's just uh i've yeah i mean i've probably had you know probably over 100 achilles uh personally over the years you know get them small you grow them out you rotate them there was a time when i had a tank that was dedicated to just keeping a harem of achilles so that's like my fish uh and why they're the marine collector's logo um but yeah the one they you don't get yeah it's uh it's the fish that got me into quarantine we'll put it that way um but aside from that assuming that you have a perfectly sterile tank no parasites in the tank they are keepable um but they do need a lot more work than those other like powder tanks we'll say you know they need a ton of flow and you might think oh you know i've got three mp60s on a 120 not enough not even close you showed me like a video of this uh in hawaii where you were diving and you could watch the they like those tidal zones like right up against rocks or just like crazy and they're getting thrown all over the place and then i thought about it and like when i'm snorkeling man that is definitely where you see these things they're not like you know out in the rocks down on the ground whatever they tend to be right up like by the rocky shore and stuff or where the break is wherever it's just like getting pounded man uh yeah i mean that footage of the i've got it was like eight foot swell and you would watch the fish and then all of a sudden the wave would come and you'd get pushed you know 30 feet that way and then 30 feet back the other way you know that's just the habitat that they want to be in you know uh it's just uh yeah it needs a ton of flow a lot of exercise it's a really hyper fish okay so one of the things that kind of comes to mind with this fish is this is actually really easy to care for fish if you're going to do a fish only tank because a fish only tank is super easy to quarantine for you'll work with elliot work with whoever you're going to work with to curate the tank you'll make sure all of these things are you know put in there quarantine to begin with biosecurity like really isn't that big a concern in a home environment that just has one tank where everything was quarantined and i'm not dealing with uh like all the corals and all the other you know things that go in the tank and now in a reef tank uh all i can think of is you better be a gambler you know uh and you know it's so funny man because like you asked me if i wanted that achilles tank i couldn't turn it down man i just couldn't i was like of course i do and then i put it in there i'm like oh my god man those are in there with those yellow anthias and those personatas and like what if this goes wrong uh and i'm like what have i done you know what you're doing just fine and uh i love it so i don't know i'm a gambler eight months eight months later it's still in perfect uh perfect shape i guess you know it's a controlled gamble too you know you put the uv on you feed right you do all the other things i got a million pumps on this tank coming from all over the place you know i i do the best i can i'm probably not blowing around like eight foot twelves you i'm doing the best i can uh if you think about it all those things like you just do what you can but in general there's a reason why this thing has the moniker on of it expert only all right so uh if you like all this kind of stuff and you want to learn more about it we have experts and stuff coming all the time that we talk to and you can see the playlist of all them in here and uh elliot will actually be back so subscribe man we're gonna keep covering new topics and we'll see you then