Purchasing sand sleepers

[asylumdown]

While it's ridiculous for me to be spending money on new fish given the whole "the house is for sale and the tank is built in to the house" thing, I was in one of Calgary's stores for something not tank related on the weekend and I saw in one of their tanks that they had just about every single 'ZOH MY GOD I HAVE TO HAVE THAT" wrasse from my 'list'. Lions and tigers and bears oh my! While I couldn't swallow spending $400 for a rhomboid wrasse (seriously, $400???), I did manage to justify to myself spending $125 on a blue line wrasse, AKA Richmond's Wrasse, AKA Halichoeres richmondi

It's a full adult male, and according to the guy who helped me, it had been in the store for 2 weeks. As I've talked about in the past, I always do the tank transfer quarantine protocol, and after adding this guy to my QT tank for stage 1 of the transfer process, I noticed that he was behaving really, really dopily. It's usually a bad sign, especially when they sit on the bottom and fall on their sides, then get blown around in the current, only to move a bit, fall over again, and get blown around. He also wouldn't eat.

I was pretty sure he was going to die, so I read some more about them to make sure I was doing it all right, and the first thing that popped out (that I can't believe I had forgotten), was that like all the Halichoeres genus, these guys are sand sleepers! The tank he was in at the store was a bare-bottomed coral tank, and he'd been there for two weeks. I have several bags of unused sand left over, so I put some in a bowl (rinsed extremely well) and put that bowl in one corner of the QT tank for the night. He ignored it completely, as the bowl was tall and when he did swim he was nose down 'searching' the bottom of the glass. The next day (yesterday) he was even worse. Could barely stay upright. So even though it's going to make the most irritating mess when I do the transfer, yesterday morning I dumped out the bowl in the corner, and added a second bowl's worth of sand so that one half of the QT tank has a solid 2 inch layer of sand. He swam over, nosed the sand, and pretty much collapsed on it. I went upstairs to put the bowl in the dishwasher, and when I came back down he was completely buried. He stayed buried all day, was still buried when the lights went out, and when I checked at midnight. I thought he had died, but I could see a little tiny amount of movement in the sand as his gills pumped.

This morning... It was like he was a new fish. He ate an entire cube of mysis shrimp, and is swimming around completely normally, no bumping in to things, no falling over, no getting blown in the current.

Now, I know I shouldn't anthropomorphize, But like every animal, fish have some sort of equivalent of sleep. The ones who never hide in the rocks at night have crazy adaptations to keep the part of their brain that watches for predators and their bodies stabilized 'on' while the rest shuts down, but if you've evolved over millions of years to be buried, completely motionless and at physical rest, with your eyelidless eyes covered with dark sand, chances are good that 'sleep' for you looks a lot like what it does for a human being. Keeping a fish like that in a bare-bottomed tank for any amount of time would be the equivalent of putting a human being in a room too small to sit down in every night. I don't think the guy I brought home had slept in weeks, which is about as close to torture as I think you can get.

Not sure if there's a real point to this post, other than to say I think I'm going to speak up the next time I see a sand sleeper being kept in a bare bottomed tank at a store, and I hope it reminds people to make sure enough for them to bury themselves in is provided during whatever your quarantine process is.

[ScubaSteve]

Yes, I completely agree with you. I actually go one step further and typically suggest that people don't quarantine sand-sleeping wrasses. I know that is playing with fire but they really do need a proper sand bed and they are typically quite sensitive to medications anyways. Oh, and these fish are very sensitive to light cycles and can actually be jet-lagged. A stressed out, sleep deprived, med sensitive fish in QT isn't going to last very long.

The first two times I tried Potter's wrasses I QT'd (with sand) but the smallish tank and sub-optimal sand bed stressed them out. One didn't make it through QT, the other made it to the display but was in bad shape by the time it got there and didn't pull through. The third time, the wrasse was slightly worse for wear from shipping but I said "screw this QT thing" and the fish went into the display right away. For the next two months I was slightly stressed I'd wake up to a velvet outbreak or something nasty, but nothing happened (I learned from a biologist later on that these fish tend to be less prone to external parasites due to sleeping in the sand and a thick mucus coat and suffer more from internal parasites). Buried itself right away and was out the next day looking pretty mellow and picking at the rocks (a good sign). Within a week I had the wrasse go from live brine to cyclopeez and then frozen mysis - a feat I hadn't been able to achieve with the other wrasses which wouldn't eat at all. Had it for over two years before it got chased out of the tank by my coral beauty 3 weeks ago, and he was doing great until then (he was one chubby mofo) - this far exceeds the sub-1 year average you typically hear for these fish.

And I attribute it to having a good start by keeping the fish stress-free by giving it what it needed...

[asylumdown]

I know people often recommend not QTing them, but this guys has been in store water with a bunch of other fish for weeks, so any resistance to disease sand sleeping might have conferred to him normally has been negated in his time in captivity, and I'm sure the advancing exhaustion has made him susceptible to all sorts of things.

The only medication I use during QT is prazi-pro, as thankfully the tank transfer protocol negates the need for harsh copper based medications. I also have been looking for a reason to use the 90 pounds of sand I have left over from when I set up my tank for the past year, so I've got more than enough to give him a full 4 inch sand bed for the next 3 transfers, Throwing out the used sand after each one. Hopefully that keeps the stress to a minimum and allows it to recover from being in the store.

I played with the idea of not QTing this one, but I have paid such a high price for that in the past. On the upside this one is already fully accepting frozen foods, so one vector for failure is already covered.

I would normally keep the fish in QT for a couple of weeks after the tank transfer is finished, but in this case I think I'm going to dose Prazi-pro during the actual transfer (the number of days between doses is conveniently the same number of days between transfers) and send him to the big tank at day 13.

[ScubaSteve]

Ya, totally makes sense. I thought of doing the same (prazi-pro is really the only one you need for this fish) but I decided to roll the dice, it worked out fine... but I was stressing for quite a while :razz:

Sounds like you have a fair sized QT. What do you use?

[asylumdown]

I do the tank transfers with two 15 gallon tanks, each with it's own compliment of equipment. Each one has it's own powerhead, heater, thermometer, cover, PVC hidy holes, and light. They sit next to each other on the counter in my laundry room and share the same timed outlet. They're right next to a big work sink so it's crazy easy to drain, clean, and re-fill them for the transfers, and they're small enough that you can just rinse them out with the hand sprayer from the sink. Cleaning out 4 inches of sand 4 times is going to be a major PITA this time, but it's worth it I think. I don't use nets to catch the fish either, I use a clear tupperware that I drilled a hole bunch of holes in. I read somewhere that it's easier on the tissue in their eyes, and it seems to actually be less stressful for them than being netted. I've done it enough times that I'm actually pretty good at catching them on the first try, from the moment my hand breaches the water to them being in a new but identically decorated tank is never more than 30 seconds. Everyone seems to go back to behaving perfectly normally in an hour or less.

I had the lights left over from a 20 gallon planted tank I tore down years ago, and I think I had both power-heads from tanks gone by (one's a cheapy little koralia, the other is an uber over-kill Vortech MP10 that I can't use in my current tank because the glass is too thick), so I was able to set the whole thing up for around $200 bucks. If you didn't have any old equipment to re-purpose, I think you could probably set something similar up for less than 300 if you really went bare bones on the equipment. They only really need a lamp on a timer so that they get a proper day/night cycle.

Then I have a 40 gallon tank for extended stays in QT, but most of the time it's empty. I used to keep the canister filter cycled by running it in an old salt bucket in my garage that I'd drop a shrimp in to every once in a while.

If I'm not getting any new fish, the whole QT system just gets put away in the garage. The only thing that requires ongoing attention is the canister filter, which I actually had totally broken down a while ago because I haven't gotten new fish in months. Since I'm not going to move this wrasse to the 40 gallon at the end, I didn't set it back up.

[kien]

I am also in total agreement with you Adam. There are fish who need to sleep and fish who do not. As you said, some of these fish have evolved for millions of years and have adapted to sleeping habits. If you're lucky, the sand sleeper will learn and adapt to sleeping somewhere else like in a cave or under a coral. However, there is probably a very good reason why some fish never seem to be able to adjust. If they are a much older fish (adult) they are probably set in their ways (to sleeping in the sand). All of my wrasses sleep in sand despite there being tonnes of nooks and crannies. And I don't even have that much sand. 2" at most. Often times I can see a part of the wrasse exposed in the sand while they are sleeping.