1. Agree with the puppy comparison. It's cool to have a fish that acts all excited when you enter the room. If you like to watch a hunt and buy live food, it can be very fun.
2. They are very easy to keep, and very peacefull tank mates, if you don't fit into their mouth.
3. Anything I put in the tank for other fish, it ate, including flaked food and pellets. I'd agree that feeding silversides by hand is a lot of fun. They will attack the food, but never bit my fingers.
4. I found some cheap damsels that I would throw in occassionally and watch the hunt. This was the most entertaining. I never fed it anything FW as everything I read, and was told by the place I bought it, that it can make them sick.
5. Mine was the exact same in that, if it thought it would get fed, it woke up. So, if I walked close to the tank, it woke up, just like a dog. Mine would always sleep straight up and down, so even if it was sleeping, it was worth some entertainment laughing at it.
6. It never ate any shrimp, but any fish it could get into its mouth was gone. If it had to hunt a fish for a week, it would without eating anything else.
7. Mine grew very fast. I would say it doubled in size in under a year. It was only about 2.5 inches long when I first got it in a 125 gallon tank.
8. If you have any smaller fish that you like, even if it is especially good at hiding, it will be gone. It was overly friendly when I would put my hand in the tank to fix rocks/clean and would occassionlly brush my arm with its mouth/body. It would also sometimes get mad and stick a brush I cleaned with with its spines. It got to the point where everytime I put my hand in, I had to get someone else to put the brush in and "coral" it to the other side of the tank. Also, the little ones fins and "eyebrows" are very long and beautiful, but the fish were so clumsy, that it would break them occassionally. By the time I got rid of it, its fins were all much shorter, and the beauty of the animal was much less. Also, do some reading on what to do if you get stung. I've heard it can be very nasty as they get larger.
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