Help Blue stripe pipefish

[oceanrider]

Originally Posted by fishoholic

Great to know, I've only had mine for a day and I haven't seen him eat yet, what does yours eat?

I had two Doryhamphus ( blue striped ) pipefishes in my 50 gallon mature reef tank.

I fed them initially with some juvenile (larger than baby) brine shrimp, which they took. But one of the pipefishes was really picking on the other smaller one, so much that later on it died and disappeared.

The remaining one lived well in the tank. HE would scrounge around, looking for small crustaceans, even though I did NOT have that much newer live rock and no noticeable copepod population. The reef tank had numerous mushrooms , soft corals, clam, etc....but he was the only fish...and he loved it.
I did not feed him with any brineshrimp or any new copepod source for over 8 months...and he was fine. You can see him scrounge around the back of the tank, looking for super small plankton/crustaceans...and then snapping at it.....

talk about easy to keep....just dump some copepods into a reef tank , and you are set.