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.