Blue Hippo Tang vs. The Yellow Tang

Most of you know the Blue Hippo tang as “Dori” from Finding Nemo.  About five months back, we had a Blue Hippo Tang and a Yellow Tank both in our tank. Well, certain fish can’t be in a tank with another fish of their kind and Tangs are one of those fish, but at the time we didn’t know it. It turns out that these fish get very territorial and the fish start messing with each other and fighting. When this happens, one or both of the fish can get a disease called “Ick”. If a fish gets this disease it can spread it to everything in the tank and if this happens everything with the disease will most likely die.

                We had this happen in our tank, however, we were lucky and it didn’t spread to the other fish. We lost the Blue Hippo Tang to the disease, but at least we didn’t lose all the fish.  We have learned now to research which fish can live together before we get one of the same kind.

You can, however, have these two fish together if you have a larger tank. We have a 55 gallon tank and it doesn’t give them enough room to have their own space all the time.  With a bigger tank they won’t always be around each other, so they won’t be so stressed, and are much less at risk of getting the disease.

R.I.P Wilbur

Yesterday we had a fish die in our tank. His name was “Wilbur” (yes we name our fish), and he was a Lawnmower Blenny. Wilber was a cool addition to the tank. He got along with all the other fish and looked really cool. Lawnmower Blenny fish are algae grazers, meaning they eat algae that grows in the tank. Because of this he was really cool to watch because he would almost constantly be eating something off of a rock or off the side of the tank. Also, he could eat a large amount of food at once because of how big there mouths are which was fun to watch. 

Because we no longer have Wilbur we will now have to change some things. How a salt water tank works is that you need to make sure you have a “cleaner crew.” This consists of having certain fish that will eat algae in the tank and also having things like snails and crabs in the tank to help clean it. You don’t clean salt water tanks so you need to have things in the tank to help keep it looking nice. Wilbur helped maintain the tank, so we will now need to get another fish like him, or get some more snails.

Also, an example of the cleaning crew is how we found out that Wilber had died.  One of our hermit crabs was eating him. The hermit crab was helping clean the tank.