anyone keep ornate butterflyfish?

[saltyESQ]

my lfs has one in stock and he told me that it took ordering 5 of them to get one alive.


is this normal?

are they difficult to keep?

[philter4]

They are obligate coral eaters, unless you feed them live coral polyps they don't survive. At this point there are no substitutes so unless you want to feed it sps corals don't buy it, and until they have a food that they would accept it is one of the butterflies that should not be collected at this time.

[JamesJR]

I have always loved this species and wanted to someday keep one but I think it would be over optimistic to assume you could even sustain it in most tanks by just throwing sps corals at it. They only feed on the polyps and it is very impractical because of the great number of polyps they feed on. I wouldn't be surprised if they only fed on certain species of sps and ignored others. Also 1 in 5 is way better than i would have estimated. I would bet less than 1 out of 100 live more than about 2 months in captivity. Best left in the ocean.

[sharkbyte1023]

I tried one years ago figuring i could provide a better home than the store could. What James said is completely true. I was constantly breaking off sps frags...some it picked at others it didn't. Even with doing it everyday it only lasted about a month. Like others have said best left in the ocean.

[WuHT]

this would be an awesome fish to aquaculture, hopefully resulting in specimens that'll take to regular aquarium foods

[philter4]

The problem with aquaculture is they don't switch diets, they eat coral from the first day they settle out of the larvae stage and become juvinile fish so they can't be trained to eat regular food. The one hope would be a coral polyp substitute that fools the fish into thinking it is eating a live coral. Maybe a paste that could be put on one of the really lifelike artificial corals. Short of that you could feed it live coral if you can get a steady supply and have the money to buy enough. Some of the other posts are correct, they only feed on certain sp, some species are so specialized that they only feed on acropora, but I think ornates take a few species, not just one so maybe with trial and error you could find the ones it eats and give it variety. Still, IMO coral eating butterfly should be left in the wild.