Fish toys?

[Banff]

I know, weird concept. I’m a zoologist and every animal I have ever worked with in captivity has benefited from environmental enrichment, often in the form of “toys”.

I have a quite large and boisterous regal tang who has the attention span of a fruit fly and gets bored and messes around with anyone and anything she can. She carries around various things like large empty turbo snail shells and festoons them upon our branching corals. I think she’d get pretty excited about something with neutral buoyancy that she could sort of bat around. Anyone know of anything like this? Or tried providing “toys”?

[Cliving1]

I remember I saw a video where a guy was teaching his fish to swim through rings. Cant remember where I saw it though... Never heard of actual toys.

[randomfishguy85]

People sometimes put ping pong balls in large cichlid tanks when they have lone cichlid. If I were you I would add more snail shells and let your tang have fun with those. Randomly scatter them in the tank and let him search for them

[mav.23]

I know this sounds a little weird, but I have heard of zoos hiding meat and food inside of toys so their animals still get to "hunt". I don't know how big your tank is, or what other fish/inverts you have in there, but maybe you could hide little chunks of food in there. But if you have other snails, then that may be dangerous for them. Sometimes I see my damsel dragging around little pieces of scallops. Idk if you would consider that playing, though. Hope this helps!

[Rilelen]

People that keep octopuses often provide toys - opening plastic jars is a popular one (for obvious reasons), but you could possibly adapt that? Plastic toddler toys are a good place to start if you want to experiment - they're generally non-toxic and safe for your reef (and many of the lighter ones likely will float like you mentioned!).