(Note: Click on any thumbnail below to see a larger version of the photograph.)

With the great success that Matt Pedersen had with this species in 2008-2009 (documented here: The MOFIB thread and in his gorgeous March/April 2009 Coral magazine article, among others)—not only keeping many specimens alive in the face of most experience, but also managing to get them to spawn and to raise some to juveniles—I had several off-hand conversations with my LFS owner about how I wanted to give them a try. At the time, I was in the middle of a remodel and did not have a decent system running, so these were all idle dreams for me.

On Dec. 31, 2008, I received a call saying, “Your fish are here.”

***Sputter. Spit out my drink.*** “What?”

“Don’t worry,” said he. “You can keep them here until your tank is ready.”

Thus began a two-month long, three-to-four-times-daily pilgrimage to my fish store to try to train these guys to eat and make sure they were ready to come home. I have to say, my fish store was great about letting me come in and completely ruin the water quality in the filefish tank (and providing lots of water changes) while I searched for a way to keep them alive.

Day 1, horrible phone photo:

For those of you might not know about these fish, in the wild their diet consists almost exclusively of the tiny polyps of Acropora species corals. Early attempts to keep these fish resulted in an almost complete parade of early deaths by starvation. That’s honestly what made Matt’s successes so very astounding. He was literally out there by himself on this one.

When I received these fish they were honestly in pretty good shape. They were a little thin but they still had a reasonable amount of reserves, which was pretty uncharacteristic of most of the specimens by the time they reach the fish store. Mike had managed to get me going on a pretty good start. It’s a good thing. The fish were going to need it all.

Some better photos from later in the day. First the male:

And the female:

As you can see, the male was in better shape to start with. Feeding was not immediately problematic. But Matt’s technique of packing an Acropora skeleton full of frozen foods so they could have the familiarity of picking food off a coral never worked with these two. I tried every food I could think of to entice them to it, but in the end they only ever wanted to eat food from the water column. As time went on, they became increasingly none too thrilled about even what they were eating.

I beat my head against the wall. My food concoctions became crazier and crazier. Somewhere in there, I noticed that they ate a little better right after a water change, leading me to believe that their appetites are affected by water quality. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to keep water quality up when you are throwing every food you can think of at the fish. The poor female, who started out with less reserves in the first place, got paper-thin over the next couple of weeks. In fact, I had completely given up on her, thinking that she would die on any day. In a fit of desperation, I ordered some live mysis shrimp from Reed’s Mariculture, not even thinking it would work. Mysis are much larger than anything they had ever sampled for me before and, as you saw in the photo on the teaser page, these fish have tiny mouths.

On the day the culture arrived, I almost didn’t bother trying them. I took them home to try to start a culture with them (failed, unfortunately) but brought ten or so back for the next feeding. I was amazed. Both fish moved faster than I had ever seen them move before, chasing these crustaceans. I honestly doubt that either fish caught even one of these, but they both tried. And something about trying to chase down the live food did something to jump start their appetites, because they both were interested in eating from that point forward. (By the way, I certainly tried to feed them live mysis after that day. They have never again exhibited any interest in live mysis. Go figure. In fact, their current tank is crawling with amphipods and I’ve never seen them take even one.)

As it turned out, the most successful food for my fish turned out to be Nutramar Ova. After finally exhibiting gusto in taking Ova, they finally were able to start putting on weight. Once immediate starvation was no longer an issue, I was able to begin training them that other things are food, too, by mixing together other foods with the Ova at meal times. Later I realized that Rod’s Food also worked as an appetite stimulant. I didn’t really see them eat it at first, but even a little in the water seemed to increase their feeding on other foods.

A photo from a week into the recovery. This is after a week of hearty eating. As you can see, they were both very, very thin and the female had come close to exhausting her reserves.

This is the female on the same day. She doesn’t look as good, but she was much worse off before.

I was finally able to bring these two home on February 28, 2009. That was a scary day for me. Was my new system stable enough? Would the move disrupt the still-tenuous connection that these two had to frozen foods? As it turned out, the move went remarkably well and the fish did not go on a feeding strike. Their new home (that they are still inhabiting) was a 40XL (4' x 1' x 1'), which seems to be a good size for them. They use all of the length of the tank swimming during the day, but of course they are not particularly fast swimmers like a tang or a wrasse.

Their first companions in this tank were a couple of citron gobies. As the citrons got closer to working out their sexual hierarchy, they began to bully the filefish any time they were near each other. I soon removed the gobies to another tank and replaced them with juvenile Banggai cardinalfish. That arrangement seems to be working well so far, even as the Banggais age.

Within a week of bringing them home, the male started courtship behaviors, displaying for the female and for his reflection in the glass (they are really aggressive toward consexual conspecifics, in my opinion). The files continued to put on weight and make sexual displays to each other more frequently. After a month of being in their new home, they were looking really good and eating like champs. Finally, it became less nerve-wracking to keep them. Here's the male from around that time:

And a month after that, they were both just looking fantastic. The female seemed fully recovered from her near-starvation (she is in back in this photo).

Just a couple of days after that photo was taken (May 6, 2009) I finally got my first evidence that the filefish had commenced spawning in my tank. The video gives the courtship just prior to spawning and the behavior right after. Unfortunately, the spawn itself is out of the frame. (And my usual disclaimer: Sorry, this was made with a webcam. The quality is not the best.)

The filefish eggs have wound up being very hard for me to find and collect. The one time that I did manage to collect a large batch of them I also collected dozens of amphipods who were looking for food. I tried to separate the eggs from the egg predators but missed a couple and they decimated the eggs overnight. Here’s a picture of some of the eggs, though:

Since the early drama, they have essentially been really easy fish to keep. I still feed them Nutramar Ova every day, but I'm now down to once per day on that. I do still feed them ~4 times per day, but now it is just a matter of getting food into the tank. They finally started picking foods off the substrate again and are now solidly eating frozen mysis shrimp. They are a joy to watch. Oh, and I should probably mention that these fish have not seen a live coral since March 1, 2008. I just don't believe that corals are required to keep these animals, but you have to teach them that the stuff you throw into the tank is really food. That is the hard part.

I will be updating this article as soon as I take anniversary pictures of them on Dec. 31. But, for now I will leave you with a video of them spawning right in front of the camera.

As promised, here are some photos of the filefish taken on December 31st.

A disclaimer: While I believe that the harlequin filefish is not impossible to keep, it is still a very, very hard thing to get them to accept substitute foods. I have kept other difficult fish including cleaner wrasses and “obligate” corallivorous butterflyfish. The harlequins were by far the most difficult to get onto substitute foods. If you wish to try them you should understand that these creatures require a large amount of commitment on your part, up to and including the possibility that you may have to provide these fish with live coral in a quantity that will sustain them every single day for the rest of their lives if you cannot get them to eat substitute foods. Or, the fish you get might be like mine who possibly never even took live coral. If they had not started on frozen foods they would have died. In addition, these fish require lots of care to their water quality, meaning you have to do what you have to do to keep quality high despite the fact that you have to feed them a lot of food. And you really cannot skimp on their feedings. If that means daily water changes, then that is what it takes to keep them. Most of all, keeping these fish means that you have to be able to tell yourself: I will do what it takes to keep them alive. If you cannot say that to yourself then please do not try them, for the sake of the fish. Thanks. Lecture over.