Enneacanthus chaetodon

I'm looking for a little general info on keeping these beauties from those of you who keep them. Tank size for a pair? What do they eat? I understand the do not do well in hard water, anyone know a good method to soften it? Any thing else I should know?

Thanks

Never kept them personally (would certainly love to) be here is some info I dug up.

Successfully Spawning And Raising The Blackbanded Sunfish
By Peter R. Rollo
http://www.nativefis...usChaetodon.php

The Black-banded Sunfish: Fragile Jewel of the East
by Bob Bock
http://www.aquarticl...ed_Sunfish.html

I have some young 1 -1.5 inch Black bandeds in hard water and they are doing very well since last fall. I've kept Blackbandeds in acid water before and it seems the more important thing is getting them well fed. The best success is with live foods. I feed them live black worms, mosquito larvae, daphnia as well as some freeze dried foods which they don't take as well. Another thing I've noticed is to be careful in choosing tank mates, they tend to be shy and not terribly aggressive feeders and fast moving constantly moving fish seem to get all the food as well as just make the black bandeds nervous and on edge. A well planted tank can help. They do seem to get less shy as they get larger and used to aquarium living. Shiners and dace in general are not great tankmates, nor aggressive sunfish like Bandeds though I have 3 small ones with them now but they get the choicest morsels and more of the food. I've also got some Swamp darters and Johnny or Tesselated darters which seem to fit in well. They laid some eggs about a month ago but they all fungused or got eaten by the other fish.
Mike Lucas
Schenectady NY

hanks for the info yall. I was thinking of planting the tank and keeping them with pirate perch and maybe Pteronotropis welaka. I want to do this in a 24g aquapod - 19.75" x 17" x 20" high.

I keep Blackbandeds with Orangespotted, Longear, Bluespotted, P. perch and others wothout any trouble.
My water is a bit hard and it's buffered so I can change it's PH. I don't think soft water is a requirement for these fish (as I once believed).
If your water is a little hard you can try one of the PH reducers at the local fish store (LFS). I would try this first without fish as this stuff seems to kill fish better than change PH. If you have success with this product then that should be all you need. If I must have soft water here (where I live) I would have to buy a reverse osmosis system (ugh). These can cost a bit as well as consume quite a bit of water.

I feed my Blackbanded sunfish (BBS) any frozen food. They seem to love chopped frozen market shrimp but also take quality dry foods. With the current inhabitants of the tank it's been hard to convert them to pellets though.

The water here is off the charts hard I think, but I have access to all the RO water I need I think so I may use that. Think a 24g is big enough for 2 and a few other tankmates?

We take chaetodon from water that is normally very sodt and acidic. We then salt them and acclimate them to a neutral pH. We have absolutely no problem with this. I am a firm believer that most fish have adapted to live in extreme conditions, such as very soft water, but will live just as happily in any water as long as extremes are avoided and it is kept very clean and well aerated.

We do normally keep some natural drift wood in these tanks. This will soften the water a bit, but I absolutely don't think it's necessary.

Breeding these fish may be a sightly different story. THey may well need a softer water tank as a trigger to spawning. SOmething along the lines of getting discus to breed. Adding some washed peat to a power filter normally does the trick for discus, so I don't see why it wouldn't work for chaetodon as well.

Water softening pillows are much easier and cleaner to use than peat, and are rechargeable. MUCH cheaper than RO water if all you need is soft water. Don't use a pH reducer. Hardness and pH are two different things. Hardness can affect pH, but it's not the same thing. For example, the water out of the tap at my house is so soft it's off the chart, but it also has a high pH. (This is unusual, yes, but is an example that the two are different).

I've used the water pillow softeners before for discus. Very simple to use, the setup is rather like using phosguard or a similar chemical media in the filter (or even just sitting in an area of high flow). Recharge is done with simple uniodized salt.

Hi. I've been keeping some from South Carolina that I brough back from the NANFA convention 2 years ago. Many years ago, I tried keeping some that I got on a pine barrens collecting trip with Peter Rollo. They didn't do well in tap water, and they didn't do well when I tried softening my tap by running it through one of those water pillows.

Since then, I've kept them in rain water that I collect from my downspout. I do a 25 percent water change weekly, and they've been doing ok. Recently, I did experience a few deaths, and I'm not sure what caused them.

From my experience with them, and from conversations I've had with Peter Rollo, I'd say that keeping them in hard water would significantly shorten their lives. I have to add, though, that if you are going to keep them in hard water, you'd need to be really vigilant with water changes. At low pH's that they prefer, ammonia isn't as toxic. So it could be that they're not necessarily really sensitive to hard water, but to ammonia.

I agree with Bob. In addittion to Bob's comments, I would have to say that even though I have collected them in very, very warm water, they tend to do better for me when kept on the cool side...say around 72-74F. Also, I find that they do good in highly oxygenated water, as well.

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