How about teaching an old fish a new trick? Apparently the Royal Gramma has learned to play dead.
So, we went out last night, and when we came home Adam turned on the lights in the living room so we could peek in on the tank. The sea hare is crawling around, munching on algae and doing her thing, the urchin is scaling the back wall, looking for coralline to eat, the cleaner shrimp is poking around the corals, searching for snacky bits.
Then we look up at the rocks. And there, lying on his side on the rock behind the yellow pagoda coral, is the gramma, looking for all the world like he just floated over, lay down, and expired. Seriously, limp tail and everything. After a momentary panic (We love that fish. He was fine earlier. What the hey??) Adam reached in with the grabber tool and gently poked the little guy in the side. He promptly shot up and raced off to the back of the tank to the bolt hole where he usually sleeps. Whew. Not dead.
No idea what prompted Caesar (the bastard basslet) to abandon his home and choose to give us both heart attacks by playing dead/sleeping peacefully out in the front of the tank like that. He’s up and swimming this morning like normal.
In retrospect, the cleaner shrimp was down in another area of the tank and the nassarius were nowhere around, so we probably could have realized he wasn’t dead, since nothing was feeding on him. But you see your little buddy just lying there and it can be a bit startling.
