Continued...
In January 2006, long before I got him, I started reading all the forums (for about six months) about how impossible they are to keep. Every story was about having tried one, but then it died. Or about a friend's friend who maybe had one. There were almost no cases of a currently-living one, much less any pics, and absolutely zero videos. So I held off on getting one, and got a snowflake eel instead.
Well at the end of particularly long Friday, I decided to go to the LFS. This particular store carries mostly staple items... nothing too exciting. I wandered the four isles and found nothing worth getting, so I figured I'd leave. That's when I saw two BR eels (!) on the way out the door. First time seeing them in real life.
So I asked the guy the question that I already knew the answer to: "Were they eating?". The answer was not just no, but nothing at all in the whole week that they've had them. Well I realized it was now or never, so I got one.
Now, my tank is a 90 bow front (30 inches high) reef located in our office. We do not have a (gasp!) quarantine, hospital, refugium, or any other kind of separate tank for me to put the eel in. I say this because in most forum posts I read, they say to try to get the BR eating by putting him in a tank by himself first. Well, the only thing I had to put him in was the... sump! So I covered all the escape holes (effectively making it an isolation tank), and put him in.
I learned a few things from this. First, the BR will INDEED find every nook and cranny and hole, and try to go through it. Intake pipes, pump inlets, skimmer tubes, and my favorite... a crack between the filter frame and the sump case (the only dark place, about 1/2 inch wide.) He managed to get himself into this dark spot several times and stay there. This told me he felt safer there, and this was the first contradiction to what I had read in the forums ("put him in a small tank by himself", etc.)
Another thing he would do is keep his head in water streams, such as the ultraviolet or chiller return pipe. Of all the relatively calm places in the sump where he could go, he goes and sticks his head in front of a water outlet and gets blown around. This told me he reacted to water currents, but I was not quite sure how/why. I don't recall of reading anything about this.
Last of the sump lessons was the BR's wall climbing ability. This is a mature 3 foot long eel, and I found out three times that he will only climb out if the water is four inches or less from the top. This is because he will only stick his head above water for an inch or two; if he can't see over the top, he does not try further. Interesting, considering if he wanted to he could stretch out twelve inches out of the water.
Now as for eating: In the week that I had him in the sump, I fed everything to him at one time or another: Guppies, live ghost shrimp, flakes, live damsels, frozen mysis, etc. Never, not even once, did he pay any attention to anything moving about him; he just stayed transfixed on the water flow, and getting to the dark place.
Then I remembered the one thing that probably saved the BR's life: A few days earlier I had been talking with Jeff at ExoticFish.com, telling him I just got the BR, and he said something totally contradicting the forums. He said that the eel should not be by himself... he should instead be with other fish so that a "feeding frenzy" would develop, and the eel would get excited and eat. At the time, his advice just seemed like another opinion that probably would not work, but after observing the BR in the sump for a week, it did indeed seem like the eel was in some sort of trance or dream state; he was not aware that food was floating all around him. Thus he did not eat, and maybe he really did need to see others eating around him.
So I combined Jeff's "frenzy" advice with the eel's desire-for-darkness that I observed, and concluded that I should put the BR in the main tank even though he is not eating yet. The main tank has other fish already eating, and, has a 2 inch pipe (see the pics) that we already put in the sand for him to hide in (I knew I'd be getting some kind of eel, and for now the snowflake had been using it.) As for the eel's affinity for water flow across his head, I was not sure what to do about it, so I did nothing. The underground pipes were already positioned, and the fish were already in the tank and eating, so... in went the BR.
