stringy things on some fish

[ndurkin]

I have a 30 gal tank with 2 damsels, an arrowhead crab, a coral banded shrimp, a manderine, and a jap 6 line wrasse. The manderine and the six line wrasse both have a slimy stringy thing attached to them. The wrasse shook it off this morning but the manderine still has it on him in some spots. Does anyone know what this could be and how to fix it. The manderine almost looked like it had ick then after a couple of min his color came back and he seems to be fine besides the string on him. If anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it

 

[promisetbg]

Six line wrasses sleep in a cocoon that they make..I suspect this is what you saw.Mandarins have a slime coat as well.{.it is toxic to other fish BTW}..he probably had some sand stuck on him from where he was sleeping.They also lose their color at night for protection.
I urge you to research the care of a mandarin dragonet.He needs live copepods{lots of them} to survive.A 30 gallon tank with a sixline wrasse is a bad place for him to be.Mandarins eat all day..picking at the rock and substrate for their natural food{pods}...a sixline wrasse will also go after any and all living crustaceans{pods} and is much swifter than the mandarin.Keeping the sixline in that tank w/ the mandarin is going to compromise his food source.Mandarins should be in a large established reef with at least 100 lbs of LR.You may try to see if he will eat frozen cyclop-eeze or PE mysis shrimp.And you may want to consider returning him to your LFS until you have a suitable set-up.These fish will suffer a slow agonizing death by starvation..it takes months.

 

[ndurkin]

We feed them frozen brine shrimp and both the manderine and the wrasse eat it. Thank you for the other information it was very helpfull. I was worried about loosing fish

 

[promisetbg]

Feeding brine shrimp to fish is like you eating lettuce every day..it is virtually devoid of nutrition.Try the two foods I mentioned..and perhaps even add some Kent Zoe or Vita-Chem for added vitamins,minerals,and amino acids.