Scooter Blenny dying

[spp]

My friend bought a Scooter Blenny for this aquarium and didn't know it was a dragonet (he thought it was just a normal blenny, those vegetarian ones). I looked at his tank and it was essentially death for the fish (no sand bottom, no crustaceans for food...) He however doesn't want to take it back or give it away (my tank is not suitable either) and wants to try to "raise" it. So essentially, from you experienced aquarists who have dragonets, how does one raise it in an unfamiliar environment? How do you get this fish to eat dead food?

I know the best solution is to give the fish away or put it back in the store but he won't, so please don't tell me to tell him to give it back (I've done it many times and am still doing it... O_o) Please give advice on how to make this fish eat dead food. We both have large aquariums (mine 400 gallons, his 300 gallons) and the fish is already "lost" among the rocks. Please help as I am doing my best to assist him but I don't have an interest in dragonets and never learned how to care for one.

[jman]

dead food is not really an option but if you feed brine shrimp...good luck :sconfused:

[spp]

He's trying to get it to eat brine shrimp, but so far we don't know if it is eating or not as we can't even find it in the 300 gallon...

[unleashed]

unless he has a lot of established (6+ months) live rock, it is going to die.

Dragonets have been known to consume prepared foods, however, it will not sustain them. Over 90% of their nutrition comes copepods and other critters which live on the live rock.

Unfortunately, that scooter blenny will die.

[ILuvMyGoldBarb]

You say it's a 300gal tank? How much live rock is in there and how long has it been running?

[spp]

It's been running for 2 years. He has multiple corals and has around 350 pounds of live rock I think. The problem is, we don't think there are any copepods. I know you can't see them since they are so small, but during the earlier periods of his career, his tank had an ammonia spike and the live rock essentially died along with everything in the tank. What's on the rock now is simply Coralline algae. He ordered a bottle of copepods and hopefully they can reproduce and feed the fish.

He is mainly a Damselfish keeper with 8 blue devils, 2 dominos, and some other colorful ones that I don't know the name of. His tank is basically filled with anger and I'm not sure the dragonet will even live despite having copepods to eat... what a sad mistake to buy a dragonet.

[ILuvMyGoldBarb]

Has he purchased those corals mounted on small pieces of live rock? If so, he has copepods. I'd actually be surprised if he didn't make it in that system. The Damsels would be the only concern for me.

[spp]

All the coral are attached to rocks. I sure hope he has a copepod population. The thing is, we will never know how the fish is doing as we can't see it at all. All we see are damsels picking on the live rock. All his damsels are pretty big with the Domino 5 inches, so yeah, we'll have to see.

I though we would be able to see some of the copepods as small specks floating around the live rock. From web articles I read, people were able to see the copepods as small white specks or some colored speck. Anyhow, he ordered a bottle of copepods that will probably last a day...

Edit: I also forgot to mention that he has no live sand. Will the scooter blenny learn to catch copepods? I read that the sift through sand to find food.