yikai

beautiful right? if everything goes well, we can hope to see it end of this year!

This fish will be mine by the end of 2010 Yes, it's a promise. this one is a huge alpha male lah maybe cannot expect the same standard.

I had a pleasant surprise at iwarna today. found two 6 inch mini colonies of the ultra rare unobtianable green nepthea. must be from someone who decided to sell it. now i have 3! *photos not mine, but they look exactly the same*

Chrysocephalus wrasse is so difficult! i like the males alot but even if they come one day i won't buy them as survival rate is abysmal!

Oh... Chaetodon guttatissimus, the peppered butterflyfish. When you called me today i thought it was the very rare Chaetodon leucopleura, the Somali butterfly. Also found in Africa shipments but very rarely imported due to unpopularity. very nice Kenyan mccosker flashers, and what big sizes. As mentioned, geographical variation in Mccosker flasher does exist and the Kenyan variant differ from the Maldivian males by having an entirely red ana| fin and a predominantly black tail.

lunatus is not very nice but very unique. when displaying, the fins turn brilliant blue. some males do look decent. posted before in this thread.

wow the blue eye band also v unique. like bicolour angel.

female lunatus. both are females.

yes. Cirrhilabrus lunatus. Identified by the black finnage as compared to red in C. johnsoni. Also, both have very lunated tails.

it's neither a fairy nor a flasher.

move if you can. anemone stretch very big.

LCK got african shipment i think. heard from lawrence got some big african mccosker flasher wrasses (with the pure red anal fin) and an un-id wrasse and butterfly. Law if you're reading this, pls post pics here so i can ID them.

very beautiful and healthy anemone sis!

ad hopefully a claire also!! and while they are re-surfacing, they can catch the canary damsels and ship to singapore.

anyway 2 nigriocella have been captured before and displayed at the steinhart aquarium. those you see on the internet are the ones there. and reportedly very easy to feed and durable. they ate flake food very well but died several weeks later, probably due to collection problem and using the drug rotenone. as you can see, they are so cryptic that drugs must be used. "Rotenone is classified by the World Health Organization as moderately hazardous.[11] It is mildly toxic to humans and other mammals, but extremely toxic to insects and aquatic life including fish." rotenone inteferes with the electron transport chain in mitochondria. don't ask me explain. i'm studying this now in metabolic biochemistry and it's very complicated and boring. narcosis angel has been reported by pyle at up to 420ft and as many as 7 individuals may be found swimming upside down in caves. they're probably haremic and when threatened, will point head down, exposing the rows of sharp dorsal spikes and the 2 large eye spots. pyle held them in his tank and reported that they are very hardy and ate flake food readily, but the fate of them were unkown. probably killed them as he needs to document them for research. and narcosis can be found in indonesia. but very deep.

Narcosis is very beautiful. from the few pictures that are circulating around the net, the yellow is very outstanding is just beautiful. they could have a wider range but no one really knows since they are found in such depths. minimum level for spotting them is 100m, anything less you won't get to see and you must go deeper to find the main population. nigriocella is very ugly but very interesting. if it pops up or narcosis pops up, it will cause a big halabaloo and the whole reefing scene will be turned upside down! same as Cirrhilabrus claire. the world's rarest fairy wrasse. also found in very deep water in Roratonga Cook islands, and it's even rarer than narcosis angel. Claire has never been collected and only 2 dead holotype photos of a male and female exist.

of coz our multis are not collected at 377 feet lah! that's very deep.

eh! i was just going to post these two!! very interesting fishes these 2. the narcosis angel is the deepest dwelling species of dwarf angel found in excess of 120m, even up to 128M. it's found only in Roratonga (Cook islands), but have receive un-confirmed reports that it is found elsewhere. funny story. Richard pyle collected this fish in Roratonga but because it was so deep, he suffered the bends (Decompression sickness). When he got back up, he did not realise, or should i say, forgotten, that he caught this fish! and he named it centropyge narcosis, the narc angel, after the nitrogen narcosis that he had suffered. the second fish, Centropyge nigriocella, is an extremely cryptic fish found in very very shallow water of only 4-15m! it's found in the marianas and johnston atoll. however it's so extremely shy that divers will NEVER see it unless they use poison to flush it out of the reefs. it's the definition of shy and is i think, the shyest dwarf angel of the entire genus. even more so than the golden angel.

location. Nahackyi is found in Johnston atoll. Johnston atoll is a unicorporated territory of the USA and nothing can be collected there. multicolor is more deepwater than nahackyi. this may come as a surprise to you but multicolor is actually one of the deeper dwelling dwarf angels, but can be found in as shallow as 20m to as deep as 115m!! 115m is about 377 feet!! nahackyi angel is not so deep around 25-75m. but it's unobtainable because of it's location and too bad they are only only found in Johnston's atoll. it was reported ONCE that a nahackyi was found in nearby hawaii because the eggs drifted there and settle. only one reported case though. since hawaii and johnston is so near.

i saw the two lemonpeels at iwarna and i found them very normal and not special. hybrids will not change colour as they grow up. so don't expect it to change. but hybrid lemonpeels no matter what, are very interesting and each have their own beauty. give yours some time and hopefully it will eat. good luck!

of course the dream is to own the nahackyi angel which the multicolor closely resemble. except that nahackyi has a larger crown and diff colour. if you get a big crown multicolor and blast it under 400W MH, the white of the body will darken to a dark grey, resembling a little bit like nahackyi angelfish. that's what the really hardcore angel freaks will want to achieve because nahackyi is unobtainable. then there's the holy grail of all rare dwarf angel....the abei angel. only waikiki aquarium has it on display. these two you can only dream of getting.

compare the crown sizes of those we posted with the normal one like this.

look at this multicolor!

big crown multicolor, yellow declivis, all these are variations of common fishes that just makes it even more exciting!! it makes looking at normal fishes more interesting.