Algae Blenny is less active & losing weight

[SF East Bay]

:?: I added an Algae Blenny to my tank about 6 weeks ago. Initially it was fairly active and usually out in the open. I've noticed in the past 2 weeks that it is now thinner than before, often hides inside the LR or barnacles.

The blenny has not had any problems with any of the other tank-mates (emerald crab, red star, 2 damsels, and a clown-fish), and I haven't noticed any other changes is physical characteristics yet.

Are there diet supplements I can add for the Blenny? What else can I do to reverse this?

[steve1s]

If you are talking about a Lawnmower (http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_Display.cfm?siteid=21&pCatId=94), they are for the most part slime algae eaters and will spend most of their time scrapping rocks and glass for their food. If you haven't seen in partake in feeding time thus far, chances are target feeding won't work well either.

Two suggestions you might try. Keep one glass pane in the tank always available and dirty so to speak with film aglae. Alternate the glass cleaning so there will always be at least one pane that can offer available natural food. The other would be to attach a sheet of nori to a small rock with elastic bands. Hopefully one of the two will work.

Keep an eye on the damsels. Even though they do not appear to be the cause, they can be rather aggressive and would not rule that out...

http://members.shaw.ca/steve-s/welcome.gif To ReefLounge.com

[SF East Bay]

Good call on the damsels. Now that you mention it, the blue damsel does quite a bit of "bullying" even though he is about 1/5 the size of the blenny. He seems to be getting increasingly aggressive with the other tank-mates also. Maybe I should change my question to ask what I should do about the blue damsel???

I picked up a package of red algae earlier today but the fish aren't used to it so they never touched it. I think tomorrow I will break some up into smaller pieces since they are used to smaller flakes & foods.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[Strictly Marine]

I have found it helpful to set up a small 10 gallon tank by a window, you can get a lot of algea growth. What I do is take a few live rocks and leave it in there for a week or so and let the algea grow. Then I ulternate so that there is also a few rocks in the 10 gallon. That supplements many of my grazers in the tank.