Dragonet

• Mandarin Fish
• Psychedelic Mandarin
• Red Scooter Blenny
• Scooter Blenny

There are a wide variety of Dragonet species found in the wild, but only a few that end up in the marine aquarium trade. Dragonets are found in a wide variety of sizes ranging from an inch all the way up to a foot in length.

However, most species brought in to the trade rarely grow longer than 4 inches. They are a bottom dwelling fish that are found throughout the Indo-Pacific ocean.

Some of the most popular members within this family are the Mandarin Fish, Psychedelic or Spotted Mandarin and the Scooter blenny. They are commonly confused with gobies and sometimes blennies as their names suggest.

Most dragonets have a largely triangular head and a mouth structure that is perfectly suited to picking off small crustaceans and worms from the substrate and rock.

All ornamental dragonets that are brought in are difficult to feed. As such, they usually require a large established marine aquarium that can produce enough copepods to sustain them. They can be trained to eat prepared foods with some success.

In captivity, they are largely peaceful creatures that rarely show aggression towards other species of fish. In kind, they are largely ignored by their tank mates.

This however, does not apply to any large predators such as groupers, moray eels and the like. They reserve their aggression for other members of the species. Males are aggressive towards other males.

Normally a difficuly species to keep, they are nevertheless collected in large amounts from the wild. Sadly, most of them go on to perish in captivity as most individuals cannot provide them with a suitable environment for them to thrive.

If you are interested in acquiring the beautiful dragonets, you need to ensure you have a large and established system that can produce enough natural live foods for them. Despite the fact that they can be trained to consume prepared foods, they are painfully slow feeders that will always lose out to other tank mates during feeding. Never rely and merely target feeding them in captivity as they need to constantly graze on foods to do well in the long run.

Dragonets are alos some of the cheapest marine aquarium fish to enter the hobby. This further impacts the problem of them perishing in captivity due to their low price. However, with the right system, they are very interesting marine fish to have.