Snorkeler's Cube

Talking to my favorite LFS about my Aiptasia blues (which they were aware of given my shrimp purchases) one of the guys (Maciel, great guy, really) offered to lend me a fish trap, explained how to operate it and encouraged me to try.

Cool, it did seem pretty simple in theory, if I had enough patience. I'll show a picture right below, but, in summary it was an acrylic box with a sliding door. Maciel told me: "man, just put the trap in there without the door, fix it to the glass with one of your scraper magnets, then put food in it for a few days, let the fish get used to it.... then, a few days later, put the door in, leave it open, and catch him when he goes in. Easy!"

"Yeah, right...." I thought.... he's an LFS guy, I'm a relatively inexperienced reefer.... and I had a failed experience with a home-made trap I tried to use to remove a hammer-coral-eating shrimp, and I knew this could be quite difficult.

Well, I decided I would be extremely patient, I really didn't want to miss the chance of trapping him in there, I knew from the shrimp trapping experience that I would probably only get one shot.

So cleaned the trap well and soaked it in chlorinated water (it was very dirty, with skeletons of Asterina stars, which I don't have and don't want). Then I installed the trap and put food in it for about four days, no door. Gradually, I think on the second day, Mr. Six started to swim in for the food in there. I kept putting food in there the next days.

So when the weekend arrived I decided it was time to try....

Guess what, it worked! I squatted on the floor, to be out of sight, held the cord to the door and waited patiently... he swam in, then out, then in, then out, then in and stayed a little longer and SLAM I released the cord and the door shut behind him!! We gotcha!!


Carefully I removed the trap without opening the door, and moved him into the quarantine tank. Here he is waiting to move into the QT:


And here he is exploring the QT. While he lived in there he would normally sleep in the brown PVC connector on the lower right hand side of the picture. In this picture you can also see the brown star polyps (lower left), and, some yellow polyps (lower middle) I bought and was leaving in quarantine out of fear that my crabs would eat them:


What to do with him now? Maciel told me to bring him to the LFS and they'd find a home for him, but I was too attached to him to do that. Such a beautiful fish who was "part of the family", hard to part ways with him. So I left him in the QT....