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For those who have been browsing the blogs you may have run across my article on breeding marine ornamentals at home. If you missed it, click below to get filled in.

http://www.reefaddicts.com/entry.php...bred-happiness

There have been some recent developments regarding what is left of my Dragonfaced Pipefish foursome, now a twosome. It is unfortunate that they are not taking to anything but BBS but I am still working on that issue. In any case the two that are left have been doing some very cool behaviors. For starters there is so much interaction between these two it's ridiculous. They are quite inseparable (Yeah, it's a 10 gallon tank, no way to separate if they wanted too but...). They engage in almost constant physical contact with a lot of body stroking, and weird twirling. I find myself watching them, and watching them, and watching them some more. I just get fixated on what they'll do next.

Over the weekend my wife's camera turned up and it so happened that I was doing monthly maintenance down in the breeding room when I caught the pair in some sort of act! They were rearing up into the water column doing the architypical "Snake Dance". Back in my stupid days as a bored youth in the High Desert of California, we used to keep Mojave rattlesnakes as pets and I have witnessed this behavior amonst amongst rival males, it just seemed funny that almost the exact same thing is happening with the pipes. I believe that this behavior is very similar to when the female passes eggs to the male but I cannot be certain since I have only seen a video of it on an episode of Blue Planet (episode: Coral Seas) where they showed, what they referred to as banded pipefish IIRC, not sure if they got it right or not but who cares.

Again I cannot say enough how disappointed I am in my lack of photography skills, and this behavior only lasted for a fleeting moment but I caught a blurry shot of it and another of the "afterglow".

I hope you enjoy them and I hope to catch more of the same, maybe even some little tee tiny pipes in the future too!

Have a Great Week!