Chill Cheilinus
Cheilinus fasciatus is the scientific name for a fish with at least a dozen common names in English alone, and many dozens of names worldwide. Here at Quality Marine, we call it the Red Breasted Maori Wrasse, but you'll see it with a mess of other monikers. They usually start with a descriptor like Scarlet Breasted, Rainbow, Banded, or Floral and then the name might or might now include (or end with) the word “Maori,” but most of them will also include the term “Wrasse.” This fish has at least a dozen more names in the Philippines alone!
Whatever you're going to call it, these are interesting and beautiful fish. They are often caught as sport fish via rod and reel and most of them that are caught are either released or marketed locally in fish markets. According to the IGFA, the biggest one on record is just under half a kilogram (1lb, 1oz). It was caught off Kagoshima, Japan by Yukihiro Sakamoto, an individual that has registered more than 250 world record fish in his life! Sadly, we don't have a length for that specific fish. If you trawl the internet for a while, you'll see a lot of different maximum lengths for Red Breasted Maori Wrasses, but to our knowledge, the longest one on record is about 15 inches long. We've never seen one this big, but they'll commonly get to between ten inches and a foot long which is still a fairly large fish.
A fish this big is going to need a big aquarium. The juveniles of Cheilinus fasciatus are also fascinating to watch and pretty to behold, so they end up in smaller aquariums occasionally, and this is okay as long as you realize that this fish will grow quickly up to about eight inches long and is going to need an aquarium in the 180 or bigger range within a couple years of it being a cute little thing in your 55. These tanks should feature plenty of rockwork for them to hide in and open spaces to swim around. Like many other fish in the Cheilinus genus, they can be shy and reclusive when first introduced and having plenty of places to hide will make them feel more at home, more quickly. Red Breasteds will love tons of flow. This is not one of the wrasses that sleeps under the sand, preferring to find a cave or some rocks to lodge themselves into so they don't need substrate, but will dig around in it for invertebrates if given the opportunity. Make sure any rocks are very stable on the bottom of the aquarium so they can't be undermined by the busybody wrasse.
That rooting around has lots of benefits. It keeps sand beds all nicely mixed up, and Red Breasted Maoris will eat just about anything they find, and this includes bristle worms and fire worms. Cheilinus fasciatus is an omnivore, spending their days hunting through coral and rock reefs for small fish, inverts and anything else tasty. This means that they are generally very easy to feed, but also means they are likely to consume any small fish they can catch, clams, shrimp, snails, crabs, featherdusters and even urchins! Luckily, they are very unlikely to consume corals. In house we feed the smaller specimens twice a day, and larger specimens once a day. A full-grown adult (anything bigger than eight inches long) could be fed a large meal daily or even every other day. Here we feed them a mix of meaty frozen (thawed) foods from Gamma like both their Krill offerings, Chopped Prawn and Chopped Mussel. The only challenge in feeding them is that they like to stay close to a cave or hiding place, and so they need to get accustomed to a hobbyist at the tank's edge and that this signifies feeding time.
Red Breasted Maori Wrasses live in the shallower portions of tropical reefs, usually in less than 50 feet of water. As such, the high flow and light of our coral-centric tanks are not usually an issue for them. This being said, in the short run, dimming your lights slightly might help any shy fish acclimate quicker. The water quality and chemistry for these fish is pretty standard: 72-78 degrees Fahrenheit, pH between 7.8 and 8.4, and a specific gravity between 1.020 and 1.026. While not overly sensitive to nitrate, you should always keep it under control, and it will be better for the fish regardless of their vulnerability to it. As the Long Jaw likes big meaty (and messy) meals, keeping nutrients in check will mean utilizing oversized filtration and regular water changes.
Cheilinus fasciatus make great tankmates for everything they can't eat, and can't eat them. Don't keep them with small, plodding swimmers like Dragonettes. Conversely, their mind-our-own business attitude means they can be bullied into hiding by large, overly aggressive fish too. We don't recommend keeping them with other Cheilinus wrasses as there might be aggression issues. We've seen no problems in keeping Red Breasteds with corals, but they will consume your cleanup crew over time, seemingly having a preference for hermit crabs. They are high risk with decorative worms, clams and other bivalves. Snails and hermits have short life spans, and it is probably better to have them slowly hunted as opposed to dying and decomposing, hidden in your display somewhere when they pass. Long story short, plan on replacing your cleanup crew on a schedule if you keep this (and frankly most larger wrasses). These fish also do well in displays heavy to decorative algae as this provides both a great amount of cover, and an excellent hunting ground for inverts.
If you are the type of aquarist who wants some fish in their marine display that aren't run of the mill species, Red Breasted Maori Wrasses are active, incredibly hardy and feature shocking color and markings. They get fairly big, but not so huge that a grow-out aquarium isn't achievable. If all this sounds interesting to you, head to your LFS and ask them about sustainably sourced Cheilinus fasciatus from Quality Marine today!