Cypho, Not Psycho

Many of the most beautiful fish available to home aquarists have question marks, especially the rarer ones. Maybe they're very hard to collect or come from prohibitive depths and thus super expensive. Maybe they're an “experts only” level of difficulty. Once in a great while a rare fish comes a long that is take-your-breath-away gorgeous, and yet easy to keep and achievable price wise.

Today is your lucky day, because we're going to highlight just such a find, and that fish is Cypho purpurascens. It's more commonly called the Oblique Dottyback, or the Oblique Lined Dottyback in North America, though our friends down under sometimes call it the Lavender Dottyback. If you look up the word Oblique in Webster's Dictionary it says: something having a slanting direction or position, neither perpendicular nor parallel to a line or surface. There is definitely nothing about this fish that is square or parallel, but there's also not much that is a line.

What there is, is an absolutely gorgeous, cryptic fish that features an ombre fade from magenta to yellow for males and yellow to a pale blue for the females. They are all flow and motion with large dorsal and anal fins rimmed in electric blue. These are stunners. You won't see them all the time, but they aren't constant hiders either. They'll love having lots of places to hide in your rockwork, and the more hidey-holes there are, the bolder the fish will be. A single adult wouldn't need any more space than a 30-gallon aquarium, but if you wanted to keep them with other fish, more space will be needed and more on this topic later. Filtration and flow should be strong, Obliques are used to the strong current and clean water around reefs. They'll be just fine in brightly lit displays. They don't need any substrate; this decision will purely be based on your personal aesthetic.

Water quality and chemistry offer no real challenges either. Oblique Lined Dottybacks are very hardy and will just fine in a wide variety of water quality parameters. Specific gravity between 1.020 and 1.026, pH between 8.0 and 8.5 and a temperature anywhere between 70 and 78. Shoot for stability (as always) but with these fish, the actual number is less important. You should always strive for low nitrates for a variety of reasons, but OLDs aren't overly sensitive to nitrogen-based pollutants.

Cypho purpurascens are as easy to feed as any wild caught fish could be (though they are sometimes aquacultured too). In the wild, these opportunists will grab any morsel that floats past of edible size and feeding them in an aquarium is about the same. The only hiccup you might encounter (if it can even be called that) is getting them to recognize you as a feeder and not a threat, which they work out fairly quickly. In house we feed them a mix of meaty food from Gamma that changes every day; on any given day it might contain three to five different products like Mysis, Rotifers, any of the Brine Plus products, Chopped Mussel, Chopped Prawn, Bloodworms, Mosquito Larvae, you get the picture. Your home diet should feature as many foods as you can, but it doesn't need to be as varied as ours on a meal-by-meal basis. We feed twice a day, and at least one of those meals will also feature a healthy dose of Nutramar Complete in either the Pellets, the Crumbles or the Shots, which is loaded with protein and has excellent mineral / nutritional value.

While Oblique Lined Dottybacks are everything we've talked about, there is a single catch with them, and that is temperament. They should be the last fish to be added to a display. Other fish need to be large enough, fast enough, or belligerent enough to stand up to a small, but moderately aggressive fish. There was once a Local Fish Store here in LA that had a brilliant male Cypho purpurascens in a 75-gallon tank with a dozen or more Domino Damsels and a massive green polyped toadstool leather. Talk about wow. This tank was all activity and complementing colors, and the Oblique was the star of the show. They'll also be good as a dash of color / supporting cast in an aquarium of larger fish like Tangs, Triggers, Thallasoma Wrasses etc. They are reef safe and extremely low risk to any of your corals, but if hungry may take a nip out of a clam mantel or a decorative shrimp. Strictly avoid keeping them with similarly shaped fish, red fish, and any other Dottybacks / Pseudochromis, unless the two come as a mated pair, which is exceptionally rare.

Here it is, the rare and gorgeous fish that is actually easy to keep and sized well for the home aquarium. So, what if you can't keep it with some fairy wrasses? You want reef safe, incredible color and great activity?  Cypho purpurascens delivers on all fronts, as long as you don't choose small and timid fish to keep them with. Plan your display well, add your fish in a logical order, and always source your fish from Quality Marine partner stores. Now go forth and ask your LFS about Oblique Lined Dottybacks today!