MARINE Mandarin
The REEF MUSE
Most Mandarinfish are doomed to a life of starvation in home aquaria, but it needn’t be so. Nathan Hill looks at how to avoid a tragedy.
WORDS: NATHAN HILL
ISN’T IT beautiful? Spend any time at all around a decent reef system and you’ll be lucky enough to see one of these in the flesh. I’ve known of folks who have set up dedicated aquaria just to keep this fish. It’s a hobby ambassador.
It’s an underwater muse. This is the Mandarinfish, often called the Mandarin blenny, sometimes called the Mandarin dragonet, Synchiropus spendidus. The most accurate name is the ‘dragonet’ one, with the Mandarin belonging to a large genus (some 43 species) of a large family (12 genera) that is the Callyonimidae. The dragonets. The little dragons.
Many dragonets are cryptic, camouflaged with mottled patterns and blending in effortlessly with the substrates they inhabit. The Mandarin has no interest in such caution, and chooses instead to dress itself as the most flamboyant fish on the sheltered lagoons it calls home.
Feeling blue
When seen in person, what hits you is the uniqueness of the colours.
Mandarins don’t even possess scales, let alone reflective ones, but they do appear to have a sheen like no other. Well, that’s biological — they really do have a sheen like no other. While many fish use chromatophores to reflect light and give them the many colours we see, Mandarins have ‘cyanophores’, stacks of bluecoloured proteins, that give them theirs. This is rare; only one other vertebrate does this, and it’s a close cousin of the Mandarin. The amount of colour in an individual may vary, given the few types available, including blue, red and green.