How Often Should I Feed My Tang to Keep It From Eating Coral?

Like vinny said, I've seen sailfin tangs shred meaty corals and it wasn't because algae was on them. I'd rehome that sailfin.

 

That seems so strange to me after having my sailfin for almost 20 yrs before I had to sell him when I shut down my reef tanks.
All my corals were "fleshy" so to speak as I wasn't into sps types, wanting more to see the vastly more impressive to me LPS corals.
Tangs were my reason for so many tanks as I couldn't get enough tangs in a tank to satisfy my wants.
Achilles, scopas, naso, yellow, regal, sailfin, powder blue and brown, all fed on algae on corals even though I couldn't see the algae, but the corals never suffered from it.
Just lucky I guess.

 

It was definitely hard for me to believe as well Ray but I witnessed it several times. It could be a product of environment as most of the cases involved mature fish in smaller systems. It was hard to tell if they were actually eating the lps but I did witness a Sailfin in a tiny tank literally ripping Xenia into little pieces and spit them out.

 

Every fish is different. I wouldn't have believed it but I saw it with my own eyes. Plus, they were nice frags that I gave to a buddy only to see his sailfin tear them up. Same goes with other species like dwarf angels, some eat corals but others dont. You just never know what a fish could do. My purple tang won't touch algae in the tank or sheets I hang for my herbivores to graze. He even spits out herbivore pellets too. He only really eats NLS Thera A or fresh food from Dr. G's. Weird guy but fat and happy

 

Anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area want a sailfin tang? I'd post in the classifieds section but Matt isn't around and I don't yet have access.

 

Any tips on how to remove him? I tried luring with food and then chasing him around the tank for an hour. All I succeeded in doing was fragging my stylophora.

 

Well, I ordered the Aqua Medic fish trap after running out of ideas on capturing this tang. I wouldn't say the mechanism is perfectly designed, but it did the job. I put in there yesterday and put some food inside just to keep suspicions down. The sailfin went in the trap 3 times and I tried yanking the rip cord - but the glass door only got stuck. So I finally had to hold the glass door by hand and eventually trapped the sailfin. Off to the aquarium store with you!

In the last couple of weeks, it has really gotten aggressive. It had started going to town on my acans and terrorizing all the other fish in the tank. At any rate, for those of you having problems capturing troublesome fish, this trap works pretty well.

Thanks, guys, for the good advice. I'll leave the hippo in there for a while, as he is very docile. We'll see how things go. Then I'm going to focus on coral health and water stability before adding more fish back. My next purchase is probably a RODI unit.

 

What size are they in now?