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The Bluestripe Pipefish (Doryrhamphus excisus) is an extraordinary, delicate, and highly specialized marine fish featuring a slender, snake-like body adorned with a vibrant orange base coloration and a brilliant, electric-blue stripe running horizontally from its snout to its tail. A member of the same family as seahorses, it moves with an elegant, undulating motion using its fan-like, reddish-black tail fin. Highly prized by advanced aquarists, this micro-predator spends its day slithering through tight rock crevices hunting for live food, while doubling as a beneficial helper that cleans larger reef fish of skin parasites.
Tank Requirements
Minimum Tank Size: 20 to 30 gallons; due to its exceptionally small, thin profile and delicate swimming nature, it belongs strictly in smaller reef systems or dedicated species-specific tanks where it will not have to compete with aggressive swimmers.
Aquarium Decor: It demands extensive layouts of intricate, mature live rock configured with tight crevices, small caves, and low-light overhangs. It requires a gentle-to-moderate water flow pattern, as intense surge environments or high-power wavemaker intakes will easily exhaust or trap this weak swimmer.
Temperature: 72°F – 78°F (22°C – 26°C).
Salinity (Specific Gravity): 1.020 – 1.025.
pH Range: 8.1 – 8.4.
Care and Feeding
Diet: Strict Carnivore and Micro-predator; it possesses a tiny, tube-like mouth designed exclusively for snapping up microscopic live prey. It feeds almost continuously during the day on live copepods and amphipods inhabiting mature rockwork. It will quickly starve to death in young or overly clean tanks. Unless you manually seed the aquarium with live copepod cultures, it must be meticulously target-fed live baby brine shrimp or copepods until it can be trained to accept frozen cyclops or nutramar ova.
Reef Safe Rating: Reef safe; it is completely harmless toward all types of small polyp stony (SPS) corals, large polyp stony (LPS) corals, soft corals, and non-predatory invertebrates.
Temperament: Peaceful; completely docile and non-aggressive toward unrelated community residents. However, males are intensely territorial against other male pipefish and will fight over breeding rights, so they must be kept singly or as a true, verified male-female pair.
The Bluestripe Pipefish (Doryrhamphus excisus) is an extraordinary, delicate, and highly specialized marine fish featuring a slender, snake-like body adorned with a vibrant orange base coloration and a brilliant, electric-blue stripe running horizontally from its snout to its tail. A member of the same family as seahorses, it moves with an elegant, undulating motion using its fan-like, reddish-black tail fin. Highly prized by advanced aquarists, this micro-predator spends its day slithering through tight rock crevices hunting for live food, while doubling as a beneficial helper that cleans larger reef fish of skin parasites.
Tank Requirements
Minimum Tank Size: 20 to 30 gallons; due to its exceptionally small, thin profile and delicate swimming nature, it belongs strictly in smaller reef systems or dedicated species-specific tanks where it will not have to compete with aggressive swimmers.
Aquarium Decor: It demands extensive layouts of intricate, mature live rock configured with tight crevices, small caves, and low-light overhangs. It requires a gentle-to-moderate water flow pattern, as intense surge environments or high-power wavemaker intakes will easily exhaust or trap this weak swimmer.
Temperature: 72°F – 78°F (22°C – 26°C).
Salinity (Specific Gravity): 1.020 – 1.025.
pH Range: 8.1 – 8.4.
Care and Feeding
Diet: Strict Carnivore and Micro-predator; it possesses a tiny, tube-like mouth designed exclusively for snapping up microscopic live prey. It feeds almost continuously during the day on live copepods and amphipods inhabiting mature rockwork. It will quickly starve to death in young or overly clean tanks. Unless you manually seed the aquarium with live copepod cultures, it must be meticulously target-fed live baby brine shrimp or copepods until it can be trained to accept frozen cyclops or nutramar ova.
Reef Safe Rating: Reef safe; it is completely harmless toward all types of small polyp stony (SPS) corals, large polyp stony (LPS) corals, soft corals, and non-predatory invertebrates.
Temperament: Peaceful; completely docile and non-aggressive toward unrelated community residents. However, males are intensely territorial against other male pipefish and will fight over breeding rights, so they must be kept singly or as a true, verified male-female pair.