Yellowtail Damsel Question

[RoyalGrammaPrincessHannah]

I read this once but havent been able to find it again to confirm so i was wondering if n e of u knew if yellowtail damsels' tails turn grey as adults. At my LFS today i saw some with the same blue as the little yellowtails but with greyish tails. Do u know how many years old they r b4 turning?

 

[superman]

boycott damsels!
My personal distaste for damsels aside...It is hard to estimate how old a damsel may be in reference to its color since color has a lot to do with nutrition, types of foods it has been eating, stress, and if it has been exposed for long periods of time to high levels of things like ammonia, nitrite, nitrate etc... I would never put a common damsel in any of my tanks though, they are (generally speaking) so very mean and get so very ugly.

 

[Riggerssssback]

I read this once but havent been able to find it again to confirm so i was wondering if n e of u knew if yellowtail damsels' tails turn grey as adults. At my LFS today i saw some with the same blue as the little yellowtails but with greyish tails. Do u know how many years old they r b4 turning?

Royal, I have kept damsels for quite some time.Particularly the yellow-tails (Chrysiptera Cyanea)AKA blue-devil has been a long mainstay in reef tanks.... do rather well,and are less aggressive as far as damsels go..very hardy and can live for years without disease and such..providing the diet meets all of it's requirements.
I "seeded" my tank with one like 5 years ago and his tail is still bright yellow!

 

[RoyalGrammaPrincessHannah]

Yeah most are mean but yellowtails are relatively less aggressive. I just have one in my QT right now to re-cycle it and i was thinking of putting him in my main tank because i have no blue in there and he has the most wondeful blue color but i was wondering about that thing i heard once about the tails. Maybe the person, as superman said, had them in not so favorable conditions. They are just treated like dirt during shipping and so forth that a lot of them are doomed for short life spans.

 

[Lynden]

I actually really like damselfish, they are not that mean, and some of them are very beautiful, such as Chromis limbaughi, Chrysiptera taupou, Chrysiptera cyanea, Paraglyphiodon oxyodon, and Pomacentrus alleni, just to name a few.

Also, taking a shoal of damselfish from the wild is far less to worry about than taking a shoal of batfish or other rarer animal. The family Pomacentridae is probably the only marine family that is not under threat from overcapturing.

 

[RoyalGrammaPrincessHannah]

Yes I agree, some have neat patterns and the blue on the blue devils and yellow-tails is unimaginably beautiful until youve seen one. But ive heard that they are meaner then most fish {in general}. Maybe theyre not, the two ive had were actually the shyest fish ive ever had.

 

[crazyelece]

blue damsels are the real mean ones. Yellow tails are like the cute little cousin. They are far more favorable and easy going. They don't change as far as I know. There are a few damsels that change, blue velvet is one of them. Read some good books on marine fish and they will list the ones that turn drab.