Amos does not have the worlds best table manners. In fact, feeding time can be quite grotesque, with much frenzy and much spraying of bits of dinner all over the tank. (This is one of the problems with puffers - they demand good water, then they fill it with a cloud of bits of snail.)
It all happens too quick for me to photograph, but I have been able to borrow a nifty digital video camera to record the activity for posterity. The quality, however, is not quite up to that of the rest of the photos on my pages. All the pictures on this page come from a feeding session in November '98. They are pretty typical of his shameful behaviour.
He is being fed cockles, which is his staple diet. A cockle is a shelled bivalve that buries itself in marine mud, and is common in the UK. They taste very nice boiled, cooled and drenched in vinegar. Amos eats them raw, still in the shell. I have discussed diet with a number of people, and reached the conclusion that Americans don't have cockles, but if anyone knows otherwise (and knows what they are called in America) I'd be glad to know.
The cockle has just been dropped into the tank. Amos makes a dart for it, pretending he's some highly evolved predator, with reflexes honed from hunting.
Unfortunately for his credibility, he isn't, and invariably misses. So the food drops to the bottom, where (now it's stationary) he gets a second chance, with better odds.
The lunge to grab the food is about the only time that splendid tail gets used.
Impact! Air trapped inside the shell gets blasted out the side of his gills.
The angels also like cockles. You'd think even a brainless angelfish would stay clear of those teeth, but apparently not.
Having got a mouthfull of cockle flesh, he thrashes back
and forth, to seperate it from the shell.
As I mentioned above, one of the worst things he does is to blow bits of dinner out the side of his head. That's what this is. It can be problemmatical maintaining water quality when it gets filled with clouds of powdered meat like this - I have an over-size filter in order to cope.
The final picture - the best I have so far of the shell-cracking teeth which do the work.
To comment on anything (please do) email ian.web@astounding.org.uk