White Cheek? Powder Brown? Gold Rim?

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Phyl

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Live Aquaria.com lists their White cheek as being purple/blue. Marine depot live has the same "Acanthurus nigricans" as AKA Powder Brown/Gold Rim. Aren't these fish more brown in coloring? I'm having a TERRIBLE time with LiveAquaria getting this fish delivered that they claimed to have in stock when I placed my order and it still isn't available for delivery. They will have broken my order up into 3 different shipments if they ever do ship the White Cheek. I'm about as annoyed with them about this as I could be and I'm ready to cancel that order and order from someone else, but everyone else lists this fish as a gold rim or a powder brown (same species). So who's right? What color is yours?
 
Had that discussion the other night. The gold rim and powdwer brown are two different fish IMO - and from books I've seen. My counterpart in the discussion claimed that the whitecheek, powder brown, and the gold rim are 3 different fish. I claimed that the whitecheek and goldrim are the same.

The powder brown has white on his face from his eyes down to his nose. The whitecheek/goldrim (same fish) only has a little white under his eyes, kinda like a football player has the black stuff smeared under each eye.

Even in Robert Fenner's book, he says there seems to be quite a bit of confusion between the two.
 
It is so frustrating because I really want the blue/purple coloring and am very luke warm about the idea of it being brown. My LFS doesn't have them so I'm stuck ordering one online which is going to leave quite a bit of room to interpretation.
 
From what I can remember, both have a little brownish coloring.

FWIW, I think the purple is hardier than both of 'm, but I gotta admit, the other two do have beautiful coloring.
 
Why not look at a purple tang? Absolutly beautiful! I hear ya about liveaquaria. It is very frustrating to arrange your life around receiveing the shipment and then you do not get it all.
 
I have a white cheek tang. It has been very hardy. Went through qt and an ich treatment. Now it's in another ich treatment evidently from some rock I added? Anyway here is a pic of mine.

f5cbdd60.jpg


The pic does not do it's beauty justice. It also has an awesome personality.
PS. I got from Liveaquaria, and was shocked at how nice it was, and how big it was. :wink:
 
I have a powder brown tang. We've had it since November and it's done very well. It's a big eater and besides flake food, it picks at the algae on the coral and substrate (although it hasn't really made a dent in controlling the algae). I think he'd like dried seaweed, but I haven't tried it yet. Mine is rather shy, but it swims everywhere in the tank and is fun to watch. I've read that they don't like change and we haven't tried to add any new fish since we got him, so I don't know how he'll react to that. AFTER we got him, I read that it should be the last addition to a tank because of that...he won't be, so he'll have to learn to deal with it at some point. :) We've been happy with him so far! He gets along with our clown fish just fine.

Not by any stretch of the imagination would I say there is any blue/purple tint to this fish. He is a brown/gray color overall, with white, yellow, orange and blue areas - but the blue is only a very thin line on the outside edges of his top and bottom fins. We got him because he was interesting and we hadn't seen one like it before.

As you can see, I had a little trouble with the photo post. :? These are all the same photo, I couldn't see it had been added so I did it again...and again. :oops: Anyway, sorry about the poor photo quality, he knows when I'm trying to take his picture and refuses to cooperate and slow down to a speed my camera can handle. But hopefully it's good enough for you to see the coloration and compare it to the white cheeked tang. (Anybody know how to remove extra images from a post??)

Jodi
 

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It is very frustrating to arrange your life around receiveing the shipment

No kidding. If they actually ship the fish it will be part 3 of one order (4 if they make good on sending me the wrong specimen)!!

I Love the PBT!!! I really want one in the future

Really?! LOL! Could hardly tell!

Can you swing a purple a little bigger than bubbles

I'm not sure why we didn't look at the purple. I'll have to look at that one again to see why I wasn't going in that direction. When I first developed my fish list I was thinking Coral Beauty for that coloring but with my new found coral obsession I didn't want to head down that road, afraid of the consequences.

Thanks for all of your thoughts on this!
 
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