Dragonette doing ok?

[lbiminiblue]

Hey all. Bought a mandarin dragonette about 4 months ago. Tank is a 120 that's been running for a while now, with a refugium full of macros including chaeto, coming up on 8 years. The dragonette is still alive, and I see him pretty much every time I get to sit down and watch the tank for an extended period of time. The thing is, it doesn't look like he's been getting any bigger, or fatter. I know copepods are a pretty mediocre nutrient source by weight - compared to other things we can culture and feed manually - so I guess I shouldn't be super surprised.

My question is, barring any major crashes or changes in the tank microbiome, can I expect him to keep on keeping on like this? I'll try to get a picture for context, but he certainly doesn't look emaciated. He just doesn't look quite like the monster dragonette I saw at my LFS recently - the thing looked like a cigar. I don't have a ton of time nowadays for culturing worms/other foodstock, so I figured I'd ask what people have seen in their tanks with letting dragonettes just graze naturally.

 

[ndrwater]

If your tank iis 8 years old and your fuge full of pods, I would expect he'd be just fine. Dragonets need a well established tank. Sounds like your is

 

[lbiminiblue]

Yeah. Just wondering if I could expect any sort of growth from that. No idea what their lifespan/growth rate is like, and I've been toying around with the idea of getting him a mate, so I wanted to look further into the limitations.