New clowns

[Caudelia]

love this video! amazing fish!

[mikev]

Thank you!

One oddness about the new additions is that I saw no dominance arguments at all, they just blended in.

The new big female took some time to adjust... started by being the last to take food, now she is first ... she finally figured out that 5-6" clowns are easy to push away.

[mikev]

Well, I'm shocked.

The big one finally discovered that snails are food too.... took her only three months... from ignoring them totally, to going ballistic yesterday, pushing everyone and managing to get most of them, she can be quite fast ....

[Loachloach]

Well, you can't blame her. In aquariums with clown loaches, most of the time there are no snails......... so they may lose the taste for them if one doesn't supply regularly. Bless her.

When I added my biggest clown to an existing school of 5, there were no arguments whatsoever either but he took his own cave that was free for the taking.

[mikev]

She definitely did not see any snails for many years, the previous owner only had one tank, no supply. For me, there are many tanks with too many snails in them, so giving them a scoop every few days is not a problem. But till now, she has not been reacting even if all the rest feasted, yesterday she suddenly went nuts, and she can eat snails much faster than smaller clowns...one after another... that was fun to watch.

No big arguments yet...

[Loachloach]

I mentioned somewhere else before, my loaches, probably because of a fault of my own, aren't mad about anything tasty like blood worms, frozen shrimp, etc.. But when I inevitably put them on a diet of just chopped frozen shrimp, they took to it eventually. They seem to just don't know it's decent food. The odd part is that they prefer the dry food like new life spectrum, coming up to the top for it begging like puppies.
My dog is odd that way as well that she'll only eat a specific type of food which is actually very cheap and she almost starves if I change it to something better.

[mikev]

Clowns are generally very conservative.... they tend to stick to what they know and anything new takes a while. And to make this worse, larger/older fish tends to be more conservative than smaller.

The favorite food of my large female happens to be bulk algae wafers.... probably this is what she was fed before ... the wafers are too large to be eaten at once (they are actually meant for plecos in the tank)... but she would swim around with big green disk in her mouth showing off the new toy.

[Loachloach]

Yes, my clowns tend to love algae/pleco wafers a lot too. I put that kind of stuff daily additionally because of my pleco who is very large but very docile with all the smaller fish and they steal his food under his nose literally. He lets the corys that he grew up with eat from his food while he tries to munch on it at the same time.

[garyg]

Gotta love those clowns, I have 4 in a 600 liter tank with other loaches, and must admit that when I first started falling for the loaches was a bit hesitant to get them mainly because of learning how big they get, then one day a friend of mine decided to change over to malawis and gave me his 2 clowns and 4 modestas, so i got another 2 clowns and now am in the process of building a 1000liter diy plywood / fiberglass tank- looks like I need more clowns!

I see the same behavior when I enter the fishroom they are out ..begging, but when I want to show them off to a visitor they hardly come out....until the food comes !!

[mikev]

Yes, they seem to be able to recognize people, I'm the source of food, everyone else is a threat.

Sure, you need more clowns!

How are they with y.modesta's? any arguments? who is in charge?

[garyg]

The modestas only chase each other,(maybee I'm just lucky) and they all mix really well, the boss is actually one of two yoyo's, they are all about the same size (between 9 cm and 11 cm) the big yoyo is a female, she was gravid a while back, so that may explain that, unfortunately the other yoyo is stunted, not growing at all only about 3 cm, been that way for some time now.

[mikev]

There was a time when the boss of my clown tank was a yoyo female... this ceased to be the case when the clowns overgrew her by a couple of inches.

As for the stunted yoyo --- did you deworm? --- this is the most probably cause, it may not be too late.

[garyg]

Hav'nt de- wormed no, never even thaught of it as he/she is not thin and has a good apetite, will give it a try, sometimes the loaches at my lfs are in a bad state and I just cant leave them there, (especially with white spot) and this was one of those.

Any advice on a good de-wormer.

[mikev]

Flubendazole is the one to use.

Depending on the size of the parasite vs size of the host you may see different problems.... could be skinny disease, could be growth inhibition. 3cm for yoyo means a problem.... 6 cm otoh is possible, some just do not grow large.

[Loachloach]

Hav'nt de- wormed no, never even thaught of it as he/she is not thin and has a good apetite, will give it a try, sometimes the loaches at my lfs are in a bad state and I just cant leave them there, (especially with white spot) and this was one of those.

Any advice on a good de-wormer.

I wouldn't put meds in the tank unless you really think your loach has parasites and what sort of parasites or worms. Skinny disease is very identifiable as they would get thin but will get a sunken belly eventually, knifeback sort of look. The fish still eats vigorously but loses weight. It will eventually die, a few months to a year. These parasites are often peacefully living in the fish without causing problems but only overtake in bad conditions or stress. I haven't had it in loaches but had it with livebearers. And it's caused by spironucleus. If you get a full blown infection some fish may die before they even get skinny. That's when the parasite goes into the blood stream instead of staying in the gut. If not, you'll get just one or two fish wasting themselves to death for months.

However, if you've had yours for a year or so, it would have died by now, or be pretty much without a belly if it had a hexamita/spironucleus/skinny disease infection. Others don't necessarily get infected in their life time because as I mentioned, that parasite is naturally found in the fish's guts, in all sorts of fish. But it can be eradicated eventually.

This is the method of treatment I tried below(food soaked in 3% Epsom salt solution and immediately fed to fish twice daily for about 5 days), totally safe to do in any tank with any fish and doesn't involve doing anything to the water. It worked 100% for me, never got skinny disease anymore. One of my platies was barely able to swim properly, it was so wasted poor thing, and now its been a couple of years, she's still alive and fully recovered but the recovery took months until she gained back weight. You can do a couple of treatments a few weeks apart. The results will be only visible in time.

It's explained here if you want to have a look.
http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forum ... ironucleus

Please note after reading that it doesn't involve treating the water column with Epsom salts but the food itself!! Some people get confused with that.

Other than that, it could be just the pecking order. My 5 grew in a pyramid size, bigger, less bigger, etc...