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CLown Loaches or just killers....

Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 8:16 am
by Drakoclaw
Hi, first posting here but long time loach lovers, we have 20+ experience of keeping tropical fish around 10 with loaches of various types.

Here is our dilema we love our CLs they are housein a Trigon 360 with a split galleon that they call home ( it takes up most of the tank). We have 17 very healthy, de wormed CLs from 3" to 8"+, they ae very tame well fed and do what loaches do most of the time.

We introduces 10 Yellow fin loaches around a month ago, over night they were destroyed and eaten by the loaches. We looked around and found after digging round the net that the colouring of the yellow fins could have been the problem.
2 days ago we introduced 13 Skunk loaches (we had these before and no problems) last night they were ALL turned to sushi and now 17 loaches have very fat tummys.
In the tank we have also zebra dannions, rummy noses, albino convicts , plecs amongs other small fish. None of these are effected or touched by our little clowns.

A couple of years ago we had to put a Frontosa from our ciclid tank into the loach tanks as he was being picked on badly (breeding season) when he was introduced withing 30 mins it was like a feeding frenzy in a parhana tank, he was cut to ribbons and killed.

Now they are using slice and dice on any other loach introduced to the tank, we have never heared of CL's being this vicious or territorial.

Anyone else hve this experience with them as it is not that easy to find info on the net re this sort of behaviour.

We have FX5 for filtration out water condition is good.
We moved house 4 months ago and until moving in a friend was looking after our fish (in their own tank in the old house) during that time we did lose several fish, and have re stocked since. Don't know if this has anything to do with their behaviour.

Here is a quick look at our tank....http://youtu.be/LoCvn3BVYwE

Re: CLown Loaches or just killers....

Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 1:53 pm
by djoneser
The only time I have read about this type of behaviour from clown loaches, it was tied to breeding, just do a google search on large clown loaches showing aggressive behaviour. http://tamarind.hubpages.com/hub/Clown-Loaches talked about it in a small section.

Re: CLown Loaches or just killers....

Posted: Sun May 20, 2012 11:00 pm
by chefkeith
What do you think causes the fish loses when you moved? How did you acclimate the new fish before adding them to the loach tank? If the fish weren't properly acclimated or quarantined, perhaps they went through osmotic shock and the loaches were just picking off dying fish.

Other potential problems:
The foot print of that tank is quite small for that many clown loaches. The tank may be over-stocked.

What are the water parameters? Nitrates, GH, KH, TDS, PH, and Temperature?

There might be some fish compatibility issues. African Ciclids are hard water fish. Clown Loaches are soft water fish. They'd do better in water conditions specifically suited for them.

The Galleon ornament might not be the most ideal shelter for clown loaches. They like to snuggle in things like driftwood crevasses and pvc Pipes.

Do you have a quarantine procedure for new fish? Most new fish carry pathogens, so they should be quarantined and treated for the most common parasites before being added to the main tank.

Re: CLown Loaches or just killers....

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 6:55 pm
by LoachOrgy
wow, i had a similar issue with my corydora catfish. I had 8 total that lived with my clowns the entire life span I have had them. When the corydoras became cow size(very large). One day all my clowns just decided that they were on the menu and tore through about 6 of them. I saved 2 but they ended up dying in a few weeks. Poor guys. I don't know what caused this aggressive behavior and I have only seen it happen one other time when the entire bunch of loaches ate my upside down catfish.

So all in all my clowns have torn through about 9 fish. I have not had anymore issues since I decided to put rainbow danios in the tank. They are fast enough to evade the clowns and also don''t pose competition on the bottom of the tank. Maybe that was the issue. The tank was crowded and the clowns saw those fish as competition for their food. Thats all I can say from experience. I hope you figure it out. Are you feeding them enough protein?