missing loaches...

[poeticpyro]

i haven't seen two of my clowns in well.. over three weeks. they do not regularly come out. you can hear them at night, and i have seen them in the wee hours of the morning, is this behaviour normal? one will swim out occasionally, but the other two never come out. i'm wondering if there's anything i can do to fix this. the tank is planted and has three "caves" however, they never leave the gigantic castle... should i take the castle out and let them not have it?

[groovyfishguy]

My experience is the more hiding places you have the more you see your loaches. Removing the Castle might make it worse.

[pedzola]

on the other hand, I would check your castle very carefully for places the clowns may be able to get stuck.

My clowns get stuck in anything there is in the tank to get stuck in!

Once I had this roman ruins type decoration that had some flashing curled around the inside in a way that it was just big enough for a clown to squeeze into, but then he was stuck.

I found this out luckily without having to lose a fish... The decoration was new and I am wary about these things, so when I didn't see one of my clowns for a few hours I decided to lift up the new decoration and see if he'd taken a liking to it....

I looked everywhere and couldn't find the fish! Took eveything out of my tank and was bewildered at the missing clown.


Finally examind the decoration again and there was a little fin sticking out!

I put the piece back underwater and rushed to get a pair of pliers!

I had to break the stupid thing apart to get the clown out... I was so afraid I was gonna hurt him! But he came out alright. Nearly unscathed except for a few small scratches on his side....



To make a long story short, be wary of decor that a fish might get stuck in. It does happen!

[poeticpyro]

i have examined the castle very well... there are little cranies, and if i lift it up they fly out so they're not stuck... it just bugs me. there's a ton of hiding spots, but they never come out. one is adventurous and comes out uaully when it's dim... but the other two... pissing me off...

[Lotus]

We have a stump decoration that the loaches loved, but some of the "roots" were too narrow. Even when we took the decoration out, we had to shake it to get the loaches out, which led us to believe the tubes were too narrow for them to easily come out. We siliconed the small openings closed, so no more fears of stuck loaches!

Definitely put several caves or hidey holes in the tank, they're much happier that way.

[Emma Turner]

poeticpyro Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 11:02 pm

i have examined the castle very well... there are little cranies, and if i lift it up they fly out so they're not stuck... it just bugs me. there's a ton of hiding spots, but they never come out. one is adventurous and comes out uaully when it's dim... but the other two... pissing me off...

Clowns are a nocturnal shoaling species. They prefer dim lighting, and tend to venture out more during the evening and night. One way of seeing more of them will be to add a blue-moon type light tube to your tank, timed to come on just before the main lights go off. You can leave this on for a few hours in the evening so that you can observe them. You do really need to be keeping at least 5 in a group for them to behave naturally and be more confident. To do this you will need to upgrade your 30g tank as soon as possible, as Clowns require/deserve more space than that. The shaking of ornaments is not a good idea. The more you interfere with this sort of thing, the more stressed the fish are going to be, and they will be too scared to come out. Bear in mind that each individual Clown loach will have a different personality to the next one, and some can be more naturally boisterous than others. You might want to think about increasing the amount of 'dither fish' in your tank too.

Emma

[poeticpyro]

soon everyone will be moving into a hopefully 65 gallon tank.. i'll maybe add another clown, depends.. and i'm adding a larger school of danios and a few gourami. the yo-yos today were playing with one of the pearl gouramis so so cute. one of my clowns refuses to hide from me now.. he always swims up and says hello! the other two are always hiding, and one i haven't seen in a while, but i know he's alive because you can see him late late at night and hear him since he's a lot larger and "clicks" much louder than anyone else..i'm just worried about my babies.. they should be okay for a few more months... may/june looks like the time they'll be moving into their new permanent home.thanks for all the advice.