Pretty cool personal fish behavior observations

Anybody got any surprising observations? Here is a couple that I had:

Fish know new arrivals even with hundreds of tank mates.. not just for the same species even… when I add new fish then many different fish will display curious behavior towards them… from just nudging(or in the case of gourami, they’ll feel them up with their little curb feelers), following them around for a bit, ect. I think this is very cool as it seems to suggest that they “know” their tank mates even in the crowd.

Actual empathy- I have seen a large school of various rainbow fish get all riled up from the presence of a stray fry at the surface and then their frenzied attack mode will kick in… but even though they seem to be “hitting” it a million times a second, they ultimately leave it alone as if they changed their minds at the last possible second. It would have easily fit in any of their mouths. It was amazing to see them overcome this feeding frenzy behavior, they all eventually settled down and let the fry swim away.

That is cool! Very unexpected.

My loaches are very tender toward each other, I didn't expect that either. THey way they nudge each other playfully and stuff. This probably isn't so surprising.. but I'm fairly new to fish keeping and I thought it was cool.

fuzzlebug said:

Has anyone ever noticed there fish personality change when another fish dies/gets moved to another tank? When one of my albino corys died the other was very different, no longer as active a swimmer


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Yes! Tiger barbs and rainbow fish especially... when one of their own starts to display dying behavior like orientation issues, they'll come up and nudge them around a bit. Sometime it seems they are trying to straighten them out, other times it seems like they're just trying to illicit a response.