Keeping an adult asian aro with a shoal of small fish?

My RTG was 14 inches and I used to feed him 1 inch convicts. But if the convicts weren't high enough he usually wouldn't go for them since it appeared that he didn't want to swim down.

I think you are crazy.

Little fishies you talking about have a metalic silver sheen. ( as opposed to the cichlids you had )
Aro will, hopefully, gobble them down.

I am worried about you....

If you don't mine losing/replacing them, I say try it. I've seen tanks with tiger barbs kept with large aros and the keeper says the aro don't bother them because I guess they are such a small meal it wasn't worth it. It looks really cool because the barbs would school tightly due to the presence of a larger fish

Here is a video of an adult Asian Aros kept with hundreds of cardinal tetra and other smaller fish I took at the Dallas Worldwide Aquarium. The tank is very large and decorated with plants that obstruct the Aros from easy hunting of small fish. I was wondering how these fish could coexist and stared at the tank for a long time and did not observe any hunting behavior from the Aros or from a pair of Thoritchthys breeding in the tank.


[video=youtube;6AK9WfyTffk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6AK9WfyTffk[/video]

I think the odds improve in your interests with a well fed aro. If he never touches them & then u go on vaca for a while, he's more inclined to take out mates that he can fit in his mouth from hunger pains. If the aro is used to eating insects, pellets, etc & he's used to getting them on a regural basis, he may simply be holding out for his normal feed till hunger pains cause him to look else where. The fact that they are tiny will play a role of course whether he wants to spend energy swimming down to catch them when he knows something simple & more filling is coming his way soon

I know that I've read that in the wild, crocodiles and sharks will not normally hunt animals that are below a certain relative size. The ones that kill humans for example are not often the largest because humans are not "large enough" to interest the largest of those predators. Obviously there are exceptions to the rule so it doesn't mean a hungry one or opportunistic one won't take a bite, but in general.

The rationale biologically is that all hunting involves risk of injury and loss of energy simply by hunting. Prey that is too small will not compensate for the energy loss, while prey that is somewhat larger offsets the energy loss but now creates risk. Prey that is even larger than that second type (for example twice as large) doesn't add much more risk but does cut the need for hunting in half, thus reducing overall risk. It's kind of like the Goldilocks concept.


In this case, location of the prey in the water column and color or speed of the prey will be factors as well.