I give up! Armatus went NILLY.

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I have a 19-20" ish armatus right now, he's been on mostly tilapia and definitely the largest and longest I have kept them. My last two were doing great for two years and somehow both within weeks decided to eat one day and die the next. Both were 18-19" at time of death when I measured them out of the water.

Now I still have not move the armatus to the 600 yet, between some 18-22" rays, 18" dat and 2ft aro, I'm scared he might spooked himself and die. So for the time being, he's still the on the 180 I grew him out in along with small 9-10" rays and Aussie lung




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If smelt is the culprit of the early demise then I must be very fortunate. I fed mine, feeders and silversides when it was small, graduated to smelt as it got bigger and now frozen market fish and sunnies. Currently 24" It would only take fish that hasn't been cut. i.e. smelt with head attached and no fillets.
 
I am on my third armatus and the previous two were fed smelt almost exclusively.They did well up to point and then just seemed to give up living and die.I posted back then that I blamed the smelt for their deaths as nothing else seemed to be wrong.
Now with this one I went back to using smelt and the armatus has been doing well.It could have been bad batches or it could have been something totally unrelated to the smelt.
 
I still think it has to do with tank mates and how comfortable they are in the tank....I believe I would still have my vatf and my armatus would still be going strong if they were solo fish in the tank or their tankmates were smaller and calmer. But who wants just one fish in a big tank!! My asian aro and rays are getting so big and are non stop swimmers,especially female rays when they are pregnant. They are always looking for food and hovering high in the tank above the bubbler or in the powerhead stream. The rays are constantly doing something and it just stresses out my other fish to the point I either had to sell them or they succumb to some kind of suicide getting away from the rays. My asian aro wants to pick on solo fish like he did with my vatf to the point the outcome is not good. I have learned that fish in groups works best with the arowana. So now I have 8 redhook silver dollars in with him and he doesn't harass them at all and sometimes swims with them. Once in a while he gets moody but doesn't bite them, just chases them.

Oh well if the Armatus dies I will be putting the widerbar silver dollars back in the tank as they seem to handle stress better in the ray tank but had to be pulled out as the armatus was taking out their eyes.
 
If I were to blame anything on your armatus death, I'd go with the rays first... I am still surprised to this days that my 2 12" tinfoil barbs still alive LOL. I have seen them pinned down by the 22" ray and scales were all over the tank lol
 
Blkpiranha said:
I still think it has to do with tank mates and how comfortable they are in the tank....
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You're absolutely correct! Once armatus is stressed from tank mates, it will stop eating. There's nothing wrong with feeding smelts, except it may lose interested in smelts when it get bigger, then you just need to switch to bigger fish like mackerel. On the contrary to most people thought, it's not good to feed it tilapia fillet
 
So,why isn't it good to feed our armatus tilapia?
 
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