I believe I have read on here of an Arowana choking to death on a Clown Loach. This was due to the sub-orbital spines of the Clown Loach lodging in the throat of the Arowana. Its clearly rare but it can happen.
arowana and clown loaches
- Thread starter Livelife
- Start date
Has there been further research on bioactive (distasteful~toxic) body slimes in clown loach? This was an ongoing conversation on LOL eons ago & with many many anecdotes of stressed loaches leading to dead tanks, but we didn't manage to wrangle a grad-student to follow-up.
Sound like a gnarly sight. Awful, but one you couldn't look away from.
It's not really that they get used to them so to speak, but it's basic predatory energy use. Once the arowana gets to a certain size, it will stop looking at certain items as food because they take too much energy to chase, and kill, causing causing original predator to go into a calorie deficit as a result of that hunt, even thought it technically got a meal.
An example of this is a great white shark. A 16 foot great shark will not hunt a 4 inch goldfish, because although it could easily eat it if it was in its mouth, the energy it would take to hunt and kill it is not worth the calories the goldfish would provide.
This can be taken advantage of in appropriate conditions with a small enough schooling fish and a large enough predatory.
I did this with my albino arowana and 500 neon tetras before moving back into rays.
Neons were full grown, aro was 20 inches at the time
Hi
Redshark1
. i) Whale sharks are filter-feeders, so their per-item investment is very small for a very large # of food items to reach their daily needs. Different strategy, different design, different thing from a one-one predator like a "normal" shark or an arowana or a sperm whale or a smilodon.
ii) me too, though I never lost anything, just had massive general surface-panting breathing-stress to all but loaches when a juv CL got stuck in the secondary filter. Seems to be a stress-induced situation, as apparently new & previously unstressed loaches are eaten toot-sweet (by arowana) whereas those previously with predators or long-term grow-out are not. In the old LOL threads this was hypothesized to be part of why CL grow so slowly, that they are investing in slime-chemistry which both took energy & negated the need to out-grow predation. I'm sure there are social/pheromonal queues there, too.
Redshark1
. i) Whale sharks are filter-feeders, so their per-item investment is very small for a very large # of food items to reach their daily needs. Different strategy, different design, different thing from a one-one predator like a "normal" shark or an arowana or a sperm whale or a smilodon.ii) me too, though I never lost anything, just had massive general surface-panting breathing-stress to all but loaches when a juv CL got stuck in the secondary filter. Seems to be a stress-induced situation, as apparently new & previously unstressed loaches are eaten toot-sweet (by arowana) whereas those previously with predators or long-term grow-out are not. In the old LOL threads this was hypothesized to be part of why CL grow so slowly, that they are investing in slime-chemistry which both took energy & negated the need to out-grow predation. I'm sure there are social/pheromonal queues there, too.
Not really the point I was trying to make. They are designed to feed on krill and such. That's their job. They aren't the type of "predator" to chase down a single prey item like an arowana, or the majority of predators, to where the whale shark has to eat thousands and thousands of little items in one go to where it is worth it in terms of energy gained vs energy expended.Whale shark eats smaller prey items than 4 inch goldfish.
Just using the shark/goldfish as an example to try and highlight what I mean in terms of prey recognition is all.
