Anyone ever had schools too aggro for lurkers?

[bomber]

My wide bar silver dollars eat everything in sight and will not let my bottom lurkers have any food at all. Sad but I had to remove my ornate, endli, mala wolf from my main tank cause they did not have a fighting chance. Silver dollars are more aggressive then I though.

My ornate does take chunks out of the silver dollars once in awhile but this shoal is so fast to heal.

Anyone ever had issues with a school so hungry the bottom fish cant eat?

 

[aldiaz33]

I had the same issue with my red hook silver dollars. The amount of food I would have to dump into the tank for my little pictus to have a chance at getting anything was ridiculous. It's amazing how much SDs can eat and how fast they are to collect sinking pellets before they hit the bottom. Not sure if this is before your time, but watching my SDs eat sinking pellets reminded me of the Atari game Kaboom. lol

Although it's a pain, you could try spot feeding them. Use a PVC pipe or even a clear tube from your gravel vacuum and drop sinking pellets into that so the SDs can't get to it on it's way to the bottom of the tank.

 

[Bottomfeeder]

Rainbowfish. Back when I had fish in my 30g I had 5 of these bastards, along with a Clown Pleco, a small Ctenopoma, and a Flying Fox. I had to divide the tank and give the Cteno his own little section or he'd never get any food. The only fish that learned to coexist with the Rainbows was the Flying Fox, he was such a beast. When they would go after him, he'd go after them twice as hard and beat the crap out of them. He never had any trouble getting food. Eventually I gave the Rainbows to Shark Aquarium and got Loaches instead.

 

[cjdesmit]

I have a shoal of 9x Buenos Aires Tetras in my 135gal that are the same way. They are quite aggressive (especially to each other) and act like a swarm of bees when it's feeding time; NO food hits the sand. I haven't added any catfish/bottom feeding species for this exact reason...

 

[5SH]

I had the same issue with my tinfoil barbs. I would just feed them pellets so that my baby IT's can hit more of the FBW after the tinfoils get full.