Can this work? How aggressive are GT's, really?

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
TangoWRX;3859031; said:
I have a GT which until recently was very mild. However he is now about 7" and took a sudden disliking to one of my blue acara and gave him a real beating. The thing is I have another blue acara which he has not looked at twice.
He is also currently with a gold severum, a firemouth, two port acara and two oscars and a baby jag who are all fine.

I setup my new 240 litre this weekend so the smaller fish will be coming out ready for the jag to become king. I've had a canister filter maturing on the main tank for a month or so to speed thing up.

I've heard of that with GTs and blue acaras, I wonder if it's the relative similarity, and the GT sees them as either competition or potential mates.

Well I went ahead and got one, he's acclimating so I'll see how it goes. Looks male. I decided if it doesn't work out I don't mind dedicating a tank to a solo GT.
 
yeah i will be surprised if he becomes a problem, when i had my male (mind you he only got to about 3.5in before he jumped:( so wasnt mature) but he was already paired with a female and both of them together ruled the tank but it wasnt in an aggressive way the others just knew their place and got out of the GTs way the only time i saw them even chasing another fish was when they had their territory claimed, ready to lay eggs and another fish got to close (even then it was only certain fish they chased away) but mainly any chasing was done in self-defense when another fish was bothering them they had no problems standing up for themselves but other than that pretty much left everyone alone they were great (and VRWC on here told me he always had to get rid of any GTs he tried because they always got beat up in his aggressive tanks)
 
i have two gt in my 75 ( soon to only have one ) but the bigger one ( bout 3.5 inches ) does the occaneshal chasing but thats bout it. hes in with a black belt and teh bb is the 2nd on the list with my gt being the dominate one and the bb is about 4 inches.
 
So far no issues. What I've noticed about this guy that's different, compared to other newly-added small cichlids, is he's not shy in the least. Usually they lay low, scope things out...this guy was exploring the rockwork, wood, etc right out of the bag. He's actually hanging out with the jurupari group, spitting sand all over right along with them.

I wondered if maybe my JD would mess with him, she's female and easily twice the GT's size in all directions (length, height, thickness) but so far she utterly ignores him.
 
dogofwar;3859222; said:
Green terrors are (generally) not terrors... not at all in the same league as say red devils.

Matt

I agree with Matt on this one. I'm sure for every 10 GT's you might get a rough fish but I think for the most part they are just mildly aggressive.
 
MonsterFishKeepers.com