I have owned rainbow cichlids, jewel cichlids, firemouths, convicts and keyholes. You'd think a convict or a jewel would be the most aggressive but no. I have a fully grown male rainbow cichlid that acts like a pirhana. I have been bitten by that fish about a half dozen times and he's TRIED to bite me literally 5 times that much. He forced me to re-home another male rainbow or he'd have killed him. He forced me to get another tank so that I could keep my female convict alive and until recently, I had to keep him alone otherwise he'd destroy all of my fish. I keep reading that rainbows are semi-aggressive and yet this one rainbow is far more aggressive than anything else I have owned. I'm quite jumpy when I put my hand in the tank to clean the glass or vacuum the gravel because he WILL attack me. Anyone else had this with rainbows?
Crazy aggressive rainbow cichlid
- Thread starter slava2929
- Start date
-
- Tags
- rainbow cichlid
Never heard of an aggressive Rainbow Cichlid but it makes me smile when people say fish of any species is peaceful. That is not true imo.
Can you post a picture of the fish? Maybe mistaken identity? Every rainbow I have ever owned was pretty mild. If course they are individuals and you might have just gotten a very pissed off fish.
It’s happened to me. Sometimes species that aren’t supposed to be aggressive get aggressive. Sometimes very aggressive species aren’t aggressive at all. It just comes down to the individual fish. I moved my h. Deppi because my larger c. Rostratus got really aggressive w/ him and only him. The deppi should be a much more aggressive, but isn’t at all. I had one that was crazy aggressive too. So you never know, there isn’t any guarantee any cichlid won’t be aggressive.
I had a fish like that once, but it was a female swordtail I was force to rehome from my 20 gallon because it bullied my gourami to death, made all my other fish even a glass catfish cowered in the bottoms right corner of the tank. If one of those fish swam out of the corner, she will go and attack it until the other fish is back in the bottom corner.
I think you just got a "defective" rainbow cichlid.
It's happened to me, too. I had an electric blue Acara who never got the memo that he was supposed to be an easygoing species. He killed almost everything in the tank with him. I moved him to his own bachelor pad and called him Jack the Ripper. Karma caught up with him and he jumped out to his doom before I could find a properly fitting lid.
It's happened to me, too. I had an electric blue Acara who never got the memo that he was supposed to be an easygoing species. He killed almost everything in the tank with him. I moved him to his own bachelor pad and called him Jack the Ripper. Karma caught up with him and he jumped out to his doom before I could find a properly fitting lid.
