Okay, I'm having a little problem here

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Mourinho18

Caquetaia man
MFK Member
Aug 21, 2005
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Okay, here's the deal. My shipment that I got from Rapps included

4 caqueteia spectabile
4 heros sp rotkeil
4 cichlasoma oblongus
4 geophagus abalios

and I added 3 tinfoil barbs

The problem I'm having with them is that they don't really eat. I've tried a variety of different foods from shrimp pellets, tubifex, spirulina, algae wafers, flake food and I'll see some of them nibble and eat parts of it but I'm not generally seeing all of them eating. I'm starting to worry that theyre so scared of being in a big tank when they are all pretty much babies, that they refuse to come out of hiding to eat.

Today, from what I gathered and from the body shape and all, I found one of my spectabile lying dead on the gravel bottom :( and I was just floored, and I'm really really sad to have seen these guys go because they were one of my favorites. really beautiful fish.

I have a 150 gallon
temperature stays at approximately 80
ammonia
nitrite
nitrate
are all zero

are there any suggestions

like

remove all the places where they could hide so theyre not always hiding?
feed something else?

I'm really starting to get worried about these little guys :confused: :(
 
How long have you had them?

How big are they?

Try live food, brine shrimp, crickets, worms, etc.

You can also soak your food in garlic extract.
 
uhhh, I've had them since the end of august if that helps. None of them are over 2 inches. The oblongus are all about an inch or so. I'm gonna try live food. Maybe that'll help. Don't really have any garlic extract on me. :(
 
The tank is definitely too big for them. The filters are much too strong for them.Thats why they hide. Try growing them out in a 30 gal. long first.
 
Benfica540 said:
uhhh, I've had them since the end of august if that helps. None of them are over 2 inches. The oblongus are all about an inch or so. I'm gonna try live food. Maybe that'll help. Don't really have any garlic extract on me. :(
Click to expand...
Feed them TETRA BITS. Everybody eatd tetra bits. Even my electric blue jack dempsey.
 
alright, so I'm just gonna create a diy divider and hurd them all into an area where i want them and grow them out there, thanks, hopefully it works
 
Okay, now i just found another one dead and I'm pretty sure that instead of the two being spectabile, that they were two abalios. there was a slite hump type feature on the forehead which makes me think it was the abalios.

I completely cleaned it out and made it a bare tank. From my count, I'm seeing 13 and there should be 14. But they arent really staying in one place long enough to make an accurate count, so i dont think ive lost any other than these two. I'm gonna do another count and see if i do get 14 this time. wow. what a load of bad luck. :(. I'm gonna start feeding live foods tomorrow to get them eating and then weane them off from there. I'm also gonna try to get them into a smaller space so they dont have all 150 gallons. I took out my aquaclear 110 and its running on an eheim 2028. uhhh, don't really know what else to add. maybe dividing them could help. :(, oh man, what a bad week
 
I already said that there was an aquaclear 110 (500), eheim 2028, and a smaller aquaclear the 20 i think, but i dont think that would be the issue, too little, too much filtration. I really do think its a food issue
 
Probably a feeding issue. I got some of the Heros sp. "Rotkeil" and the Astronotus sp. "Venezuela" and mine are feeding well on frozen brine shrimp, bloodworms, whiteworms, and beefheart. They won't eat frozen tubifex or krill. All of them will taste pellets, but the severums won't keep them down. Your fish need some good frozen foods to get them started feeding, and they probably need more size on them before they can really take pellets.

Mine are in a 100 gallon tank with two Emperor 400s and they aren't having any problems zipping around the tank. It did take them about a week to get used to us and to realize that we are the source of food; before that, all they did was hide in the back. You need to get some decorations back in the tank--you are just doubly freaking them out by taking their hiding places. I would not try to move them or divide the tank, etc.--I don't think that's your problem as my eight fish are already getting psychologically crowded. Your fish are just scared and hungry.

Laura
 
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