Aggressive fish and pecking orders

[afremont]

Reading up on Serpae tetras today and discovered that according to the experts they hang at the top of the tank and tend to be too aggressive to keep with danios or long finned fish like gouramis. Well in my tank and apparently many others, they(5) hang at the bottom. They didn't seem to want to come above the mid layer to get food until they figured that the danios were getting too much by eating at the surface and chowing on the falling flakes. Now they come right to the surface to eat, but they seem to prefer the falling bits. The alpha male in my tank appears to be one small danio. Too funny, you should see him chase the tetras around and they never turn on him. So far he's steering clear of the gourami. The gourami continues to do his own thing most of the time.

The day that I put the "dwarf" gourami (~2.5") in there, the tetras all came up and tried to intimidate him as a pack. He pretty much ignores them other than trying avoid being impaled at feeding time when they are darting around trying to hog all the food. They don't seem to nip at him, I think they're simply intimidated by his size even though he's real laid back. The gourami is getting with the program on the short duration of feeding time. He was pretty slow for a few days, but I guess he's decided he'd like to eat so he's really stepping up to the plate now. I really like him, I wish I could find him a girl friend but they seem to be unavailable.

In another tank I have a red tailed shark that thinks he lives alone until the food comes out. Then he spends most of his time chasing the other fish away from the food. Of course there is only one of him and five of them so they all get plenty to eat and he misses out.

Everybody got bloodworms today for the first time. The tetras pretty much acted like I expected, but my cute little mosquito fish turned into savages with each other. Nobody got hurt, but there was allot of action and tug of war during the frenzy. Size didn't seem to matter when it came to bravery. Amazingly, the really small fry could run off with a worm and escape a much larger fish by making sharper turns. They move fast.

Anyone else have unusual pecking orders going on?

[eklikewhoa]

I think every tank has its hierarchy battles but it is indeed fun to watch.

[SunnyHouTX]

Yeah, fun to watch:

[Numero111]

I also have serpae tetras with a gourami and a blue ram with other bottom feeders. I also notice them doing the same thing and they are at the bottom of the pecking order and I have a 12 gallon with gourami tiger barbs and danios with one guppy and the only one who does chasing is the gourami and I was told by several that they would all kill eachother.

[afremont]

After doing some digging around, there seems to be an awful lot of cut-and-paste going on with the information available. I was reading up on pygmy sunfish and came upon a study. The whole thing basically involved several ten gallon tanks, one per species. They also had some five gallons for spawning and studying mating behavior. All in all it looked like a fairly unscientific experiment what with the way things appeared to be handled. Nothing remotely resembled the normal conditions the fish would experience in the wild, yet anything the fish did in this unnatural environment now became documented as the "typical" behavior of these fish. Hmmmm.....

[afremont]

Clarification: I don't mean to come off like I'm some kind of fish expert, because that is far from reality. I'm just intrigued to find that in this hobby, like many hobbies and fields, there seems to be allot of (dis)information that is passed around by well meaning folks as gospel but that may not actually be correct in all cases.

For example, when researching the mosquitofish I caught in my backyard, it became rapidly apparent that there were two schools of thought on them. One group sees them as the final solution to mosquito borne disease, the other sees them as an invasive pest that displaces other more beneficial species. Each side seems to base their case on relatively few actual observations. The "fors" are all about the voracious appetites that can consume 1 to 1.5 times their body weight (who knows if this is per day, per feeding or a one time event after a long fast). The "againsts" cite one study where a scientist examined the contents of 2000 fish (no mention of if they were collected in one location or not) and found that they had primarily been eating other fish' and frogs eggs. Without context both arguments seem meaningless, sensational perhaps, but meaningless.

I'm thinking that there are people here that know far more about caring for certain species than you could ever learn by reading all the material available, but they're not writing books. They're raising fish. There's really not allot of unique information available on the internet about many types of common fish, just allot of cut-and-paste of the same (unverified and often conflictin) information over and over.

Trying to determine how to put together a successful cichlid tank has been an impossibility, for the world (youtube) is filled with "impossible to combine" collections of fish that seem to get along fine. Yet most reading material I find leaves me feeling that I might be able to keep one cichlid in a 200 gallon tank by itself, maybe. ;-)

[Numero111]

Agreed I will find more useful info from lfs staff then on the Internet and usually ones who have already tried it