polosniffer
06-24-2003, 12:09 AM
I have a school of 10 zebra danios in my 20gal and have been noticing some really odd behaviour. They generally seem to be perfectly happy, but a few times, when they seem to get really excited (eg. at feeding times) one of the fish will suddenly freeze and go limp. It will float to the bottom, twitching, looking as if it's about to die (which is what I thought was the case when I first saw this). If you give them a shock though (like taking them out of the water and dropping them back in) they seem to snap out of it. After a few sluggish moments they are back to zipping happily around the tank. An additional interesting piece of associated behaviour - when this happened again today, I decided to leave the fish alone to see if it would recover by itself. As it lay twitching on its side, one of the other danios started prodding it frenzidly. It was soon joined by another, and another, until practically all the fish in the tank were swarming about the comatose fish, prodding at it (not biting it) and lifting it up off the gravel towards the surface of the tank. As fascinating as this was, it became apparent that their efforts did not seem to be working, so I picked it out of tank and dropped it back in, which seemed to result in a full recovery. Has anyone else observed anything similar to this?