Thou Shalt Not Eat Thy Neighbors

[rdmpe]

Which fish is eating it's tank mates? The cardinal tetras which I added last weekend seem to be falling prey to one of the other fish...

1 pearl gourami 3"
1 weather loach 3"
1 oto cat 2"
6 oto cat 1"
1 SAE 3"
1 unknown cat 2"
10 cardinal tetras 1" <<<--- down to 4 in less than a week!
~100+ Malay trumpet snails
~20+ ghost shrimp

So far I haven't found any bodies. However, with the snails and ghost shrimp and cats, I don't think the body would last long. So they could be dying from other causes and then be eaten.

They don't seem very interested in eating the flake food I've been feeding them, but they are active and I can't see any other evidence of sickness.

I would suspect the gourami, but I've never seen it go after the ghost shrimp, so I thought it would be OK with the tetras. Any other ideas?

[thom336]

Pearl Gouramis are a great community fish, so I cant picture it being them. Nor can I picture it being any of the others (curiosity asks what the unknown cats are...).

I would tend to agree that they were dying of some other cause, and corpses being scavenged from before you find out. Whats water quality like? To add 10 fish at a time would be a bit of a strain on the filters. Some other general information, such as tank size, temp, filtration, etc could all help find a cause.

[cdawson]

With 100+ snails and 20 ghost shrimp you probably wouldn't even see the body of a fish if it died. We had the same problem and our snails were eating dead fish before we could find them. I'd come in and be like, "ah....where's the pictus cat??" and I didn't figure it out until I caught him eating our dead cobalt gourami.

[rdmpe]

I think it must have been too many fish added at once. The tank is heavily planted and about a year old. I figured that the fish were so small it would be OK to add ten at once. However it may have been too many at once. The remaining four have been doing fine. I think I'll take a hint and add them four at a time with a couple of weeks in between.