black skirt business

[tim watson]

hello peoples
the other day i noticed two of my six black skirts were quite fat, and i noticed that they were the leaders of there little group, that night i watched them eat their frozen bloodworms, whom they shar with 2 bala shark, 2 paerl gouramis and a female betta.
i saw that ,because they are the boss, were right in front of the place where i feed themjust swimming in the current of the filtered water. i dropped the little cube of frozen bloodworms in the water pipe and watched them eat. i found that these fishes were getting a large portion of the food, and this was why they were so fat. i have a 10 gallon tak with 5 guppies, would this be a good place to put them on a diet, or is it ok for them to be fat?>>>>
thanks :cool: :p :p

[ewok]

i would think it's sort of a normal dominance thing, it seems to happen in most of my tanks where there is a bigger mix of fish. moving them to the 10g will probably just move the problem if the guppies are still present. over-eating is generally bad for any animal or fish, i think i have seen one article spefically on fish. i don't remember specifics tho, other than it was sort of bad.

in this case i don't see a way to control it.... maybe do more with flakes, or pre-melt the worms and scatter them in the tank. you need to food to be more distributed i think, for it to change and even that may not help. normally my staple diet is flake, pellets or crumbles and i use the frozen once or twice a week as treats.

something else you might want to try, is the frozen brineshrimp. they melt pretty rapidly and disperse around the tank. it might give the other fish more chances to get to it........