Barb eating other barbs....

[ta2d2001]

Hello all , some help needed...

I have a 20g with 6 tiger barbs and one of the green barbs has taken to nipping the others. One of them has completly lost its anal fin and even some flesh. I have no hospital tank , so I put the injured one into a large pitcher with an air line and some gravel and water from the 20g.
What should I expect from him?
The mean barb immediatly started chasing the other barbs. Is there a way to chill this dude out? I am pretty fond of one barb in there who has grown HUGE and I dont want him chewed up!
Thanks for the help!

 

[NowherMan6]

hi,

i had the same problem with my tiger barbs a while back.
if the injured barb has lost some flesh you might want to dose some melaflex to prevent infection. it'll also encourage the wound to heal. not too sure about the fin though... if it's an anal fin he should be ok, if it was the tail fin I'd think otherwise. also make sure to change that water in the pitcher fairly often... best case would be to get a little hospital tank for now.

as for your crazy barb... as i said, a while back I had 11 tigers, they were the only fish in a 46 gallon tank. one grew larger than the others and started to become very agreesive. he killed several of the other fish before I removed him to a separate tank by himself. I tried reintroducing him a few times but he went right back to bullying. I eventually too the whole lot of them back to the LFS, I didnt have the time or resources to constantly monitor my fish's behavior, so I had to give them up.

you could try taking the aggressive one to a LFS, they may take it, especially if you offer to just give it to them. if you're attached though, I dont know what to tell ya

 

[Dr_Woo]

Whew, thought i was the only one who had this problem. I started out with like 5 tiger barbs, and one became very aggressive and killed 3 others. I went and bought more, thinking another will take over the dominant one. It did, and it started killing other tiger barbs too. Now i am left with 2. One male, and one female. I think i had such bad luck of having all males and one female. If you do want them to stop, my best guess would be to have more females than males. The males have red noses, and are generally more colorful, so go for females. I was dumb enough to only pick out the very "colorful" ones.

 

[Lauren]

one of my gold barbs just took out the top fin of my largest gold bard, leaving some pretty nasty wounds on both sides. I didn't see it, i don't know who is responsible, but i'm surprised the largest one was the victim.

now i need to spend christmas money on a hospital tank I am tempted to put some aquarium salt in the tank for now, to at least try and clean the wound a bit, but would the salt hurt him?