Gold Barbs

echoofformless

echoofformless

Peat Advocate & Defender Of Snails
Oct 1, 2005
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Phil Uh Del Feeya
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Does anyone have experience with these characters? I'm considering buying a few for my twenty gallon Asian pseudo-tope but I keep reading conflicting reports of their aggressive tendencies.

I know that most barbs are semi-aggressive, but lots of people on the web say that they gold barbs are peaceful. Others on the web say they are like any other barb.

Do they eat hair algae? I read that they'll do that.

Anyone?
 
My gold barbs are farely peaceful and tend to stick together. As for their eating habit? Have you ever owned a goldfish because that is the only fish I could compare them to. They tend to eat anything and everything except for my live plants. I don't know about hair algae though because I've never had it.
 
I have a quartette of Gold Barbs and they do nibble at the short fuzzy hair grass, but my pair of Rosy Barbs eat more, and also eat pond snails, shell and all, if they can get them in their mouths. The Tiger Barbs don't seem interested in algae, except if it gets food particles caught in it ... Fish Flakes with algae garnish and a side order of fresh-laid eggs is their favorite meal.

Patricia
 
I have seven Gold Barbs in a tank with White Clouds and Harlequin Rasboras. I have seen no aggressive tendencies at all. I got the scheme from David Boruchowitz's Simple Guide to Freshwater Aquariums and it is supposed to be a peaceful, quasi-Asian community scheme.

Now, the Gold Barbs do seem to have the most voracious appetities of any of the species in there, and they actually are pretty good scavengers. They will pick stuff off the bottom that the other fish don't bother with. Also, when I introduced a couple White Cloud fry that accidentally came with a couple adults from the LFS, the Barbs outraced everyone and didn't even slow down to swallow the fry. (I don't have the facilities to raise the fry, but had hoped maybe they'd find a hiding place and be OK.) Of course, all of the fish swarmed to go after the fry, but the Barbs beat everyone else.

On a side note, I went out of town for a week for Thanksgiving, and thought I'd try one of the dissolving pyramid feeders. I tried one for the few days before I left. Because the barbs seem happy to feed from the bottom, I think they were the only fish actually feeding from the block.

The Barbs also did a pretty good job cleaning the brown diatoms off the fake plants in there when I introduced them.
 
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