a few weeks ago i had finally got all of my clown loaches to come out after having them hide for several months and almost never seeing them.
i did quite a few things to make them more happy like raising the water temps slihgtly, doing a weekly or bi-weekly water change, increasing air, adding more plants. i wasn't really certain what did it but they started comming out and schooling for hours on end.
the same thing happened again a week ago. they would just hide all of the time and i would never see them.
i think i found the connection between the two times. udring both intrances, the clowns had very cramped hiding places where 3-5 of them could all cram themselves into. these were very small areas, somtimes an inch in diameter and very dark. the first time i fixed this by breaking a piece of driftwood apart. the second time i had added a plastic fake tree stump. after removing that stump (took 10 minutes to get the 7 loaches out of it) i come down this morning and see all of my loaches schooling together.
this is some sort of loach behavior. i don't know if it's beacuse my dominant loach does it so they all follow or if it's an instinct. either way, it's something that i thought i should share.
they still have many hiding places right now. i'd say more than half a dozen where they cannot be seen, however, none of these places are completly dark or very small.
when they are schooling, they may just be mucking around or maybe looking for somemore cramped places. this may be a bit selfish but i'd like to see them every once in a while, even if they aren't perfectly happy. when schooling like this however, i think they are pretty close to it.
i'll be setting up a web cam and i'll get some video recordings of the schooling for you guys in the near future.
i did quite a few things to make them more happy like raising the water temps slihgtly, doing a weekly or bi-weekly water change, increasing air, adding more plants. i wasn't really certain what did it but they started comming out and schooling for hours on end.
the same thing happened again a week ago. they would just hide all of the time and i would never see them.
i think i found the connection between the two times. udring both intrances, the clowns had very cramped hiding places where 3-5 of them could all cram themselves into. these were very small areas, somtimes an inch in diameter and very dark. the first time i fixed this by breaking a piece of driftwood apart. the second time i had added a plastic fake tree stump. after removing that stump (took 10 minutes to get the 7 loaches out of it) i come down this morning and see all of my loaches schooling together.
this is some sort of loach behavior. i don't know if it's beacuse my dominant loach does it so they all follow or if it's an instinct. either way, it's something that i thought i should share.
they still have many hiding places right now. i'd say more than half a dozen where they cannot be seen, however, none of these places are completly dark or very small.
when they are schooling, they may just be mucking around or maybe looking for somemore cramped places. this may be a bit selfish but i'd like to see them every once in a while, even if they aren't perfectly happy. when schooling like this however, i think they are pretty close to it.
i'll be setting up a web cam and i'll get some video recordings of the schooling for you guys in the near future.
they love jamming as many of themselves as they can into a tiny area(loaches should go on spring break, they'd win all the "see how many of you can pack into this car/tent/phonebooth!" games