One of our albino catfish has been acting strangely from the time we brought it about three weeks ago, but now it is even worse. It swims upside down, does back flips, gets caught up in the weed and then nose dives into anything in it's way. At times it will lay on the bottom of the tank either on it's side or at weird angles, and looks dead, except that you can see the gills working really hard. The other fish in the tank (25 guppies and 3 other catfish) are doing just fine. The tank is 144 litres, pH nuetral and tank is cycled. Does anyone know what could be the problem, we wake every morning to find it alive and not floating on the surface of the water as expected.
crazy catfish
- Thread starter fish'n'chips
- Start date
Cheers for the advice tank angel. We have what i believe to be a lot of oxygen being pumped into the tank. The poor little fella seemed to just get worse. I watched him lying on his side, then suddenly do a couple of back flips land on his back and just lay their for a minute or more. It all got a bit much for me so i ended up putting him down. I just wish i new why he went like that, as our left over three are doing good. They are nicely active racing around the bottom searching for food and every now and then darting up to the top to gulp a bit of air, which i thought was quite normal. The tank has cycled (which i have the test kits for), the ph is neutral and the temp is set at 26 celsius which varies between 24 to 28. The guppies don't pick on them and we vaccum the gravel and do a 30% water change once a fortnight.
Maybe the poor little fellow was just old and senile.
Maybe the poor little fellow was just old and senile.
Sounds to me like he may have been "damaged" some how. Lots of things can happen on the way to the LFS from the supplier/natural habitat. Someone could have pinched him with a net, dropped his bag...who knows. Sounds like putting the lil fella out of his misery was the best thing you could have done.