My tiger barbs funny dance!

YZFR1rider

YZFR1rider

Large Fish
#1
Dec 11, 2002
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Flint, Michigan
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#1
I just notice my one of the 8 tiger barbs I have will go vertical with his nose pointing towards the rocks and he/she does like a dance it looks like, shaking really fast or almost vibrating. Well my theory is that it is a female and it is showing off to the males. Also I noticed one of the tiger barbs has 3 little white specs in the tail fin is this some sort of disease or bacteria if so how can I cure it. Well any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
matt
 

A

Antony

Small Fish
#3
Dec 5, 2002
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Melbourne Australia
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#3
Er...

That funny dance is what Tiger Barbs do when they are suffering from high levels of Nitrates! ie they swim vertical with their nose pointing down.

Each fish has its own tolerance level to nitrates.

Best do a water change.

The white spots could be ich as per soulfish's suggestion.

Cheers
Antony
 

C

colesea

Superstar Fish
#9
Oct 22, 2002
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#9
Don't trust the recomended levels on your test kit. Any nitrate is bad nitrate, and if the one tiger barb is especially sensitive, then you probably want to do a water change before the nitrates start affecting the other members of the school.

Use that one sensitive barb as your index fish. Every time it does its little dance, you know you'll need to do a water change. Makes it a whole lot easier than using a test kit<G>. Biologist do the same thing all the time, using the animals in the environment to judge environmental health. It is called biological indexing.
~~Colesea
 

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Antony

Small Fish
#11
Dec 5, 2002
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Melbourne Australia
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#11
Yes Geoff same thing.

Because its a new tank theres no bacteria to break down the nitrates.... ie the term used is that the tank is yet to cycle...

Hopefully after a few days maybe a week the levels will start to right themselves!!!

You can buy something like Hagen Cycle which adds the right sort of bacteria to the tank to help kick on the process.

Cheers
Antony
 

G

geoff

Large Fish
#14
Dec 14, 2002
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#14
Ok, now I'm a little confused. Since it's a new tank, I didn't think that there would be any nitrates yet. I thought the cycle went from Ammonia>Nitrites>Nitrates. Then we do the water changes to dilute the nitrate?
 

A

antsinger

Small Fish
#15
Dec 4, 2002
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#15
Only two of the six TB's I just got (4 days now) are doing this new dance. I'm pretty sure it's due to the fact they have a bad case of Ick. The only thing that is wrong with the tank is that the PH is about 8.0. The other tests are all fine.
 

equinom

equinom

Large Fish
#16
Oct 22, 2002
386
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The Blue Planet
#16
According to my Aquarium Problem Solver book - that tiger barb nose down dance is high nitrates. They even have a photo of that exact thing!
It's funny, though. I have a female green tiger, that when things get calm in the tank - she goes vertical: nose up. She's been doing that for months. She's the only one that does it. (I have 7 TBs - 2 are green, 1 is female) When she's doing this and you approach the tank - she straightens out and comes to the front of the tank. She also eats like a horse.
I think the TBs just like to mess with our heads...
 

K

keprydak

Large Fish
#17
Oct 22, 2002
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#17
Originally posted by Nativefish Boy
Yalp, thats a sing of nitrate poisoning.
Click to expand...
I thought it was Nitrite poisoning? There is traceable amounts of Nitrate in my tiger barbs' tank, and they haven't done their headstands since the end of the Nitrite spike in the cycle.

... Now that I am reading about it again, my book says Nitrite.


At any rate, when my tiger barbs' sleep, they sleep in the headstand posistion....
 

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