Attacking Gourami!

[rachellouise]

hi there
ill start at the begining.....
we have a 60litre tank and went to an aquatic shop and got 6 neons and 2 guppies, about a week later we got 2 male dwarf gouramis(pets at home).
both the gouramis got sick with white fluffy growths the the fins so as recommened we treated the tank with methlene blue.
however one gourami died-so did one guppy but not fromt he same thing!

so....we had one gourami and one guppy, fish which i thought should be kept in pairs at least.
went to another aquatic shop and asked for advice-would they be ok left solo of should i buy more to replace the fish that had died.

was told they would be ok but io decided to get one particulary nice guppy(male same as the other one) with i really long tale and also got 2 red platis......

however my gourami is now attacing the three new fish and my nice guppy now has a shreded tail. rang pets at home where i got him from and the answer was they are not usually aggressive-something i now dont believe after ready they can be quite nasty.

what should i do now? p@h wont have him back but unfortunatly he is the one causing a problem for the other fish?
did think it could be because the other one died but he was never that nice to him!!

advice need please as my other fish are trying to take shelter under some rocks.

 

[luque]

i had the same problem with my guppies, but i had two gouramis and in the 2 weeks i had them one trebled in size and one stayed the same because he bullied every fish in there. i took him back in the end. but im not sure what you can do with yours sorry, maybe offload him to a friend or something.

 

[MartinD]

First point - Never ever ever get your fish from Pets @ Home. They don't know what they're doing, they get 5 minutes 'training' and are suddenly
experts. They should never have sold you two male Gourami's for the same tank.

If you have Gourami's you should always sex-pair them - 1 male to (at least) 1 female. I've been through all of this before and I would
never have more than 1 male gourami in a tank together.

The best thing you can do at the moment is to create more shelter for your other fish (rocks, bogwood? plenty of plants) and hope they can
find enough hiding places until you can offload the aggressive male Gourami to a friend or another pet store. Usually, Aquatic Shops will take
a fish off you and sometimes give you credit for it.

The white fluffy growth you mentioned sounds like fin rot - you can use the methane blue for this but it tends to die the silicone in your tank
blue if you use enough and you can't get rid of the staining. One things i have tried in the past is a salt bath (in a seperate tank or bowl) for
a few hours - this helped a lot and cleaned up the fin rot within 24 hours.

So, sorry I can't give you good news - I think it's best you offload the aggresive Gourami otherwise you'll never have a peaceful community tank.

 

[dollfaced]

Maybe your gourami is being territorial. I have two tanks, one 55 gallon with a male gourami, and one 20 gallon with another male. The one in the 55 is with fish bigger than he is so he leaves everyone alone and has his hiding hole. The one in the 20 gallon will chase my danios when they go to the back right corner of that tank (his territory). I would suggest finding that gourami a new home.

 

[bike_riding_cichlid]

You don't have to give the gourami away if you can find it a new tank. A 10 gallon will do.