Gravel?

[nightmare sasuke]

I was just curious about something. I recently put a flower pot in my fish tank and pushed some gravel into it to weigh it down and make it appear to be pressed into the gravel; both of my fish are going inside of it (even the big one which can't even completely fit inside of it) and are picking up the pieces of gravel, swimming them out, and dropping them. Why do they do this? I don't really care if they do, but I thought it was interesting. Are they defending their territory some how? Or is it like a game to them? Or do they just do it to get the algae off of the rocks? I noticed that they never did this before, not until I put the flowerpot in, which was about an hour ago. Or maybe, they just never did things similar to that when I was around before. What do you all think?

 

[dthoffsett]

Most likely they're just rearranging the tank to their liking. I have sand in my tank and my labs spend a lot of their time tunneling, flicking and spitting sand around. The reason they haven't done it before was because there was no flower pot before. Putting it in made a change in their territory, and obviously they feel you didn't place it correctly so they must fix it. Just one of the many joys of cichlid keeping. Try to get some pictures if you can.

 

[SamUK]

yea what he sed.


i always come home to big piles of sand with a fish sittin in a lil hole hes dug.


one of my fish keeps his cave clean too, spits out all the dirt.

 

[garry]

hi..................
congratulations you have some teenagers in your tank (in fish years).....
what you will find is that your fish are coming of sexual age and it is most likely that the male fish is building a cave to lure a female into and have is wicked way (so too speak) ... you will probably have noticed a change i behavier if there were more fish in the tank the fish doing all the excavating would probably be chasing all the other males in tank away from the cave good luck with your breeding
what type of fish are they and do you know if you have one of each sex