I Really Need Some Gouramis Help

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wwestar2000

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Well I had a blue gouramie all alone in a 20 gallon. I wanted to give it a tankmate so i fot one which was the same but had a little orange on the bottom fin. But they started to like display to eachother and grabbing eachothers fins and shaking there heads. It looks really brutal. So i seporated them. I thought that with more fish it will even out and kill alot of the aggression so i got another blue a golden and a moonshine. But the one that i think is the male is still extremely aggressive. Even the female i hade first is being mean to the new ones. Is there any restrictions on sexes one can keep in a tank? anything i can do?
 
What you can do is return all those fish you added to the tank.

Male blue (three-spot color morph - all your gouramies are Trichogaster trichopterus except the 'moonshine' which is probably Trichogaster microlepis) are particularly aggressive and territorial fish and, to be kept with other gouramies, need a lot of room and a big group of females. Keeping two male together almost inevitably results in the death of one or both of them as they tend to fight with each other - often as brutaly as Betta splendens - and, if they don't out-right kill each other, the stress and injuries usualy leed to death.

Adding the other gouramies when your original fish had already settled into its tank and established a territory only made things worse as it would have viewed the newcomers as 'intruders' and would have wanted to get rid of them. If this had been a larger tank and you added a large group of female gouramies, things may well have turned out ok as any aggression displayed by the male (assuming it was a male) would have been split between the females , diluting it and making it less severe.

Note that, whereas you can keep a male with a group of 2 or more females, the tank needs to be heavily planted/have lots of hiding places and it needs to be quite large (30 gallons would be the absolute minnimum for a trio but more is better). You also need to consider that three-spots are the easiest gourami to spawn - but when they spawn, all hell breaks loose as the male becomes especialy aggressive as he guards his nest and, at this point, he may turn his attention towards non-gourami tankmates as well as his mates and it's not unusual for male three-spots guarding their nests to kill fish they'd otherwise ignore (such as rasboras or cory catfish). Basicaly, if you want a mixed-sex group, you need to be prepaired in case they breed. Heavily planting a large tank and keeping the water flow relatively strong and the temperature relatively low will help reduce aggression/chances of them breeding. But, if they breed, you need to only have very fast fish (such as danios and some barbs - but nothing nippy as that'll just provoke the gouramies even more) or fish that'll stay well out of the way (eg: nocturnal/semi-nocturnal catfish, most plecs, some loaches etc).

Because your tank's not big enough for mroe than one three-spot (and therefore not big enough for any other gouramies), you need to re-home all of your except one ASAP.
Also, moonshine gouramies (assuming we are talking about Trichogaster microlepis) grow to at least 7" and, while they are less aggressive than three-spots, need to be in a bigger tank.
 
I agree, I have a 30 gal with 8 Blue Gouramis, as soon as I found I had 3 males I traded them in. With my experence even one male can be agressive towards the females. I now have 5 females in a planted tank and things are going good. I think the problem with your female you started with is that she was in the tank alone and sees it as hers. If you rearange the tank add more plants get rid of the ones that get too big, I think you could keep 2-3 blue gouramis in 20 gal tank. They can get up to 6 in, but the females that I have keeped have not gotten bigger than 4 in, and I have had them for over a year. But gouramis are not agressive to other kinds of fish, you could also go with a small group of schooling fish instead of a gourami. Hope this helps I went through the same thing.
 
yeah all this seems fairly common, gouramis can have a nak for being somewhat agressive at times. Being that gouramis are my favorite group of fish i have realized that gouramis are very personable and over time develope unique personalities. I found that oftentimes the first non-dwarf gourami that you add to a tank will become the king (or queen) of your tank, and will be agressive to any new comer and will be aggresive to it for a while, afterwords he (or she) will accept this newcomer to the tank society. this gourami also will act as the law inforcer, if two other fish get in a dispute he will often come between and seperate the two. right now the king gourami i have is pretty laid back and accepting but can have a temper he is a 6" moonlight and has two pearl buddys (one 4" and one 2"). the most dominating king ive had was a 5" paradise fish who was my favorite fish ive ever had. he got so pissed when ever i added a fish to his 29Gal that he would ram the bag as hard as he could, i often feared that he would pop the bag. Any ways like i said each gourami has its own individual personality and each case is different in regards to aggresion.
 

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