Mating Behaviors Or Fighting?

[KRamgren89]

so its been forever since i have posted anything. i gave up on my freshwater angels and my friend at my LFS took them in. and since then we rehomed both our sterbai cories since we couldn't find anymore around here and added to our bronze and unfortunately lost 5 of 6 rummy nose tetras but are waiting for our shipment to come in and will be getting more.

so on to the real topic! i just couldn't stay away from gourami's something about this fish really catches me so we went out and bought a beautiful male Gourami that was labeled as a blue, but when we got him home and watched him relax we think he might be a blue/yellow cross? his bottom fins are more like the yellows, and his eyes are half red like yellows.. he was different, all the blue gourami ive seen and or owned have just been blue with light stripes if any at all really (unless they were really dominant then out came the stripes) but his over all color wasent the pale blue i was used to it was darker and his stripes and spots were a constant from the start, and now that he has met the new girl you can hardly see his spots he is such a dark color! and his bottom fins is almost flourecent!

well we had the male for a month or so and decided we wanted to get him a girlfriend so we went to our LFS today and seen a beautiful true blue 3 spot gourami and it looked like she was carrying eggs (she's really fat you'll see the pic!) so we bought her and took her home. they touched alot with their ventral fins through the bag and as soon as i let them out together they would grab onto eachothers tails! (literally she would have his tail the same time he would have hers) at first i thought it was mating behavior and then i checked back on her and seen that her tail looks a little worse for wear.


now the male is perfectly fine just turned a REAL dark color as soon as he spotted the little gal. but the girl looks like her tail fin is pretty raw from all this horse play. they seem fine now, he is just following her all around the tank and occasionally poking her with his ventral fin clearly annoying her. can someone tell me if they were fighting or what this behavior was?

i added some melafix into the tank when we brought her home cuz her fins looked a little ragged, she was in a tank with two full grown kissing gourami and they were HUGE. so hopefully this helps the bites. but any info on what i can do to make her comfy and about their behavior would be appreaciated! and also maybe confirm their fishy breeds!

 

[Ruskull]

Hello! Those are 2 great looking Gouramis but in my humble opinion they're both female. The top one is darker because it's stressed, probably out of competition with the other female. My Opaline female always gets darker in color & the patterns are more pronounced whenever I'm doing a water change or if she gets spooked somehow. I consider her like a mood ring.

 

[onidrase]

Looks like stress to me. Gouramis don't tend to like each other very much. The chasing and nipping is just territorial disputes. Blue, opaline, and gold (all the same species, known as three spot gouramis) are actually rather aggressive, amongst their own species, and other species as well. In smaller tanks, they tend to just dominate everything.

Also be aware that your female might not be full of eggs, but rather bloated from over eating, constipation, or parasites. It's never good to buy a fat fish (unless it's a female livebearer, in which it might actually be full of babies) try to only grab the ones that look healthy, rather than the ones the LFS mark as "special" or "pregnant"