Platy fish bully

zarasunflower

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Feb 17, 2021
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Bristol, UK
Hi,

I have a fairly heavily planted established 55L tank with 5 female platy fish and 1 snail. Due to me being inexperienced and buying bad stock from pets at home, I had two deaths early on this year. This left me with two adult platy fish. While checking for illness, they were kept with just each other for about 3 weeks. These two remaining ones started very shy but in the recent months have both become more aggressive and chase each other round too much. Specifically one of them, called Cumin, has been bullying the other, named Corrie. Cumin also bullied one of my other fish before she died (I believe it was parasites, but she died before the treatment arrived).

I know that platy fish prefer groups, so I recently bought 3 more female platy fish, which are of course smaller than my old ones. I was hoping that this would curb some of the aggression that Cumin showed Corrie. However, I have had the new fish for 3 days and Cumin is being an absolute nightmare. This involves, chasing the new fish if they eat ANY food (Cumin isnt lacking food, she will literally stop eating to attack the new fish) and is still showing aggression towards Corrie. Weirdly, Corrie is also chasing the newer fish, but to a much lesser extent. I don't know what to do. The tank is quite heavily planted to catching Cumin to put her in time-out is very hard.

Parameters: 0ppm Ammonia 0ppm Nitrites and 0-5ppm Nitrates.
No fertilisers, no CO2. Using a Fluval U1 filter.
 
I have a similar issue with male Platys, I had three and one of them was constantly been bullied, so I introduced a fourth male to spread out the aggression, the hierarchy changed and the newly introduced Platy teamed up with the original bully and now the 2 smallest of them are been chased. I think size definitely matters with Platys, they rank in hierarchy from biggest to smallest, unfortunately the smaller they are the more they take the brunt of the bullying, hope you manage to work it out.
 

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