Worried About New Endlers!

[Lampshade444]

I Have a 95litre tank wich has been set up for over six months now and curently has perfect water chemistry!
I have a couple of catfish a neon tetra and 3 guppies and today bought 7 endlers from my lfs!
Almost imedeately after adding the endlers to the tank the females started to act weird, laying against the gravel on the floor of the tank and only swimming tiny bits at a time! All the males are acting fine! Since, one of the females has gotten a little better, swimming in the same spot about 2 inches from the floor of the tank, but the other three havent really been moving! I have turned the light off in the hope that they will get used to the tank more quickly that way! These are my first endlers so i dont know what to expect!

Any advice!?
Is this normal?
Is there anything i can do!?
THanks you in advance!!

 

[fatheadminnow]

Did you acclimate them properly? Fish are skittish at first until they get comfortable with their new environment.

Also, 7 fish at one time is far too many to add. You should add about 1-2 fish a week. You are most likely going to have an ammonia spike followed by a nitrite spike. Watch your water parameters closely for the next week or so to see if anything goes out of whack.

You should also quarantine new fish prior to adding them to your main tank.

-FHM

 

[Lampshade444]

Thanks for the reply! I also forgot to add that i removed 8 fish a few hours before adding the new fish so it wouldnt be much shock to the tank! Ya i followed all the right procedures to adding them to the tank! But no, i didnt quarentine them!

 

[fatheadminnow]

Okay, then you should be good on water parameters.

I would just give it sometime then; let them settle in.

-FHM

 

[OldMan47]

Endlers and guppies require almost identical water. The endlers average much tougher than guppies if they are pure endlers. There are still people who insist that endlers are guppies, although the genetic testing being done has proven that wrong to my satisfaction. What you do have is a fish that prefers its water a bit warmer than a guppy, but not much. One problem that I see with your setup is that you have both endlers and guppies in the same tank. That is always a mistake. They are quite capable of cross breeding and producing fish that are not good guppies or endlers. It may even be what you have purchased, since few fish shops bother to mention that they are selling hybrids. My own estimate is that over 90% of the "endlers" that I see are guppy crosses. I breed registered pure endlers and find that the fish claiming to be endlers are obviously, to me and others like me, not true endlers. If you indeed got lucky with true endlers, they are very likely to recover and soon overpopulate whatever tank they have been put into.