Adopting loaches - will it work?

[helen nightingale]

Ey, thanks for your kind comments.

i would think the shop you go to gets active/boisterous fish, i f people are keeping them on their own, without realising the problem. they can be quite feisty like this (i am glad i learned my lesson)

About the risk. defaintely follow everyone else's advise on quarantine, and at least a month if you can. if your friend didnt have much time to maintain his tank, the, no offense to him, but the fish may not as physicaly strong as they could be - a bit like us getting a cold when we are stressed. you dont want the new ones bringing in new bugs to infect your exiting fish, but also when fish get stressed, which they will do by adding new, big fish, disease can come out.

if you see your fish fighting when you add the new ones, i would not take the new ones out straight away. As you said, you know somebody who ended up with a dead fish, so i cant deny there is a risk of this happening, but hopefully it wont. mine went very white, with lots of chasing and contact with each other, but they didnt bite each other badly. there was a few marks on both the fish at the end of the brawl, but only minor. it wasnt nice to watch, but they calmed down in the end.

when i got 4 baby rostrata, none of them batted an eyelid.


the bonus of giving the loaches a long quarantine is that you can start with the water the same as your friend's, and gradually alter it if your tank has different water. it makes acclimatising the fish so much easier, and less stressfull for the fish and you

[starsplitter7]

Experiences vary, especially since personalities in fish vary. I have clowns, yoyos, striatas, darios together along with two green tigers without any major issues. I had them together before I knew there might be a major issue.

I have some minor scuffles, but nothing major. My clowns had a scuffle last week, and my yoyos frequently chase each other, but no major issues.

I agree with everyone: quarantine for a month or two.

[ey]

Thanks for the replies from everyone.

I will post a detailed response later.

Just a very quick question though - when transporting the loaches from my friend's house to my place (which is less than a 5 minute drive), what is the best way to transport them in order to minimise the stess? I have some fish bags which I could use to put them in or alternatively I was thinking a small bucket while getting someone to hold onto the bucket on the drive back.

The problem with using the fish bag is that I have no air pump to pump the bag up. For those that transported fish, what have you used?

[chefkeith]

If it's only a 5 minute drive, then air in the fish bag shouldn't matter.

Buckets with a lid can work as well just as long as it won't tip over.