weird behaviour

[free]

my pakistani loach is behaving strangely, i think! i have noticed that he seems to "fall asleep" in the late evening when i turn the lights down. the 1st couple of times i thought he was a goner. is this normal behaviour for loach? i have bought another as a friend, but the new one (were two, but one died within days) is a lot smaller, ie; an inch as opposed to around 5 inches, i know they are shoaling fish, but these two ignore each other completely, should i get another? i have a trigon 350, so there is no problem with space, although there are a number of other fish as well.

[Diana]

Loaches do tend to try to fool us by playing dead. They are very good at it, too. Often this involves lying in a cave or on the substrate on their side or back, with not much gill movement until you get ready to remove the 'corpse'. Then you jump backwards across the room as the 'corpse' takes 3 laps around the tank and I can almost hear mine laughing, "Ha! Ha! Gotcha!"

I have found most Loaches are quite tolerant of other Loaches that are younger/smaller. Sometimes they ignore them, other times they sort of take them under their fin and are almost like a surrogate parent.
I would suggest more than just 2. In small numbers is it easy for them to get irritated with each other, and the lower ranking Loach will get a lot of harassment. With 5+ Loaches they seem to take turns being the lowest ranking Loach so that the pestering is spread out.