(no subject)

My last german blue ram in the big tank died, after a week of wasting away and nervously flitting around. I watched to make sure it got food, but it never went to the surface - not that strange for a GBR since every now and again they get the dumb and watch me instead of the food. The tiny ram in the 20 gallon does the same thing, no matter how I try to coax it to the surface. It wiggles at the glass "feed me, feed me!" and doesn't stop until some food rains down on its fool head.

Anyway, the big ram died, its long fins shorn.

I googled around for information on how frequently fish die (is this normal?) or what could be causing it, and came up with the usual "disease/parasites" but noticed a trend in the answers: "sounds like the fish is being bullied and wasting away. You said you had angelfish...?"

I look over at the tank. I've lost 6 cories, 4 rams, and 2 plecos since the mystery began, leaving me with 3 cories, 2 congo tetras, 2 swordtails, and 6 angels.

Odds are, if it was an indiscriminate disease or parasites, surely one of the angels would have succumbed by now, right?

And the plecos had torn fins (and they fought all the time, so no surprise) but the cories also showed some signs of being beat up and one lost an eye but who knows who did it, except I have a good idea of, precisely, who the culprits are. And all the fish show signs of having their fins nipped.

The angels have arranged themselves, conveniently, according to age and price. The two ladies are the biggest, over a year old now. The two $20 angels are the smallest. The $10 angels have grown considerably-- the four started at roughly the same size, but the $10 have grown faster and turned... meaner. They'll boss around the ladies, who are probably twice their size. The two small angels have shown repeated signs of being nipped--not uncommon with angels, but distressing because they're the fancy butts: a pinoy paraiba (not a wide fin though) and a Philippine smokey blue. Never mind that you can't see the paraiba in my black aquarium, he's a fancy one.

The next targets may not be so cheap. So do I wait and see, or do I freak out now? Maybe it is a disease, I don't know. Probably not, since it only takes out a fish every month or so (it's been two months since the last death) and that's just a strange time scale for a disease. And what do I do-- save the pretty and expensive fish, or keep the two pretty murdering fish? One is a koi with a little bandit mask (so charming!) and the other is a 1/2 wild Peruvian and very pretty.

Gaaaah FIIIIISH. Clearly I should have sprung for discus instead. Though if I did that, it would certainly be a disease and I'd be out several hundred dollars on discus.