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An Article by George J. Reclos

Sometimes, fish aggression causes wounds, even severe ones. Then you have to isolate your fish and treat their wounds to avoid secondary infections. Isolating the fish means that you have a tank which is set up with the right temperature and is ready to receive the wounded fish. What happens if all your tanks are already occupied with recovering fish and / or breeding pairs ? You simply have to transfer one of the partially recovered fish to one of those tanks. Recently, my male Nimbochromis venustus (3 years old; 24 cm) was badly wounded by the male Cyrtocara moorii (5 years old; 24 cm). In order to treat it I needed an empty tank since its situation was really bad and any tankmate would take advantage of it. The only tank with only one inhabitant was a 140 liter one housing a recovering male Cyrtocara moorii (2 years old; 15 cm). The fish was found nearly dead following a very serious fight with a wild caught Fossorochomis rostratus (22 months old; 18 cm). At the time of the incident the C.moorii had partially recovered from the wounds so I thought there would be no risk to transfer it to a tank housing a breeding trio of Haplochromis nyererei (Lake Victoria rock fish). The latter is known to be extremely aggressive but I thought the difference in size would keep aggression at bay. I turned off the lights in the nyererei tank, waited for one hour and then transferred the C.moorii hoping that this red devil had gone to sleep.

After exactly 23 seconds, the tank was like boiling. I turned on the lights again only to find the two gladiators making big circles progressively closing in. Both fish are really aggressive but fight in different ways. The smaller (H. nyererei) is much faster and more versatile thus prefers to strike in the side while the C.moorii is more powerful, less fast and will go for a direct hit, preferably a jaw lock. Under normal circumstances, the H. nyererei might choose not to engage with such a bigger opponent but there were three reasons that forced it to: Firstly, it was its own tank for over a year, secondly, there were two of its females in that tank so it had to protect its territory (one female can be seen next to it) and thirdly, it is far more agressive than mbuna.   Continued in next page

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