Posts Tagged ‘angelfish’

Lesson learned – Glofish and Angelfish Don’t Mix

Years ago when I first got into keeping aquariums, I had zebra danios and Angelfish.  Over time, the danios died off, but I kept going with angels.  In fact, I have a 4th generation spawn of angels in my 10G fry tank.

I had been thinking about adding some dither fish to the 125G tank in my bedroom to distract the 4 angels in it from constantly beating each other.  Zebra danios are good for that – they are very active swimmers and big enough and fast enough not to be anyone’s lunch.   So, I went to my local Petsmart last weekend to get some zebra danios.  While there, I saw that they have glofish and decided that I’d like to buy those instead of the normal danios.  Now, for those who don’t know what glofish are, they are a Zebra Danio genetically altered to contain a genes that causes bio-fluorescence.  The fluorescent genes was originally added to the fish to detect pollution.  So, basically glofish are a brightly-colored zebra danio.

Knowing that zebra danios like to be in groups of 6 or more, I bought 7 – at $5 each.  I took them home, floated them for a bit, and released them into the tank.  Immediately my 4 angelfish begin hunting the glofish, snapping at them.  One by one they disappeared.  One was left alive, and I found the remains of two more.  But, the other 4 I am afraid were tasty and expensive snacks.  It would seem that the colorful glofish remind them too much of their natural prey.

The remaining glofish swam the tank for about a week.  I felt bad for him, and figured that the angels were probably accustomed to the colorful fish now.  So, I bought 12 more.  Immediately on release, they start getting hunted again.  This time, I netted all of them out and put them into a 55G tank with bandit cichlids and a firemouth.

I now have 13 glowfish zipping around a different tank than I had intended.

Glofish are quite pretty, but they do not mix well with angelfish.