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Cardinal behaviour.......

Alastair

Alastair

Member
Joined
27 Dec 2009
Messages
4,400
Location
Denton, Manchester
Hi guys, I wasn't sure whether to pop this in the inverts section or on here, but I'll try here first. Not long ago, I added 20 shrimp to my tank, covered the inlets of my filters, however slowly my shrimp started dissappearing, finally being left with one large cherry shrimp. All my water stats were fine etc. So, I ordered 30 off here the other week, only again to see numbers drastically dropping. I wasn't finding any dead ones or anything.
This morning however, during my water change whilst the filters were off, I noticed my cardinals were in different groups around the tank doing what I thought was chasing each other. Looking closer I saw that they were infact ganging up on my cherry shrimp and pulling bits off them, or grabbing them and swimming off being chased by the rest of them. Then my black neons joined in.....surely this isn't right, I thought fish this small wouldn't bother with them????
 
Ihave seen the same happen, chase them, nip them and hunt them down, nipping every leg from them then demolishing the body, mine were fine together till the first day i introduced easi carbo, it seemed to have an effect on the cherry shrimp, making them a bit drowsey or slugish, that was enough to grab the attention of the cardinal tetras, once they got a taste for them i would say that they ate approx 100 cherry shrimp within 2 weeks. i hav'nt seen a shrimp in the tank since then
 
That definitely confirms what I saw then. Bloody shame too as my plants were being kept lovely and clean. I was actually thinking of going for japonica shrimp but if they are going to do the same with those then I shouldn't waste my money. I know they are super greedy with food but watching that today I felt really tight. I even tried to stop them with tweezers and my net but they were completely oblivious 😡
 
cardinals are pretty amazing fish, i tried feeding some bananna to my geophagus and plecs recently in a large tank, there is a shoal of about 120-130+ cardinals in there and they gobbled up the bananna before the other fish even got a look in, i have found them to be the scavengers of the amazon, not at all fussy about food and willing to give anything in the water a try to see if it is edible
 
Hi all,
As a general rule "black-water" fish like Cardinals aren't at all fussy about what they eat. This is because the black-water is very low in nutrients and quite a challenging environment for invertebrates (technical term is oligotrophic). As an example most black water areas don't have mosquitos, which makes fish collecting a lot more comfortable, but makes life more difficult for the fish. The outcome of this is that if the fish recognise an item as food they will eat it, and if it is a novel food item they will try it and if it isn't actively un-palatable eat it. A lot of their food items are terrestrial insects etc that end up in the water during seasonal flooding etc.

Details are in "Rio Negro, rich life in poor water. Amazonian diversity and food chain ecology as seen through fish communities. Goulding, M | Leal Carvalho, M | Ferreira, EG
SPB ACADEMIC PUBLISHING, THE (NETHERLANDS). 1988. "

I think if you go for fish with shrimp from the vegetated waters, like the "pantanal", where there is a lot of aquatic growth and the water is more productive, you will have a greater success. I've got Marbled Hatchets, Threadfin Rainbows and Corydoras hastatus with my RCS and "Green" shrimps and the shrimps are doing well.

cheers Darrel
 
Thanks Darrel.

It is information like that that we need. 🙂 and thank for bringing some sense to the thread.

We often, me included, mix mix without actually stopping and thinking about where these fish come from. We know they come from the amazon, but I never stopped to think what exactly happens on the amazon through the seasons, and how hard those fish really have it.

I dropped some chicken on my tank, and even the corydoras and otos were eating it. 🙂 Scavengers at their best.
 
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