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Pentazona Barb Help

Sammiec0108

New Member
Joined
21 Aug 2019
Messages
12
Location
UK
Morning all,

My tank has been up and running for a year now, i've had a shoal of 12 pentazona barbs who have been in the tank from the beginning and have always been quite dosile and timid. They have got bigger and now seem to be much more confident shoaling around the tank. In the last few days they have become noticeably more boisterous, more chasing around within the group, this morning i have noticed one of the barbs has a glassy eye (one) and some of the tail fin is missing.

Is it likely this is due to some fighting? The glassy eye is just on one side so i'm thinking this is likely to be an injury rather than a disease - the colouring was slightly more reserved this morning and he was on his own hiding behind the heater but now seems to have rejoined the shoal and has coloured up a bit.

Any thoughts on what might be driving this slight change in barb behaviour and what i should do for the pentazona. They share the tank with 2 dwarf honey gourami's and some amano shrimp, everyone else doing well and did a water change, gravel vac and filter 'clean' yesterday. I have a quarantine tank set up, so could move the barb across, but i'm concerned about the isolation effect on a fish which seems happy as part of the group (albeit is perhaps taking a bit of a 'kicking' at the moment).

thank you very much in advance

Sammiec0108
 
Hi, barbs, even more timid barbs, can be quite boisterous with one another as this is how they establish a hiarachy. From the sounds of things it injured it's eye and became impaired enough to get its fins nipped. Fins quickly regrow so as long as you don't think it's fin rot, I'd just leave alone and observe.
My brother has pentazona barbs (well they aren't really as very few true pentazona's make it into the hobby and a closely related species is sold in its place) and they get more physically aggressive when breeding, so perhaps with all the temperature fluctuations we've had recently your are in the mood.
 
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Thanks for this Mort, that all makes complete sense, the temperature got up a bit higher than my usual 77 or so over the last week so I think you may be right about turbo charging them into a breeding frenzy, the males have really coloured up into a kind of flame red which I guess would also make sense! Exciting stuff and relieved about the little guy with the eye and fin issues, I'll do an extra water change to ensure the water is as clean as possible to help him heal up! Thanks again!
 
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