waggers

Iv'e had 2 firefish in my tank now for about 5 weeks ,every thing has been fine the two were inseperable, always within an inch of each other.yesterday i noticed only one was out ,the other hiding in the rock .iv'e watched them this morning and the slightly larger one keeps attacking the smaller one .at first he was just chasing him away now he's destroying his fins .tried cathing him to put him in a different tank no chance,any body know why there behaving like this ? i could understand if i had just put the smaller one in .

aquarist48

Hello Waggers,

I don't have personal experience with the fish in question nor salt tank experience. Hopefully someone will chime in soon and help you out.

This link states to be careful when housing more than 1 fire fish per tank. hmmmmmm?
http://www.fishlore.com/profile-purplefirefish.htm (hopefully it's the same type of fish that you have)

Ken

charzar-g

I don't have experience with this actual fish, but many fish if put in pairs of the same gender (normally) will have a 'dominant' and a 'wimpy' one, the dominant one normally will fight with the wimpy one because it is his territory, but the wimpy one has no where else to go, so is constantly attacked.

I have a pair of banggai carindalfish that i were hoping were male and female, but it turns out they're both male, and one attacks the other. The only thing keeping him from not being killed is because my tank is 5 foot long, so he can swim down the end to stay out of the dominant ones territory.

sgould

Firefish, like many other species, are generally peaceful EXCEPT with each other. You do not necessarily see this behavior right away when the fish are added to a new tank as they are more concerned with getting used to the new home than with fighting. Sometimes if your tank is big enough it can work out if they can both stake out some territory far enough away from each other. You can try rearranging the rock inside of the tank. Sometimes this will get them back into "new home" mode and out of "run off the intruder" mode. But if it doesn't work, then I recommend getting one of them out of the tank before it ends up dead.