Dealing with moody fish...

'Modern Love: What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage' is Amy Sutherland's story about an exotic animal trainer who uses the tricks used to train her pets on her husband with often funny but heart warming results.

Aquarists often have to deal with similar situations where their new acquisition turns out to be a monster that devours all the plants or worse still chases, nips fins, and leaves the older pets swimming for cover and shelter.

Occasionally, an older pet becomes roguish and you have to take a crucial decision. Should you...

Mind games

But before you have to take a heartbreaking decision, you can try and use a little psychology to take care of your loved ones. Some fish are gregarious by nature and lead a social life, but some others like the fabled Siamese fighter will always be aggressive.

Then there are others like the Discus, Oscar, Scat that will be fine in a same species tank but become aggressive when introduced into a community tank.

How do you deal with this situation?

A few aquarists after getting the fish in the plastic pouch consider equalising the temperature as the main thing. It is, but more than that, you have to make the introduction as monotonous as possible. For that, you have to resort to a simple trick of feeding the fish.

Do that, and the distraction is sufficient for acclimatisation of the new members of the community.

But what is the lesson from the exotic animal trainer? When the fish behaves roguishly, create a glass partition.

Then you can start the training, if the fish is good feed it a little, if it behaves badly, ignore it. Stick to this behaviour control and the results should be good, unless you have a fish-eating monster like Arrowana.

And if everything else fails, it is better to return the rogue to the pet shop than to confine him in a small aquarium.

~S.N.