synodontis nyassa playing dead ?

[syno-kev]

i have a 4ft malawi set up and i watched very strange sight last night of my 5 inch syno nyassa floating as if dead with the slightly bigger syno nigromaculatus pushing it around ,
im sure its a bullying problem but it is totally unmarked no damage no marks it looks perfect and as soon as i turned the lights on to remove what i thought was a dead fish it swam off and hid under the rocks as theres plenty of caves and 4 inch plastic pipes for it to hide in,
these are the only 2 catfish in this tank with about 6 very small 1-2 inch african cichlids.
anyone else seen this happening is this a natural defence tacktick for synos ?

[unblinded]

The only thing I've had similar to what you describe is when my tank got too cold one day. I had several synodontis floating and lost one. When I went to take them out they would swim back to the bottom. Once I got the temperature corrected the rest of them were fine.

[syno-kev]

no the temp is fine and so are the other fish .
i do feel its a bullying thing though !
only ive seen it doing this before with the multipunc i had in that tank
but i got rid of that about 2 months ago and now the bloody nigromac has started doing it ?