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Hello driftwood catfish keepers,

Do any of you have experience with your tatia/centromochlus musicae fighting so badly that eyes have been lost?

We are unsure if another fish in the tank has attacked this male, as we have not witnessed the fighting or the eyes being taken/eaten; so we are going on the premise that this is fighting within the group.

Do these fish regularly fight for territory or over females? We have seen aggressive fighting between males a few times and there was definitely biting, but it stopped after a while.

We don't often see the ninjas as they mostly come out after we've gone to bed, but I did see quite a few actively swimming about last night at feeding time, then the other half found the attacked fish against the strainer this morning.

We did have to move our 4 remaining centromochlus/duringlanis perugiae to the smaller tank a few months ago when we spotted one with only one eye and then a search of the tank found that this was all there was left out of a group of 12 So, maybe dwarf driftwood catfish can fight so badly as to maul and kill each other?!

The injured fish is being acclimatised to the hospital tank to see if he can eat enough using his smell and barbels to survive, I thought that on balance this might be kinder than jumping straight to euthanasia.
We will try and find and check the other fish later today as it should also be a fairly large group, I think we should have about 8 or so.

Many thanks for any thoughts!

Hi ZoomiesPB,

I've kept several species of woodcat, and while I have observed fighting, I've never had obvious injuries like eyes bitten out. That said, I can't rule out that some of the deaths over the years weren't the result of fighting, either directly or indirectly by prolonged stress.

Regards,
Eric

What other fish do you have in the tank? Also, shining a red light and watching after lights out can reveal a lot. my 2¢

naturalart wrote: 18 Sep 2022, 16:27 What other fish do you have in the tank? Also, shining a red light and watching after lights out can reveal a lot. my 2¢

So many! It's the 6 foot tank.
Lots of plecos, 2 jaguar catfish, 3 tatia intermedia, 17 dwarf chain loach, about 12 checkerboard cichlids, 5 blue emperor tetras, 3 upside down catfish, 2 hoplos, 3 pygmy driftwood catfish, the other ninjas and Leonard, our south american lungfish.

Leonard's too slow and his mouth is too big.
We don't think it would be the loaches as they are so peaceful compared to most loaches...

We have an hour of red/blue light after lights out, but they don't tend to be out even at, say, 10pm.

bekateen wrote: 18 Sep 2022, 15:17 Hi ZoomiesPB,

I've kept several species of woodcat, and while I have observed fighting, I've never had obvious injuries like eyes bitten out. That said, I can't rule out that some of the deaths over the years weren't the result of fighting, either directly or indirectly by prolonged stress.

Regards,
Eric

Thank you, Eric.

We are hoping that he won't be stressed now he's been removed from the tank. He's survived the first night, at least.