Two nights ago I had the weirdest thing happen in my 55 Gallon Tank.  Before I describe what happened, first I need to explain what fish were in the tank. Here’s a list of fish that I’ve had in the tank for the last few weeks:

2x Female Betta
1x Cardinal Tetra
2x Bala Shark
3x Pictus Catfish
2x Giant Danio
2x Oto Catfish

Besides the fact that the two Giant Danio’s would swim round super fast and sometimes freak out the other fish and the two Pictus Catfish were skittish when I would turn on/off the lights, all the fish seemed to be getting along quite nicely with no fin nipping or aggression.

Then, a few days ago I got a Free 46 Gallon Tank so I decided to get rid of my 20 Gallon tank and put the 46 Gallon in that spot in my room.  To do this I had to transfer the fish that were in my 20 Gallon into the 55 Gallon.  I didn’t think there would be any problem with this, considering all the fish in the 20 Gallon are peaceful fish.  Here is what I had in the 20 Gallon tank:

8x Cardinal Tetra (Small)
1x Oto Catfish
5x Guppies (Small)
1x Pleco

Ok, so I moved those fish into the 55 Gallon.  My main concern was that the 55 Gallon isn’t completely cycled yet so I knew I would have to really watch my Ammonia levels carefully.  However, I’ve been doing daily partial water changes due to the Ich problem I had and it’s not that bad so I figured even if the extra fish put more strain on the biological filter I could temporarily compensate by doing more frequent water changes.  A small price to pay to get a nice 46 Gallon tank setup in place of my small 20 Gallon.

Anyways, I put the fish in there and I kind of figured a couple of the small Tetras might go missing or die but I never expected what happened next.

The following day I check the tank and I noticed that one of my Bala Sharks had the top part of his tail nipped off.  I thought that was pretty odd since I didn’t add in any aggressive fish and the existing fish that have been in the tank were getting along fine.  Then I started looking around and I noticed that a whole bunch of fish were missing!

When I say a whole bunch, I mean EIGHT FISH!  Here’s the casualty list from one night:

2x Female Bettas… GONE!
1x Bala Shark… GONE!
1x Bala Shark… Missing top part of tail.
5x Cardinal Tetras… GONE!

What the heck happened!?  I am pretty sure my 3 Pictus Catfish may be to blame.  They must have gone into a major hunting expedition that night and ate 8 of my fish!  I was devestated to see my Female Bettas gone especially.  They were so fun to watch.

I checked and no the fish didn’t jump out of the tank.  My lid is pretty tightly placed and I looked around the aquarium to make sure they didn’t all jump out.  And no it wasn’t my cat either.  I’m keeping a close eye on the Pictus Catfish and if I find that they are killing all my fish at night, they might just end up getting relocated to the pond in my back yard!

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Yesterday I got my 20 Gallon Freshwater Aquarium setup, and today I went to the pet store and picked up the rest of the things I wanted to get to finish my setup and to pickup my initial set of fish.

I need to cycle my water to build up the good bacteria in the aquarium before I can fully stock the tank with all the fish I want in there, so for the time being I just picked up 6 fish for now.

It wasn’t easy picking which fish to get.  There are so many cool fish to get out there.

Here’s what I ended up getting.  The first two are Tiger Barbs.  Here’s a picture of them:

I’ll try to get better pictures of my fish soon.  This is the best I could do for now to keep them in proper focus.  They are super fast fish and they love to chase each other around the tank.  It wasn’t easy to get a fast enough focus on them before they zip out of camera view.

Here’s another shot of them in the corner of the tank:

The next two I picked up are Cherry Barbs.  It’s so weird because at the pet store they all looked very similar, but now that I’ve got the two of them in the tank they look totally different.  I don’t have a picture of them yet, but one of them turned completely red and the other one has horizontal stripes very similar to the vertical ones that the Tiger Barbs have.

The one Cherry Barb with the stripes follows the Tiger Barbs around almost like it wants to be accepted into their little group.  The other red one just swims around by itself like a loner.  The other thing that it does that is so funny is that when I turn on the bubble maker, it goes straight for it and swims around in all the bubbles.  It totally loves bubbles.  Reminds me of that character in Finding Nemo that loves bubbles.  It’s so funny to see the personalities these fish display.

The final two fish I got were two female Bettas (Siamese Fighting Fish).  The male ones you can only keep one in a tank because they fight, but the females are OK in the same tank together, so I got two females.  The funny thing the females do is that they chase each other around and then they eventually face each other and lock lips!  It looks like they are kissing, it’s so funny.

I really have to learn how to take better pictures of these fish.  The best one I could get of the Betta Fish was this picture here:

So that’s pretty much it for now, I just got six fish for now to get the cycle started in my tank and once everything is running smoothly I’ll start adding in a few more fish.

I took a few more pictures of my setup as it is now:

My 20 Gallow Aquarium Setup for Now.

I added in a few fake plants and a decoration so that the fish have somewhere to hide.

Another picture of my tank.

Bubbles! This is the green bubbles that the Red Rainbow Barb loves to swim through.

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