ravi626

Hi All! Just wanted to thank everyone once again for your practical and timely advice. Fortunately, our local shop was happy to take our gourami in trade, and they had a bunch of little corys of the same type that we've got! So now we've got a decent little cory school (which makes me super happy, because they've quickly become my favorite), and everything seems more chill. The beta has actually been behaving very interestingly since the change. He spends much more time just hiding out in the floating plants by the filter overhang. I wonder if he felt obligated to patrol more when the gourami was there? Thanks again!

Thanks again to you both. I am going to see if one of my local shops will take the gourami back. Not sure what to do if they won't... but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Really appreciate your time and consideration!

Thank you both for your quick responses! The tip about what is stressing me is an excellent point. I think our tank is much too small to add 2 more gouramis? Part of why I want to figure this out is I do think we can support a few more small fish (like maybe a little school of something) but not with all this aggressive behavior happening. Maybe he does just need to go...

Hello everyone, I am relatively new to the aquarium hobby (we had a couple tanks when I was a kid/teenager that I helped with, but this is my first in almost 30 years). We have a planted, 20-gallon community tank that we started in May. Overall, things are great in terms of water quality, etc. However, our motley crew of fish worries me a bit. Due to some poor planning, a couple new fish deaths, as well as fish shopping with my very eager young daughter, we have a beta, a 3 spotted gourami, one female sword, one female guppy, and two corys. The problem is that the gourami, who I am quite sure is male, has become kind of a bully. Much of the day, everything is fine, but pretty regularly, he will aggressively and persistently chase either the guppy or the swordtail, even pursuing them thru the plants and rocks. The sword has remained uninjured but I do worry about stress. The guppy had what looked like a nip out of her tail last month, which fortunately healed. My theory is that the big mistake is having both a beta and gourami in a small tank. When they face off occasionally, the beta seems to get the upper hand. Luckily, they don't appear to actually fight one another, but I wonder if there's like a trickle down effect of stress making the gourami really aggressive? I am wondering about rehousing the beta with a family member to see if that chills things out a bit, but I'd love to hear suggestions on how to work with what we've got here. Thank you!