Question about strange white cloud male sparring behavior

[mbwells]

Hello friends!!

Hope everyone is doing well.  I have a 40 gallon breeder set up with about 15 fish each from the gold white cloud mountain minnow (Tanichthys albonubes), the Vietnamese white cloud (Tanichthys micagemmae), and the yellow white cloud (Tanichthys kuehnei).  I've never seen a tank where someone  had all 3 species of white clouds so I thought it would be fun to set that up.

 

I have a question about some strange behavior I've noticed.  I have to say at the outset that I have far more males than females, and I have females that are ready to spawn almost every day.  As you can imagine, the sparring between males gets ... intense sometimes.  This usually takes the form of the males flaring their fins at each other, or chasing, but sometimes several males will stubbornly fight around my Cryptocoryne tropica and Cryptocoryne wendtii red plants.  The chasing and flaring lasts for anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes and ends when one of my males will dramatically swim over to the same few leaves on each plant and thwack them vigorously with his tail.  This happens several times, the male swimming around the plant erratically and hitting the leaves for about 10 to 15 seconds, and then stops.  Again, it's bizarre but it's always the same few leaves on each plant as well.

At first, I thought this was flashing, and gave a treatment of ParaCleanse.  The treatment had no effect, and I started noticing that this behavior is *repeatable* but only during the early morning and late afternoon (when my lights either start slowly growing or waning in intensity).  Other than these regular sparring sessions, I never see this behavior!  And curiously, I never see this flashing like behavior in females, just whatever male happens to "win" the sparring match.  Moreover, it's the same broad leafed plants (the crypts) not my sponge filter or Ziss bio bubble filter, or my stem plants rotala or wisteria. 

Is this a normal behavior for male white clouds?  If not, is it flashing?  The behavior has gone on for over a month now.  The fishes external coloration and appearance is immaculate, and my water parameters are always consistent:

pH: 6.4 to 6.6 (buffered with Controsoil)

Temp: 72 to 74 degrees this time of year (I don't heat the aquarium)

Hardness: Somewhere between 50 and 75 ppm

Ammonia: always zero as you'd expect at my low pH

Nitrite: always zero

Nitrate: Anywhere from 10 to 40 ppm (I always change water at 40 ppm) and add Easy Green three times a week

Any insight from a fellow white cloud keeper would be greatly appreciated! 

 

[mbwells]

Thought I'd say that all the white clouds have a health appetite.  I give them a steady diet of Fluval Bug Bites, freeze dried blood worms and Daphnia from Hikari, and Xtreme spirulina flakes. 

[Biotope Biologist]

I would say white clouds are interesting fish. While I haven't seen this specific behavior before I would not be surprised if it is a form of dominance signaling. My white clouds right now are too small still to start breeding but they do things my last school didn't do. And even still the ones I kept last were different from the ones in the display tank at the store. 

 

If I had to guess it would be that the individual personality of the fish can change the group dynamics of each individual school. But that is just speculation on my end

[mbwells]

@Biotope Biologist that is a huge relief to hear that that can be a dominance behavior among at least some fish. I’ve dealt with flashing before and on the surface this can look like flashing. It turned out that I had bought a rare danio species, Danio nigrofasciatus, that requires unusually warm temperatures, and my 74 degree tank was causing the issue. The flashing was an all day occurrence with both males and females and disturbingly the fish used plants, substrates, rocks, and the filtration to get relief. 
 

This is why I’ve been slow to medicate with this. I’m new to fish keeping, but I just couldn’t understand if this was a gill fluke or water quality issue why the behavior was so predictable and of short duration.

 

One thing I’ve noticed is that these intense sparring matches (well, intense for white clouds 🤣🤣🤣) began when I added Tanichthys kuehnei to my tank. T. albonubes has never been territorial for me. Male T. micagemmae can be weakly territorial. However, male T. kuehnei is pretty territorial. They have favorite spots and they actively chase away all other fish. Cryptocorynes are favorite spawning places, and the other two species will actually fight the male kuehnei over those spaces. Maybe adding all 3 species together caused this aggression. 

[Torrey]

On 5/18/2022 at 8:55 AM, mbwells said:

Cryptocorynes are favorite spawning places, and the other two species will actually fight the male kuehnei over those spaces. Maybe adding all 3 species together caused this aggression. 

There's a distinct possibility the "winning male" is attempting to dislodge eggs fertilized by a competing male (or a male viewed as competition). I'm not a @WhitecloudDynasty and haven't bred white clouds, I have simply seen competitive males eat eggs and destroy egg "nests" from perceived competition in other species, so throw it out as a possibility.

[WhitecloudDynasty]

Sounds pretty normal to me, they act like that if they have enough space and other active fish to mess with. Yes female can flash also..those will be the harder female to breed from.

Every male will clam their own spot and lure a female in to spawn.  If you watch them close enough they have their own fav male or fav female

Be careful since they all can cross breed

Edited May 19, 2022 by WhitecloudDynasty

[Dancing Matt]

I see my Whiteclouds smack by broad leaf plants also. I will now be watching to see if it is exclusively males.

[mbwells]

On 5/18/2022 at 11:23 PM, Torrey said:

There's a distinct possibility the "winning male" is attempting to dislodge eggs fertilized by a competing male (or a male viewed as competition). I'm not a @WhitecloudDynasty and haven't bred white clouds, I have simply seen competitive males eat eggs and destroy egg "nests" from perceived competition in other species, so throw it out as a possibility.

I can't believe I've never made this connection.  Come to think of it, within an hour after the male beats one of my leaves, I see multiple white clouds around my Cryptocoryne plants picking around my substrate.