Reason my fish swim up and down the glass

cdawson

cdawson

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Jan 6, 2003
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Why do my puffers swim up and down the glass , my monos and scats do it as well just not as much. Do I need more decorations or what?
135g tank
7.5 ph
0.1 nitrites
0 ammonia
1.005 sg and rising (I need to buy more salt).

sorry about lack of data for the nitrates I ran out of the solution, can't get anymore until friday. Also I posted this in general freshwater because this should have nothing to do with the tank being brackish and will get more responses here.
 
Some fish go up and down along the glass in order to get more dissolved oxygen and to get more water through the gills...the nitrite levels are a little high, so they might be affecting the fish!
 
Scratch the last one...I have a quote from an article that RTR wrote for AquaSource magazine: "Some active hunters develop stereotyped swimming in tanks. They adopt one area of the tank wall and swim up and down there repeatedly, chronically. To me this is identical to the pacing of caged zoo animals which are inadequately housed. If the environment is larger and more complex you may see less of this. If this behavior appears it is not terrible, just not desirable. Animals in the wild have certain lifestyles, and if they are roaming hunter/gatherers, they “need” to work off some energy – even if just by swimming up and down the tank glass for a puffer or pacing the cage for a captive big cat. If this behavior occurs in your tank, you can control the location where it is done in part by current. Rearranging your filter outlet flows can cause relocation of the selected site. But to get rid of it altogether requires moving the fish to a much larger and more complex setup in my experience (IME)."
 
It can't have anything to do with size , they've got a 135 gallon tank to swim around in, puffers are curious fish. If not size then I should add more decorations right? Therefore making a more complex setup. Thanks.
 
Ask RTR to be sure, but that sounds like it might be the best bet...I am, of course, going off of reading and not necessarily experience.
 
It's been up for about a week (with fish in it). The scats and monos do it when I walk up to the tank but after about 5 seconds of realizing I'm NOT going to feed them they go about swimming in circles around the tank and decorations. It's the puffers swimming up and down the glass that bother me.
 
I agree w/ChilDawg, especialy on what I wrote... :p In this new tank it obviously is not size, so it is either insufficiently complex (to them, not to you - different thing entirely) or perhaps just that the whole setup is new. There is a chance that it is also the nitrite - they might in fact be trying to swim to better water or escape. Puffers do not do well with unoxidized metabolites (ammonia, nitrite) at all. Monos don't like that either. I think the scats are a bit hardier to that. Nitrites in BW are not as big an issue as in FW due to the salt content, so I would not bet on this option.

Chinaboy - I've seen small schooling fish display this behavior, but their drives are different fron the hunter/predators. With them it is more likely current and tank size. Pure personal observation - I never see this behavior in my overscaled tanks (fish size to tank size ratio, not stocking density), but have seen it with the school in a smaller QT tank for the same fish.
 
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