Bought my first datnoid seemed like a good price, semi stable 8-9 inch. Less the 20 minutes in the tank he is getting color back and seen him chewing on a piece of tilapia. Any advice from experts?
First datnoid any advice
- Thread starter millerkid519
- Start date
Tilapia is good also will eat freezedried Krill. Notice the one I have swallowed a pellet once .
Quality fish man. Hopefully you get hooked like a lot of us datnoid keepers here.
In general you can expect datnoids to be on the shyer side. You're likely not going to get the boisterous personality you might find in something like a peacock bass, oscar or other fish of that sort. This isn't to say there aren't a few bolder individuals and in general most dats come around and come out of hiding the older they get, you may not have to deal with this as you have a decent sized one from the get go.
Most of my dats have been most active and social with tankmates and people alike when I've kept multiple dats in the same tank though this isn't a guarantee. While I've found them to be generally good tankmates towards an array of species expect them to keep a pecking order in line especially amongst their own kind. A fairly unique thing about dats is that they won't eat their own kind seemingly regardless of the size differience. Someone may dispute this but to my knowledge and research I've only heard of this happening once and it seemed to clearly be a mistake by the larger of the two sucking in a little one who strayed too close to the sinking pellwts during feeding time only to spit it right back out. Some tankmates I've kept successfully are, channel & 7 Spot Shovelnose catfish, Oscars, Midas, Peacock Bass, South American "Gar", Silver & Aussie Arowana, Clown Loaches and I currently have an IT and smaller NTT housed with a Giant Gourami, Black Shark and Black Spotted Eel and all has gone very well with this current set up. I find the best datnoid behavior is observed when they are housed with fish that are typically less aggro and boisterous.
Stablility.. there are probably hundreds of threads here about or mentioning this. I will copy and paste a previous explaination here after posting (on my phone today).
Feeding is often the biggest issue new datnoid keepers seem to find and as stubborn as they can be dats in my opinion aren't too difficult to feed if you have a group and they aren't too large. The group mentality is great for creating competition around food time and shows more timid dats that the food is safe and ok to eat when they see their own kind shooting out to grab some. In my mind if I can get one dat out if a young group on pellets and I'll likely have them all on pellets within two weeks. Tilapia and market shrimp (shell removed) are both solid options and are even better if you can manage sneaking some crushed or broken pellets into it. I've also fed some of my larger dats live crawdads in the past but it's not the mkst economical and be sure to get them from a safe source and a good timed quarantine isn't a bad idea either. If yours is eating so soon I wouldn't worry myself but if you can get it onto pellets, generally speaking this is the best case scenario.
If you have any other questions about the above or anything I may have left out please feel free to ask.
In general you can expect datnoids to be on the shyer side. You're likely not going to get the boisterous personality you might find in something like a peacock bass, oscar or other fish of that sort. This isn't to say there aren't a few bolder individuals and in general most dats come around and come out of hiding the older they get, you may not have to deal with this as you have a decent sized one from the get go.
Most of my dats have been most active and social with tankmates and people alike when I've kept multiple dats in the same tank though this isn't a guarantee. While I've found them to be generally good tankmates towards an array of species expect them to keep a pecking order in line especially amongst their own kind. A fairly unique thing about dats is that they won't eat their own kind seemingly regardless of the size differience. Someone may dispute this but to my knowledge and research I've only heard of this happening once and it seemed to clearly be a mistake by the larger of the two sucking in a little one who strayed too close to the sinking pellwts during feeding time only to spit it right back out. Some tankmates I've kept successfully are, channel & 7 Spot Shovelnose catfish, Oscars, Midas, Peacock Bass, South American "Gar", Silver & Aussie Arowana, Clown Loaches and I currently have an IT and smaller NTT housed with a Giant Gourami, Black Shark and Black Spotted Eel and all has gone very well with this current set up. I find the best datnoid behavior is observed when they are housed with fish that are typically less aggro and boisterous.
Stablility.. there are probably hundreds of threads here about or mentioning this. I will copy and paste a previous explaination here after posting (on my phone today).
Feeding is often the biggest issue new datnoid keepers seem to find and as stubborn as they can be dats in my opinion aren't too difficult to feed if you have a group and they aren't too large. The group mentality is great for creating competition around food time and shows more timid dats that the food is safe and ok to eat when they see their own kind shooting out to grab some. In my mind if I can get one dat out if a young group on pellets and I'll likely have them all on pellets within two weeks. Tilapia and market shrimp (shell removed) are both solid options and are even better if you can manage sneaking some crushed or broken pellets into it. I've also fed some of my larger dats live crawdads in the past but it's not the mkst economical and be sure to get them from a safe source and a good timed quarantine isn't a bad idea either. If yours is eating so soon I wouldn't worry myself but if you can get it onto pellets, generally speaking this is the best case scenario.
If you have any other questions about the above or anything I may have left out please feel free to ask.
There really is no set in stone answer for why some datnoids are stable and other aren't. krichardson's situation is something I and I'm sure many other datnoid keepers have experienced before where some are bright gold body and pitch black bars while others in the same tank are fully black/brown. Some people have setups that they feel have a higher chance to bring out stability but it's not something that can be relied on 100% of the time.
Personally, I think stability is mostly a matter of camouflage and relates to comfort (not necessarily stress.) My current example, the one datnoid I currently keep, a 4" standard 4 bar Indo with a slightly timid personality was mostly black in the LFS tank I purchased him out of. It was a 20g tank with about 4-5 other similar sized IT and PVC tubes with no lights on in a busy, high traffic, louder store and he was the only one out in the open. After a few minutes of "face time" with him watching me watching him I could make out his pattern and decided that I liked the pattern and his more personable personality from the other IT in the tank and bought it.
Fast forward a few days, he's alone in a 180g tank with lightly dimmed lighting, sand, not bulky driftwood, in a quiet room, veryinfrequent movement throughout the day and a lot of open space in the tank. He was going back and forward from mostly stable to light brown most days.
He began eating pellets almost immediately (always awesome) and began to associate me with food early on and now about 3 weeks later he's about "85%" stable all of the time and very rarely brown/blacks out. He also makes himself known when he's seemingly asking for food going even more stable to catch my attention when he decides to wait in his feeding corner.
I guess what I'm trying to convey is that in my experience a datnoid that is unstable doesn't necessarily equal a stressed or unhealthy datnoid. I think they are incredibly underrated in terms of the amount of curiosity, inquisitiveness and personality they have and I think it's not acknowledged enough how much they may camouflage themselves simply based on mood and adaptability to their physical environment. For example, I've seen some of my smaller IT in the past flaring their stripes as vibrant as can be and ducking into long grass like plants to sneak up on live worms as if they were an actual tiger blending in the grass. I think they sort of biologically have an idea of how they need to look to best suit their optimalsurvival.
Another thought I have on it would be that larger datnoids (typically +14") seem to be far more stable far more often than smaller dats. It's just a personal theory but I would imagine most datnoids unfortunately never see the size of +14" but those who do are typically going to be in a more stable (no pun) situation, eat well and often have compatible tankmates and at some point don't feel the need to camouflage themselves into darkness because they know they're cared for, food is coming.
I'm not sure if datnoids going "unstable" is technically a legitimate form of camouflage but I imagine it is and I'm no ichthyologist or biologist but I imagine active camouflage is probably more energy and resource consuming than staying in their base pattern "if that is indeed what 'stable' datnoid's base patterns are so to me, a "survival" technique, going unstable is something they just do naturally.
Thank you
Gage Zamrzla
that is reassuring and is there you can have one or X amount when it comes to datnoids
