Besides serious injury or of course death, perhaps the thing most Asian Arowana owners dread is their fish losing a scale or three (though in fact it's not an uncommon occurrence).
While it's usually not a health concern (if you keep tank water clean/good parameters), without doubt it doesn't look nice -- where once was a lustrous gold or red mini-plate of armor is now a turdy brown spot that stands our like a sore thumb on your shimmery showpiece. Superficial yes, but not too different than nearly crying when your shiny sports car/bike gets a ding.
So while a scale itself will actually come back pretty quick (IME within abt 2 weeks), the million dollar question is how long will it take to regain its nice color? Naturally I was wondering this when my Goldenhead lost several top scales near his head -- in 2 separate spooking incidents soon after arriving, and both due to a sudden change of lighting outside the tank.
Now I'm starting to get at least a partial answer to this query: finally, after ~4 months of watching and wondering, I just noticed that the outer rings have come back about halfway, and also small specks of gold are also coming in on the main part of the scales:
Happy to see this, though of course the next question is how long will they take to fully color up... I'm thinking not anytime super soon, but maybe within another 3-4 months or so I'm hoping.
While it's usually not a health concern (if you keep tank water clean/good parameters), without doubt it doesn't look nice -- where once was a lustrous gold or red mini-plate of armor is now a turdy brown spot that stands our like a sore thumb on your shimmery showpiece. Superficial yes, but not too different than nearly crying when your shiny sports car/bike gets a ding.
So while a scale itself will actually come back pretty quick (IME within abt 2 weeks), the million dollar question is how long will it take to regain its nice color? Naturally I was wondering this when my Goldenhead lost several top scales near his head -- in 2 separate spooking incidents soon after arriving, and both due to a sudden change of lighting outside the tank.
Now I'm starting to get at least a partial answer to this query: finally, after ~4 months of watching and wondering, I just noticed that the outer rings have come back about halfway, and also small specks of gold are also coming in on the main part of the scales:
Happy to see this, though of course the next question is how long will they take to fully color up... I'm thinking not anytime super soon, but maybe within another 3-4 months or so I'm hoping.
