Aggressive pearl gouramis?

[bosk1]

I previously had one pearl gourami, and he started hiding out a lot more than I would have preferred, instead of staying in the open. No signs of stress or illness. He would just tend to swim behind my large "fake driftwood" decoration a lot whenever someone walked by the tank. My LFS had a fairly large stock of similar sized pearl gouramis, so I decided to add a couple more, and see whether this would make him more social. I added a male, smaller than my original male, and a female, slightly bigger. This seemed to do the trick. The three of them were usually seen swimming together around the top of the tank. The two new ones, although they did not seems to be a "pair" in the tank at the LFS, are now always together. The original one often swims with them, but sometimes not. All three seemed to be thriving.

Then I came home and found the original male dead on the bottom of the tank. My clown loaches were chewing on him a bit, so I could tell if he had been beaten up beforehand or not. I never saw any signs of aggression, but am thinking perhaps the other two have "paired," and may have suddenly become aggressive toward the "rival male" and killed him. I know pearl gouramis are generally very peaceful, but it seems like a possibility. Then again, it could have been just any number of natural causes.

Any thoughts based on what I've described?


EDIT: BTW, in case anyone asks, as soon as I noticed the dead fish, the first thing I did after removing him was check my parameters. Everything looked good: 0/0/5-10. It was about time for me weekly pwc, so I changed out about 40%, as usual. Everyone seems happy.

 

[malkore]

Hard to say. But I'll offer this: all the fish I keep that turn up dead...they all tended to hang around near the top of the tank for a few weeks prior to passing.

Its very likely he was on his way out, and finally went...maybe the stress of two new friends did it, maybe not.

gourami are known to be aggressive in general. some species like opaline are generally less aggressive than blues and golds, but fish are still individuals, and can display very different behavior than 'the norm'.

 

[RoK]

I've seen some male pearls be a bit aggressive, especially towards other males.

Malkore, the opaline's I've had are/were (1 died, 1 is living) more aggressive than the others. Plus, the blue, gold and opalines are all the same species so I'm confused as to why is it that they are generally less aggressive?

 

[GlitcH]

I was at my LFS yesterday and saw a gourami that they called a pearl gourami.
I came home to do some research on it and all the pics i can find look nothing like the LFS's pearl gouramis.

The one at the store had no pattern at all and the body color was sort of a cream/yellow.
The tail was a deep red..........a really striking fish.
Does this sound like a case of mistaken identity or do they change color as they get older cuz the pearl gourami at the LFS seemed young, it was only about an inch long.