libertybelle
Aquarium Advice Addict
Anyone ever seen a picking / cleaning behavior where their shrimp (mine are cherries) kinda pick at their bottom dwelling fish? I have Pygmy cories in my shrimp tank and every once in a while I see a cherry picking at one of the fish.
The fish seem healthy and will eventually get annoyed and swim away but the cherries can be quite persistent in the behavior and will keep at it until the fish darts away to rest/forage elsewhere. The fish seem pretty tolerant of it for 30 seconds or so, which at first made me worry the fish were ill! But a minute later both are back to foraging normally. And. I’ve seen this behavior over a week or so with no indication the fish aren’t well.
I know that there are plenty of shrimp / fish symbiotic relationships like that in the wild, but I’ve never noticed it with cherry shrimp and was wondering if that was a common behavior people saw in their shrimp tanks?
I attached a couple pictures from feeding time today. The first is of a particularly persistent example of the behavior (you can see why I worried the fish were sick at first!) and the second just a few seconds later when both were back to foraging for the shrimp pellets i had put in earlier.
The fish seem healthy and will eventually get annoyed and swim away but the cherries can be quite persistent in the behavior and will keep at it until the fish darts away to rest/forage elsewhere. The fish seem pretty tolerant of it for 30 seconds or so, which at first made me worry the fish were ill! But a minute later both are back to foraging normally. And. I’ve seen this behavior over a week or so with no indication the fish aren’t well.
I know that there are plenty of shrimp / fish symbiotic relationships like that in the wild, but I’ve never noticed it with cherry shrimp and was wondering if that was a common behavior people saw in their shrimp tanks?
I attached a couple pictures from feeding time today. The first is of a particularly persistent example of the behavior (you can see why I worried the fish were sick at first!) and the second just a few seconds later when both were back to foraging for the shrimp pellets i had put in earlier.