Chaca Chaca

[Bloo]

I've read up a bit about these interesting creatures and have done a few searches on this forum about them as well. SirM, I see you currently have one - what is your setup if I might ask? Size tank, tankmates (if any apart from feeders)? Do you only have the one, or more than one ? What do you feed him & what is his "regime" ?

 

[Paul_MTS]

you don't need a very big tank at all as they don't really move, i'll let Sir confirm his tank size though.

has to be sand substrate.

no tank mates as they can kill them by rapidly lowerinmg the PH to as low as 4, Sir lost there congo puffer this way.

when we had the chaca at work they wouldn't eat anything but neons, but sure what Sir has whined them onto.

 

[Bloo]

Thanks Paul. My PH is actually quite high to start off at - at around 8.4 so not sure if that will even be suitable for him ? My KH is around 12GdH and my Gh around 18GdH. So all are quite high in fact.

 

[CFC]

A single Chaca is fine to keep in a 18x12x12" tank as since previously mentioned they rarely move other than to eat and only grow to around 8 inches, though multiple Chaca will co habbit happily in larger tanks. They are almost impossible to ween off of live fish with small Cichlids making the best foods for them due to their bottom dwelling nature ( i used 4 month old krib fry), livebearers which spend much of their time at the surface may be missed by a lazy Chaca. Chaca chaca is one of the few fish that will starve itself to death if not fed what it wants. As mentioned Chaca chaca has the ability to lower the pH of the water around it to levels which other fish will find fatally low, it is not yet known how or why it does this but for obvious reasons even larger tankmates are out of the question too.

 

[SirMinion]

We're almost certain that a sharp pH drop caused by our chaca killed our congo puffer so now we monitor the pH in his tank very closely, daily in fact.

Our Chaca shares his tank with two (jellybean?) parrot cichlids and a purple spotted gudgeon, all of which are at least twice as big as the Chaca.

After a lot of effort, we moved him from eating live tetras to gut-loaded live river-shrimp and now he easily takes peeled prawns and whitebait with no trouble at all.

Because he's so lazy and will starve himself rather than actually look for food, we have to feed him by hand using snake tongs. We feed him every third day.

he spends 99.9% of the time buried up to the eyeballs in the sand and does absolutely nothing except sometimes at night we hear him croaking.

 

[hellohefalump]

*lol* bloozoo we must be psychic!! when I saw sirm had one, I started wondering about them too! thankyou for starting this thread... interesting stuff - sounds like a very cool fish...

 

[wayne the pain]

Here's a profile i done on them a while ago
http/www.####.com/forum/index.php...t=0&#entry70241

 

[Bloo]

"###" etc. is not a valid URL

 

[CFC]

thats because it leads to another forum and must have been added to the swear filter.