Exadon Paradoxus (bucktooth Tetra)

[nate]

hi im new here.....


I bought 2 exadon paradoxus (bucktooth tetra) yesterday.......the people at the place i bought em told me they would gobble up tetra's but they didn't touch them.....so i got my buddy to bring over a white cloud minnow and we put him in tht tank and they chased it but wouldn't eat it....then my roomate decided to kill the minnow and threw it back in and they swallowed it.

we tried another one today and they wouldn;t touch it........i was hoping these guys were gonna be more feirce......my friend has some and his are killers...


and i know they must want food because they eat flakes..........they just kinda spend most of there time chasing each other around.....



i hope they decide to get vicious asap!

any help would bbe greeaat

 

[Gatorbait]

What size tank? You should have many more together than just 2.

They really are vicious fish. It just may take more than 2 days for them to get settled in.

 

[Canis-Equus]

If you want to see them displaying anything LIKE their natural behaviour, you'll need to keep them in a 55g tank and an absolute minimum group of 8, some sources say 12 min.

Less than this and they will be stressed (all shoaling fish get badly stressed when kept in lower numbers), and will agress at one another, resulting in damaged and sick fish who will die fairly shortly.

If you stick to the two you have then likely they will eventually kill one another, or die from stress caused by too small a group - stressed fish succumb to parasites and disease very fast.

Live feeding of other fish is a seriously unwise thing to do. These fish WILL pass on disease and parasites and a diet purely of live fish is extremely unhealthy.

Invest in feeder crickets that you can gut load with veg and vitamins, good quality flake and good quality clean frozen foods, in a shoal of 12 in a 55g tank they will live long and look awesome.

However if you just got them because they are vicious then you are probably going to have wasted your money. Theres nothing wrong in appreciating the skills of a predator doing what it was born to do, but owning one PURELY for that reason and not taking care to keep them correctly IS wrong, please dont do this.

I enjoy my predators, they dont have big pointy teeth, and i dont have to feed them live disease ridden fish to enjoy them, though Ellis my tire track eel would quite easily wipe out a tetra or a minnow, and probably quite a bit faster and more deadly than your tetras can! (no feeder fish would get the CHANCE to be scared and stressed in a tank wtih Ellis it would be dead and in his belly before it knew what was happening!)

Even Angel fish are skilled predators - you should see my tank when i drop in some mosquito larvae or bloodworm! Makes a tank of Piranha look like big girls blouses.

Bucktooth tetras are beautiful fish as well as excellent predators - enjoy them for both reasons and keep them properly please.

 

[The-Wolf]

 

[nate]

if its so bad for them to be in small groups and for them to eat other fish, why would they just 2 to me and encourage that they can tear apart other fish?

 

[Canis-Equus]

Because the world is full of idiots, especially those who know if they tell you what you want to hear they stand a good chance of parting you from your cash.