Tiger Barbs And Green Morphing?

[untitled]

Hi. I am new to this site but it looked helpful when I stumbled across it trying to find out what is going on with my tiger barbs.
I have 5 tiger barbs in a community tank and yesterday ttwo of them started 'fighting'. Whilst doing so their black stipes turned green as I watched. A couple of the others joined in a bit and they went green too, when they left the scene they returned to havin black stripes. I believe I have 2 females and 3 males.
Can anyone tell me what they were doing and why they went green please???

Many thanks
Jo

 

[rocknurworld2006]

this is common with barbs and its just them flaring at oeach other

 

[ALW]

Tiger Barbs like to see whos top fish, so they often do this

 

[Lateral Line]

As the others have said, in a group of barbs, most species anyway, their is a heirarchy which needs to be created and defended. It is common for small squabbles to break out. These rarely last long or cause any damage, in a large enough group. The group size is important because in a large group, the aggression gets shared out amongst the weaker fish - in small groups, the weakest can often get hounded to death, then the next, and so on until top dog is left with an empire of zero. TB's are notoriously aggressive, 5 fish is a bit small as groups go.

With the colouration, in power displays and breeding, emotions are running high and the fish display their best colouration. This is a general increase in brightness and sharpness of definition, but also can involve adjusting the angles of iridophores in the skin which contain layered guanine crystals. It is these that are responsible for the green flashes.

 

[untitled]

thanks all for the info, really helpful.

Eventhough there are only 5 TB's in the tank they only seem to pick on each other and even that is fairly rare, they are in a large tank with quite a few other fish. They did have a go at my Angels at first but have left them alone now too. Maybe I just got lucky this time!?!

Thanks again for the help