fish acting weird

Question
hello..i have a 20 gallon fresh water tank..i have 2 bala sharks and a clown loach in it..20gallon bio filter and air pump that is attached to a bubble bar..every since i put the bubble bar in all 3 fish have been acting odd..the loach is just floating around..all 3 of them are staying close to the surface..this is the first time this has happened and i have had this set up for a month..is this normal or am i crazy?

Answer
Good afternoon, Jeff! Thank you for your question.

That does sound like strange behavior. Test your water to make sure that it is within acceptable levels. There should be 0 ppm of ammonia and nitrite, and less than 20 ppm of nitrate. Your clown loach is pretty sensitive to water quality, and bala sharks are schooling fish that grow large - 14 to 16 inches in captivity! If you want to keep them long term, you will want to begin considering acquiring a larger (more than twice the size) tank for them fairly soon.

One month is still fairly new for a tank, so keep an eye on those water parameters. I would turn off the bubbles and see if this stops the behavior you are describing. I had a bubble wand in my African cichlid tank, and when I turned it off once during maintenance, they swam around ecstacically! I never did turn it back on because they seemed much more active and happy without it. It seems some fish just do not appreciate the extra aeration and/or playful bubbles!

Try some high-quality flake food like Ocean Nutrition or Omega Ones line of community flake foods. Some frozen foods like brine shrimp (not very nutritious but highly palatable) and frozen bloodworms should entice them. Clown loaches like vegetable matter (such as a weighed-down slice of zucchini) and sinking wafers. If you find a food your clown loach really likes, it might even click for you!

Clown loaches prefer the company of their own kind, so that really active and playful behavior might not be as apparent in a single loach. I bought two from Walmart once...alas, they did not get past their quarantine period, succumbing to ich. I did not know at the time that they were sensitive to medication (being scaleless fish) and the copper medication I used led to their demise! (Bala sharks are scaleless fish too, incidentally.) That was a long time ago...I am a much more experienced fishkeeper now. You live and learn!

Hope that helped. Best of luck to you,

Nicole

P.S. I am a big fan of the bio-wheel filters myself, I have three of the Penguin line filters. Make sure never to rinse the bio-wheel in chlorinated tap water, by the way!