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would it work if i had a full grown oscar with 3 little red belly oscars.

the oscar has lived in that tank its hole life and the piranhas have been in a other one.

A full-grown Oscar will eat small Piranhas, or at least stress them out enough so that they never come out.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

Sounds like a fight or predation waiting to happen to me. The oscar will eat small pirahnas and adult pirahnas would have teeth and jaw power the oscar simply couldnt defend itself against. Working as a team pirahnas can take apart much bigger fish then themselves.

Chunky Oscar plus Piranhas? Sounds like a recipe for the Tank From Hell to me ...

Oscars are big bruisers that are also highly territorial, to the extent that even trying to pair up an adult male and an adult female is fraught with problems if they haven't been raised together as juveniles. Unless the tank is truly huge, even that attempt at pairing is a recipe for serious warfare.

Piranhas haven't acquired their reputation as vicious predators for nothing. A big adult can bite through plywood! Plus, they are shoaling fishes - in the wild, they cruise around stretches of river in shoals numbering up to a quarter of a million individuals. One on its own will be nervous, panicky and a coward when you out your hand in the tank. A group of six, on the other hand, will be easily capable, once adult, of amputating fingers. Their courage grows with numbers - which is why, in the wild, they are capable of dismantling large prey. A quarter of a million Piranhas will, if the mood takes them, turn a 1,000 lb water buffalo into stripped bones in about 20 minutes. Even things like Piraiba catfishes (that reach nine feet in length!) and Spectacled Cayman treat large Piranha shoals with respect.

Put one Piranha in with an Oscar, and the Oscar will bully it to death. Put several in, and they'll gang up on the Oscar and make a very tasty lunch out of the Oscar.

However you mix them, put those together in the same aquarium, and one way or another, the result will be carnage.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002