FishProfiles.com Message Forums

I was thinking about getting a school of rummy nose. I know they are alot more sensitive than the average fish and I was just wondering what I needed to know to keep them happy and healthy.
TIA
Jen

Rummynose tetras are peaceful fish & they will eat good quality flake foods, dried foods & small live foods. They need good water quality & they are sensitive to nitrates. Water changes is a must with Rummies. Males are thinner than females & breeding is hard. They also like plants & they need to be in a school of at least 6/8 fish.





http://www.flickr.com/photos/corydoras/
Member of the Malta Aquarist Society - 1970.
http://www.maltaaquarist.com

I just got some!!! They're great fish and I highly recommend them. They have a reputation for being a bit delicate, but mine have adjusted well despite a less than optimal trip from a fish store in another city to my house. My advice would be to make sure that you buy them from a store that has quality stock and takes good care of their fish (good advice for any fish), and take your timme acclimating them to your water. I used the drip method to slowly drip water from my tank into the fish store water. Take your time and they'll adjust well.

Rummys are great. I have/had a school of 9. They swim well together and fly around the tank very well. Definatly keep up water changes. Unfortunatly I had an out break of ich a when I was gone for the weekend. I lost several rummys and a few others before I got the tank under control. They are a good indicator of the tanks health. When they were sick with the ich the rummy color on the nose faded. It has returned now that they are doing fine. Just keep up the tank and you should be fine. You will love them.

i'm a bit of a freak when it comes to rummies - i absolutely love them and they obviously love the water conditions in my tanks...i have never found them sensitive, and i have kept them in both discus and community south american tanks.

they do love clean, clean water - i do 2x40% water changes per week with the discus, and 1x40%change per week for the community. i use them as my water indicators - their noses go pale (like they will be when you first put them in your tank - don't worry, this is them paling down to be less obvious as they check things out, and should change within 2-3 hours tops) when the water quality gets out of whack. they like warm, acidic, soft water, and the larger the group, the better. in my 6 footer i had a school of 30 - just gorgeous!

they get a big variety of food - live, flake, frozen - and they LOVE chewing on hikari algae wafers, which i put in for my royal whiptails. don't ask me why...

they breed early in the morning, the groups of slim males chasing and butting the fat females - as they rise to the surface among the tallest plants the female spits out eggs which the males (and any other fish clever enough to have caught on) quickly eat. this happens for about 4 -5 days per month.

if you're like me you watch your tank for hours anyway - but just watch them, learn how they move and interact. you'll soon pick up on their signals and correct colouring - when you see a discrepency, test and change the water.

they are evey worthwhile fish, i've never had a problem with them.

WOW! Thanks for all the great info guys! I really learned alot about rummynose. I just can't decide if I want a school of these or a school of cardinals (I would get about 9 of them). It's definitely a dilemma!
Thanks again!
Jen

I've never had any particular trouble with them being delicate (unlike my experiences with Diamonds and Cochu's Blues) -- and, as other writers say, monitoring their faces for any sign that the cherry color is fading is an excellent way to monitor both their health and your tank's overall water quality.

One caution, though: don't overcrowd or jostle them in transit. I've found out the hard way that, like some other tetras, they secrete a "fright" chemical to warn other members of their school of danger -- and that, when they're crowded togeter in a small container and frightened, they release so much of it that they can throw each other into shock and literally frighten themselves to death.

These chemicals (or rather, cell clusters) are excreted by almost all living fishes, especailly apparent in schooling fishes, as Bruce stated. However, I heard that they only occur as a result of bodily injury, as these cell clusters lie beneath the skin (and on the slime coat) until it is punctured.

So, as long as it's a safe trip and they don't get bumped around they SHOULD be fine?

Like I said, mine had a less than optimal trip home. It took far to long to get them into the tank, I jostled them around too much, and it was in December and VERY cold. I was convinced that I'd be lucky if only a few survived, but much to my surprise, they all survived and by the next morning were looking great and doing their thing! I certainly don't recommend treating them the way I did on the trip home (it was due to circumstances beyond my control), but rummynoses seem to be far hardier than I had been led to believe. If you treat them with care (as I usually do when I bring fish home), they should be fine.

Cardinals are great, too -- I've never kept them, but they're beautiful. It depends on the look you want: rummynoses seem a lot more active, but it's pretty hard to beat the colour of a school of cardinals.

To provide more details: I was transferring a bunch of fish who had just been evicted from one of the two aquariums I maintain (at an auto dealership that had decided to close it down) to the library aquarium that I maintain. I piled them all (about 15) into a very large jar for the drive, which took less than 10 minutes. On arrival, all were perfectly fine -- except for the three Rummy-Noses, which had lived healthily for two years in the first aquarium but arrived at the library floating limply upside down, in obvious shock, without a mark on them. I put them into a net bag to protect them from the other fish in the library aquarium, but the next day all three were dead.

A talk with some people at my very professional LFS confirms that this frequently happens with Rummy-Noses. On the other hand, I have never had any Rummy-Nose show the slightest sign of such shock when being taken home from their original LFS with a few other Rummy-Noses in a plastic bag -- so I suspect that what scared them was simply being crowded in with those other fish, some of which were moderately larger although totally peaceful.

I did lose another Rummy-Nose once a day after its arrival, for unknown reasons; but in every other respect I've had no trouble with them at all -- and, as I say, it's nice to have a fish whose degree of comfort you can actually visually monitor from its appearance. Would that all fish were like that! I see no reason why you can't keep them entirely successfully. (I agree that Cardinals are prettier, but a lot of people are charmed by that horizontally striped flag-like tail. I think of them as "Art Deco Fish".)

I'll echo Bruce's sentiments here.

Rummies are e to transport shock, and need TLC in transit. One good way of keeping them calm is to let then think it's night time, i.e., transport them in a darkened container. This, I have found through personal experience, helps quite a bit. Also, they travel MUCH more happily if they're bagged separately.

I had Rummies for something like 7 years. Lovely fish. Sometimes I wish I'd stuck with them instead of getting the Beckford's Pencils, because Rummies don't ever fight with each other

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Even though mine (miraculously) survived a bad trip home, I just want to be clear that I don't recommend doing it the way I did. I was stressed the whole time, sure my precious fish were going to be in trouble. I think I just got lucky. I'd definitely second what the other posters have said about treating them with TLC on the way home. The importance of regular water changes can't be stressed enough either. I do weekly 25% water changes religiously, but even though my nitrates never get very high, the rummies respond very well to water changes. Their noses seem to glow extra red after a water change. Wonderful fish and a joy to watch.