Odd Blue Damsel Behavior

[Panda Jerk]

<heavy sigh>Against better judgement, we added 5 blue damsels. One quickly elected himself king butthole, now owns the best cave, harasses the other 4 and has finally managed to create an invisible divider giving the other 4 one-half the tank and himself the other half. Fortunately, the clown pair and Coral Beauty take no flack. The Midas Blenny took a thumping when he was added, but now seems off-limits and goes where he pleases. SO, that's the backstory. But today I walk by the tank a few times and notice the other 4 damsels are just sort of "hanging out", like they're stoned, not swimming around wildly, not even really pursuing pellets when I fed, kind of like they're lazily trying to claim some turf of their own. They're evenly scattered across their half of the tank. This happened suddenly, as yesterday, the 4 were actively swimming around chasing down anything resembling a food morsel (again, restricted to their half of the tank).

Does this indicate anything? Is there gonna be a fight in the parking lot later? I checked params, everything is still on point. Angel, Clowns and Blenny still doing Angel, Clown and Blenny things. It's just eerily idle with these guys. Thoughts?

 

[vetteguy53081]

<heavy sigh>Against better judgement, we added 5 blue damsels. One quickly elected himself king butthole, now owns the best cave, harasses the other 4 and has finally managed to create an invisible divider giving the other 4 one-half the tank and himself the other half. Fortunately, the clown pair and Coral Beauty take no flack. The Midas Blenny took a thumping when he was added, but now seems off-limits and goes where he pleases. SO, that's the backstory. But today I walk by the tank a few times and notice the other 4 damsels are just sort of "hanging out", like they're stoned, not swimming around wildly, not even really pursuing pellets when I fed, kind of like they're lazily trying to claim some turf of their own. They're evenly scattered across their half of the tank. This happened suddenly, as yesterday, the 4 were actively swimming around chasing down anything resembling a food morsel (again, restricted to their half of the tank).

Does this indicate anything? Is there gonna be a fight in the parking lot later? I checked params, everything is still on point. Angel, Clowns and Blenny still doing Angel, Clown and Blenny things. It's just eerily idle with these guys. Thoughts?

These fish are territorial and can get quite nasty. I would set your cell phone on video mode for about 30 mins and drop a little food and walk away - YOU MUST walk away as they know youre there. Often the aggressor is a bully at feeding time. Review the video and see who may be your aggressors

 

[Cthulukelele]

This is also pretty true to their usual behavior in reef tanks. Once they establish their softball sized territory they fight things off of them and keep to themselves not free-swimming much.

 

[Panda Jerk]

Yeah I def know about the aggressive tendencies but when they all went idle I was surprised. It was just a 180 from what we’d been seeing. I do know which is the turd of the bunch, he makes it pretty clear. Someday I’ll work up the energy to help him rehome but I don’t look forward to the exercise