We had a major bushynose catastrophe in one of our tanks yesterday. It's a tall 150gal with 6x Uaru amphiacanthoides, 5x wild discus, 1x mystery wood-eating L-cat (maybe , but we weren't 100% sure), and 3x bushynose. The bushynose are 2 male (probably fully grown or nearly so) and 1 female (quite a bit smaller, maybe 3" TL, probably still growing). The tank has a thin layer of fine gravel substrate, and a bunch of driftwood sticks for hiding places and chew-toys.
We recently bought a bunch of clay caves that we're using to spawn plecos in other tanks, so we threw a few into this tank about 3 days ago. One or two days later, we found the Panaqolus dead, with all the skin rasped off its belly.
Right now our best guess for what happened is that the dominant male bushynose decided it was breeding season and became super-territorial. Or maybe the caves had nothing to do with it and this all was unlucky timing.We've always heard that bushynoses are peaceful, but our big males have always seemed pretty aggressive. They fight the Uarus for sinking wafers (and the bigger Uarus are >8" TL and always act like they're ravenously hungry, so that's pretty brave), but we've never seen them attack each other or the Panaqolus. Of course, we're not watching the tank all the time, especially at night... I don't know if we got a couple of particularly nasty ones with fighting L-cat genes in their ancestry. Anyways, we're definitely moving them out of the tank for fear of what they could do to the discus, if they got the wrong idea. (We just moved the discus in there from a smaller tank last week.) My husband is particularly upset because we've had the Panaqolus for more than 6 years, and she's been with us for three big house moves.
J