What’s in a Crowd?

Arowanas are usually solitary creatures. Several arowanas can be placed together in a tank in groups BUT ONLY IF they are put together since young. (I personally recommend odd numbers.) If you try to put adult arowanas together in a tank, they will fight and this can be fatal. BE WARNED!!!
They also have tendencies to become aggressive and dominant over other fishes. Should you decide to give your arowana some non-arowana tank mates, do not put in fishes that are small enough to fit easily into its mouth. It is also better to add fishes that are semi-aggressive. Stingrays, oscars, clown knifefish, and parrotfish are good company for your arowanas.

In the Tank

The size of your fish tank must be able to accommodate territorial needs of your arowana. I would recommend a tank size of at least 4x2x2feet to start off with. This would probably be able to accommodate 2-3 fishes for at least 3 years. You should keep your tank covered as arowanas are known to jump up to 6.6 feet high. This fish needs to live in a well-filtered and clean tank. Being meat-eaters, they tend to excrete a lot of wastes. Poor maintenance of tank could lead to nitrate and ammonia toxicity.
Also at least 20% water change is desirable once a week. Clear water does not mean the water quality is good!!! Water pH level is ideally kept from pH6.5 to pH7.0. You should also keep your tank away from direct sunlight as algae grows easily in such condition and will cause oxygen levels to drop in the water.
Sudden rise or drop of water temperature can be harmful and can lead to shock. Maintain your tank’s water temperature to 26 to 30 degree Celsius. Investing in an aquarium temperature checker will do your fishes well. You may put some fine gravel on your tank’s bottom surface but bear in mind that cleaning can be a hassle if you have this. You can also add some rocks or plants to create a natural looking environment for your fish. Be careful not to put anything inside the tank that has sharp edges.

Moving Your Fish to a Larger Tank

This can be stressful for you (and the fish) but you will probably have to do this once or twice when your arowana grows in size. Remember to cycle the water in your new tank for at least 2 weeks. Catch your arowana from the old tank using plastic bags and bring the entire bag into the new tank. Open the bag and mix the water in it with the water in the new tank. This will help to ensure that the water temperature does not change too much as arowanas gets stressed when water temperature changes too drastic too suddenly. Let this bag float for about 20 minutes and then add more water into it. Do this about 3 times and then release your arowana into the new tank. It will usually take your arowana 2-3 weeks to adapt to the new tank and environment. It is also common for them to stay off food during this period.
You can check out this post as I show you first hand how I moved my new arowanas home.
Bringing Your Arowana Home

Varieties

There are many varieties of the Asian Arowana. There is the Green Arowana from Indonesia; the Banjar Red from Banjar Nasin; the Red Tail Golden from Sumatra; the Golden Crossback Arowana from Malaysia; Red Grade 1 from Kalimantan and the Tong Yang, which is a crossbreed between Golden Crossback and Red Grade 1.

Tank Maintainance

Keep your Asian Arowanas happy by giving them enough space to swim in. The tank size for one is ideally 4 x 2 x 2 feet AT A MINIMUM. Should you decide to keep more, you should get a larger tank. This species particularly likes soft and slightly acidic water with pH maintained at 6.4 to 6.8 and water hardiness at KH2 to KH20. An abrupt temperature change is not healthy for your fish. Appropriate temperature will give your fishes more coloration. The tank must be properly filtered. Knowing that Arowanas are carnivorous, they tend to release more waste. Filtration should depend on the size of your tank. You can always use biological filters if your tank is not that big. Tank water should be changed at 10% to 20% once or twice a week. Arowanas cannot tolerate unexpected changes in their water.

Diet

Like any other Arowana species, this Arowana has preference towards live fresh food, which is live food. This fish is a surface feeder; you may feed them with floating food. They can be fed with mealworms, shrimps, small fishes, and even moth larvaes. Don’t feed them with the same thing each time. Provide variety for healthy nutrition. For better color development though, it is best that you feed them with live food feeding on food rich in ceratanoids. This will enhance their red and gold color. Don’t zealously feed your Arowanas, they might end up overfed, which is not healthy at all. An adult Asian Arowana may be fed every other day.

If you take good care of your Asian Arowana, they could live up to 20 years, and for those who believe in Feng Shui or Vastu, will bring you health, wealth and prosperity.

1. Protruding Scales
This usually happens when the arowana is at a young age. Adult arowanas do not usually get affected by this disease. This disease is caused by events that lead to extreme change in temperature inside the aquarium as well as water contamination.
When this disease affects your arowana, you can observe its scale to get tilted at every fifth to eighth scale. You can see traces of blood at the scales’ root. It is possible for the scales to get tilted and reddened when not arrested during this stage. When this happens, the scales will not be able to give protection to the body and cause attacks of bacteria. The scales will drop off and cause the body to decay and leads to death.
To treat the disease, add coarse salt to the aquarium water and increase the temperature to 32 degrees to 34 degrees. Make sure that the oxygen content in the water is increased. Change the water every three to four days. Before you actually change the water, you can heat it first and add copper sulfate medications to it.

2. Stomach Ailments
These ailments usually occur when the arowana is young due to the consumption of stale food or an injury caused by a prawn’s princer causing stomach to be infected with some bacteria. This will cause the belly of the fish to swell. During this initial stage, the fish will have a swollen anus as well. At the serious stage, the arowana may have lost balance and dips its head downwards.
As of today, there is limited cure to this ailment; fish medications can be administered. It can also help to change the water in the aquarium to prevent complications while increasing the temperature by 2 to 3 degrees.

3. Fish lice attack
These lice are visible with the naked eye. They have a length of about 3 to 5 mm and have flattened body shell. Their needle-like structure found at their mouth allows them to suck out the arowana’s blood fluid causing the dragon fish to lose its lustre. This condition will also make the arowana uncomfortable and it will scrape the bottom or side of the aquarium’s gravel. The parasites can be killed with the use of copper sulfate medications. Make sure to have your fish soaked in a concentrated salt solution while increasing the oxygen content of the aquarium.

What happened was my wife wanted me to move my tank to another location in our house and of course I could not just lift it up and carry it right.. I could have said no to my wife but thought better as she would probably nag me until I did it anyway. Sigh! So anyway, I decided to do it ASAP. As I did not have a spare tank in my house, I decided to move my 5 crossbacks to the farm so that I could drain the tank and move it to the new location.

I’ll be frank here… There are not really any hard and fast rules as to how to move your arowana to a new tank/location. But what I’ll be describing below will definitely give you an idea on how it’s done if you ever needed to do it yourself.

HOWEVER here is my advise ok… if you have just one arowana, then I think you can probably do it yourself but if you have more than one, maybe it would be better to get some professional help to move them. You really do not want to stress out your arowanas unnecessarily. Trust me on this!

So anyway, let’s get started with the move ok… ENJOY!!!

1) The below are probably the only equipment that you would need to do the job. A styrofam box, STRONG plastic bags and fish stabilizer. The fish stabilizer is to make your arowana a bit drowsy so that it would become ‘calmer’ and not struggle too much when you try to guide it into the plastic bag.

2) Example of a fish stabilizer …

3) Ok before you start, it would make sense to drain a bit of water from the tank. This is in case your arowana becomes a bit excited and jumpy… You don’t want it to accidentally jump out of the tank while you are trying to move it do you?

4) After draining some water, put a bit of the fish stabilizer into the tank to calm the fish down. Be mindful that this is potent stuff ok.. so use sparingly… Read the instructions on the bottle.

5) Put the plastic bag into the water and guide the arowana into the bag. Do not try and force the arowana into the bag as this can cause it to become very agitated and jump around and injure itself.

6) Before you tie up the plastic bag for transport, do put in a drop of the fish stabilizer to calm it down for the transport to another location. (Only needed if the distance is far enough and in this case is to the farm.)

7) Putting the arowanas into the tank in the farm. What you should do is put the entire bag into the water first for about 30mins. After which, open the bag and slowly mix the tank water with the bag water before slowly releasing the arowana into the tank.

Ok hope you enjoyed the above ‘move’. Do share if you have any other methods. Oh by the way, some people also oxygenate the bags before they tie up the bag for transport but I think it might not be needed if the distance is short. Like I said… no hard and fast rules to follow but some people do take additional steps… Cheers and take care…

BUT BUT ZE GRAND CHAMPION WAS A GOOD OL RED AROWANA!!!!

Ok ok without further ado, here they are! ENJOY!!!!

1) Small RED Arowanas Category …

2) Small GOLDEN Arowanas Category …

3) Small OPEN Arowanas Category …

4) Large RED Arowanas Category (Grand Champion is here! What a RED!!!) …

5) Large GOLDEN Arowanas Category …

6) Large OPEN Arowanas Category …

Hope you like what you saw above. Let your friends know if they’re keen to see the winners.

Later on I’ll publish some nice goldfish videos here as well. Have taken the videos of the winners already but have yet to edit them. Will find some time.

Anyway cheers to everyone and take care! FISH POWER TO ALL!