Fishes / Habitat
The dwarf gourami is a small, colourful labyrinth fish, with the red-and-blue striped male being a familiar sight in Indian aquarium shops. It reaches around eight centimetres and is generally peacefu
The dwarf gourami is a small, colourful labyrinth fish, with the red-and-blue striped male being a familiar sight in Indian aquarium shops. It reaches around eight centimetres and is generally peaceful, if occasionally territorial towards its own kind.
There is an important health issue worth knowing before buying this particular fish: a viral disease called dwarf gourami iridovirus has become widespread in commercially farmed stock worldwide due to decades of intensive inbreeding. It is highly contagious, untreatable and fatal, and surveys of exported stock have found a meaningful proportion of fish carrying the virus without obvious symptoms at the point of sale.
A single dwarf gourami, or a calm pair, does well in a tank of sixty litres or more with gentle filtration and some floating plant cover, which this naturally shy fish appreciates. It adapts reasonably well to typical Indian tap water.
Given the iridovirus risk, quarantining any newly bought dwarf gourami for several weeks before adding it to an established community tank is a genuinely sensible precaution, not overcaution.
A varied diet of flakes, pellets and occasional live or frozen food suits it well. It is an air breather and will visit the surface regularly, so a lid with an air gap helps it access the warm, humid air layer it prefers.
When buying, look closely for any fish in the shop's tank showing colour loss, lethargy, clamped fins or visible sores, and avoid buying from that tank entirely even if the individual fish you want looks fine, since the virus spreads readily between tankmates before symptoms show.
Article content © S Vejay Anand. All rights reserved.
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