i have had my oscar for about six months and he is great but the other night he started acting really weird first he has been taking his head and shoving the rocks around until the bottom of the tank is showing, he also has pulled out one of his bubblers from the rocks and is like rubbing up against it then everytime i walk up to the tank he flips around to where his tail fin is facing me and swims backwards @ me and the weird part is that he doesnt do it to my boyfriend (who is the one that feeds him) i dont know if this is an aggresive behavior or submissive he just started doing this a couple days ago normally when i walk up to the tank he hides from me behind his plants like he is afraid of me i odnt know what is wrong with him or if his is just being an oscar if anyone knows please let me know cause im really wondering

Im not sure i can visualize exactly what your saying your Oscar is doing but i will hazard a guess. Let me try and describe what i think you might be seeing. The Oscar is almost squaring up to you slapping his fins from side to side with his mouth opening wide and closing again is if trying to bite the glass. This type of behaviour coupled with the clearing of substrate down to the glass indicates that your Oscar is showing al the signs of spawning behaviour. The unfortunate thing is that he or she wont be able to because they are on their own. You may find that this fish is a female and might even lay eggs. Hope this helps

thanks for the info that is pertty much what he is doing i do have another question for you though i was reading this website (which i found very helpful) and it was saying that oscars are not actually as aggresive as people think and that they do not mess with other fish just for the fun of it but im going to have to disagree with that because my oscar is in a 75 gal tnk and the only other thing that is in his tank is a sucker fish they were put in the tank at the same time and the oscar follows that poor pleco around and bites him his top fin is jagged and torn why is he doing this (he always has) if he isnt "agressive" it has been getting worse lately if you have an opinion please let me know cause to me it seems like he is doing it just for the fun of it.

In my experience single Oscars do not behave as they would in the wild because it simply wouldn't be on its own. They will often become extremely aggressive and that is probably what you are experiencing at the moment. Although i must say i am surprised that he is attacking the pleco they are normally too well armored to take any stick. Many years ago i had a stand at a fish show and had two Oscars on display in a tank. they were a pair that had spawned a few times and were quite docile. A lady walked up to the stand with a few friends and proceeded to tell her friends all about her Oscar which she said was a really aggressive one. She actually said my Oscar isn't anything like those docile things and showed off to her friends about what a bulldog he was. 20 minutes she came back to the stand on her own and very meekly started to ask me why her Oscar behaved like it did and what could she do about it. She had a huge tank so i told her to go out and find 2-3 other Oscars around the same size. She phoned me a couple of months later to tell me how she was getting on with the Oscars and she was really made up that she had bought the others as now all the Oscars were interacting with each other and she was happy that her Oscar now had some friends. Myself i would never advise that people have a solitary Oscar as does tend to change their behaviour

thank you so much for the advice im going to try to find another one close to his size to put in the tank although i dont know how easy that will be because he is about 6 in long already would it be ok if i got one close to his size but a bit smaller? i was actually really suprised when he first attacked the pleco too i was told that plecos are about the only thing you can put in the tank with them that they wont kill and the pleco is actaully bigger than the oscar he is about 7 in so ya i dont know why the oscar would go nuts like that but thanks again for the advice i really appreciate it this website is great i didnt even know anything like this existed

Just be careful when you put another one in you might remove the existing one rearrange the tank and then put them both in the same time that way they will both be new to the tank and one wont feel like their territory is being invaded

I have two Oscars in a 55 gallon. I use to have a dragon fish in with them, it disappeared. I just took my sucker fish out becaue one of my Oscars "the Grouch" Has started to bite at his tail. This has just started, a couple days ago he went off food. He will suck it in chew and spit it out. I have tried his favorite shrimp, and silver stripe fish. He doesnt even eat his pellets. As far as behavior he seems to bite at the glass, doing alot of rearranging, and "kissing " the other fish. Should I be worried? What should I do? They are about ten inches long. He still gets very excited when I goup the tank, he doesnt act sick at all!!