Quick chromis question

[repru04]

I like chromis and have some blue and blue/green in my tank. I would like to get a few more but of the different types. Will they school? If I had an orange line, agile, and sunshine chromis, would they school or fight despite being typically passive? (the types I named are just examples)

 

[Reefing Madness]

They are not quite typically passive, they are semi agressive, and some get away with having a bunch in the tank, but, like most of us, always end up with just one.

 

[Mike J.]

I think a big advantage in keeping schools of Chromis is to have more aggressive fish in the tank. Fish school for protection. It very well might work if they were added all at once and there was an aggressive tang of something to keep them in check.

 

[mfinn]

There was something that I heard years ago. When you add a bunch of chromis, eventually there will only be one.

However, I added 6 to my 240 about 6 years ago. Lost one in the first year.
But I still have the 5.
They seem to have a pecking order.
There is one, I would call the boss and I believe it's a male. He has a longer tail fin with small streamers. His dorsal fin is different from the rest.
Not sure if there are other males in the group, but there are a couple females.
They do spawn on occasion, but the eggs usually disappear in a day or so.

They are getting pretty pushy with the other fish. They will go at it with my Flame and Coral Beauty Angels, but it's only for a few seconds.

 

[FL_Reefer]

I have 2 different types in our tank, green and yellow. When we first added the green or blue green what you want to call them we started with 5, a year later we now have 2. The two that we still have stay together all the time. When we add the yellow, we added 11 and about a half a year later we have 7. They do not ''school'' and like it was said before there is deff a pecking order. You can see this not only by the behavior but also by the size of the fish. The two different kinds do interact together but the blue/green deff run the show. I think they are great fish to have together and I'm look for some more different kinds to add but with any fish there's always the top dog out of the bunch that is more dominate/aggressive then the others.

 

[Reefing Madness]

There was something that I heard years ago. When you add a bunch of chromis, eventually there will only be one.

However, I added 6 to my 240 about 6 years ago. Lost one in the first year.
But I still have the 5.
They seem to have a pecking order.
There is one, I would call the boss and I believe it's a male. He has a longer tail fin with small streamers. His dorsal fin is different from the rest.
Not sure if there are other males in the group, but there are a couple females.
They do spawn on occasion, but the eggs usually disappear in a day or so.

They are getting pretty pushy with the other fish. They will go at it with my Flame and Coral Beauty Angels, but it's only for a few seconds.

Man, I had 6 in my 240g and they all jumped ship, all but one that is.

 

[Mike J.]

I started with three B/G Chromis a couple years ago and still have three. They always school, but they are the bottom of the pecking order in the tank. Sometimes the Powder Blue will get in formation with them.

 

[mfinn]

Man, I had 6 in my 240g and they all jumped ship, all but one that is.

That's what I'd heard, but I saw a tank that had 3 chromis once. One male and 2 females that spawned on a regular basis.

Maybe you just need to be lucky and get the right combination of male to females.
I am just guessing on that.