Color fading of aquarium fish might be a serious problem as we love their vibrant, magnificent colors. So let’s find out why your fish is getting pale or changing color and how to avoid it.
What causes a fish to lose color?
Usually, the stress in their environment is the main reason for fish to lose their color. In addition, several environmental factors, Diseases, Genetics, and the lack of care from their owners also may cause color changes of aquarium fish.
Why do fish get stressed?
Stress in your fish can have a lot of potential root causes. You should try to figure out the exact reason for being stressed.
Environmental Changes
Sometimes introducing a fish into a new environment can cause the color to fade. especially this happens when it takes a long time to ship to your home from the pet shop.
Poor Water Quality
Poor water quality can cause to fade out fish colors in two ways. First, the bad compounds in the water can directly wreak havoc on your fish. Also, it can indirectly cause your fish to lose colors by stressing them. So this is one of the first things you should check if your fish is suddenly experiencing a loss of color.
The presence of Ammonia or too high nitrates is the common reason for poor water quality. Along with this, other water quality factors such as too high or low water temperatures, large temperature fluctuations, pH fluctuations, and water hardness, can also cause color loss in your fish.
So it’s important to make sure that you are regularly testing your aquarium water and know where the water parameters are.
Tank Bullies
One of the next big reasons that your fish gonna stressed is tank bullies. Often the fish that’s being bullied or picked on by other fish will start to lose their color. Actually, they might start to darken or even appear to turn black.
Keeping an eye on the behavior of the fish in your aquarium can really help you to determine whether your fish are compatible with each other. If this is the problem, those fish need to be separated and may be placed in a separate tank.
Inappropriate Tank Setups
Finally, your fish may become stressed due to uncomfortable tank setups. Each fish has its own preferred tank setup like community, planted, or black water setups. It includes the right lighting condition, tank size, tank decorations, and many more factors. So you should do some research regarding each fish to understand what type of tank setup is needed for that particular fish.
Specially when keeping schooling fish like Tetra varieties, try to keep at least five to ten fish per school.
Lack of Nutrition
Poor Diet and lack of nutrition is the other main factor that causes color loss in aquarium fish. Feeding your fish incorrectly, such as a diet too high or low in protein, can be a contributing factor to color loss, depending on the species that you’re keeping.
Always do research regarding the fish species that you’re keeping and make sure that they are receiving adequate nutrition for that specific species.
Diseases
Your fish may also lose color due to an underlying illness. If the color loss is accompanied by other symptoms such as brain fins, white spots, bloating, odd swimming behavior, or any other potential symptoms, this fish might need to be treated for an illness. Once the fish is fully recovered from the illness, its colors should begin to return.
Color Fed Fish
If all the above factors are Ok but still your fish is losing color, probably you might have been tricked at the store and bought a dyed fish. It means, most probably, those fish have been color fed.
Unfortunately, this is a thing that happens in the aquarium hobby. Naturally, those fish are not much vibrant or flashy as you see in the pet store. So if you have bought these dyed fish, in a matter of a few years, the colors gonna fade away, and you’ll be left with a paled white fish.
Conclusion
I hope this information really helps you to determine why you might be seeing some color loss in your aquarium fish. Now you know what you can do going forward to keep that beautiful vibrant color in your fish. So do the right thing and take care of your fish; they will heal your mind with their beautiful colors.
