Niger Triggerfish spitting water out of tank

Joeb1983

Member
I have had this fish for a while now and it's pushing 7-8" with streamers.

Today I come home from work to find water on the floor and water running down the glass and stand.

Params are good and I just performed my weekly maintenance.

I sat down in the fish room and watched...

Fish swims up to the surface, next to the MP40 wet side, sticks its head out the water and spits water out 2 or 3 times and goes on it's merry way.

Swims to the other side of the tank to the next MP40 after a few and repeats. (I have four MP40's on this tank so you can imagine...)

Also, does it randomly on the front pain as well now and then.

Like I said, I've never seen it do this since I picked it up when it was a little guy.

It's my favorite fish and it allows me to pet it believe it or not. Lol!

I whipe it all up, it does it again.

Started to get frustrated.

Turns the lights to 1% blue. It's now in its cave.

Any ideas?..
 
It seems that the fish is bored. Niger trigger are known to do that. Normally they use the water spitting under water to turn over urchins so they can get to their less protected underside.
But your fish might just be bored and is playing around.

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Either that or hungry and associates food coming from the top so uses his sand shifting technique out of the tank to try to find food, maybe
 
Either that or hungry and associates food coming from the top so uses his sand shifting technique out of the tank to try to find food, maybe

Hah, poor little guy is doing all he can do to summon the magic food monster :lol:

Maybe he's bored.. Fish are relatively intelligent creatures. You could give him a puzzle to solve and see what happens. Or you could give him something that would feed his primitive side -- Like an urchin.

No matter what type of animal you observe, if it's a predator, it has a more advanced brain. Except for jellies.. But one way or another he might want stimulation of some type. And if you don't mind giving him a HEALTHY urchin to shred to bits, he might really enjoy doing his predator thing.

Additionally, you could maybe move some rocks around.. These little guys are used to exploring large swaths of open rockwork. I'm sure even a fish can get really bored with the same exact space. Fish are also social creatures -- Do you have anything living with him?
 
My friend had an oscar he trained to pull on a string attached to a bell over the tank. He would feed it when it rang the bell.

The bell lasted for about an hour ...as the oscar would not stop ringing it once he found out what it did.
 
My friend had an oscar he trained to pull on a string attached to a bell over the tank. He would feed it when it rang the bell.

The bell lasted for about an hour ...as the oscar would not stop ringing it once he found out what it did.

hahaha. Yeah.. That phenomenon has been reported by a few people with different fish. Clearly, even fish got a 'lil something going on behind their eyes. He probably just needs some form of stimulation.

I had an african cichlid who grew abnormally large by about an inch, he would often fight the heater. He'd start with display threats, then flare his gills and fins, and finally put his mouth on the heater and swim as hard as possible to knock the heater into the glass.

He could do this as little as 3-4 times in a row, or for hours.. For the entirety of his natural life. Fish gonna be fish.
 
This is pretty common with Triggers. I have had a Bluethroat for about 2 years now and I have seen them do this twice. I guess, he was hungry.
 
Its a feeding behavior. When larger triggers do this to inverts like urchins etc and can actually flip them over to get at their vulnerable underside.
 
I agree, it is feeding behavior. Do you immediately go next to the tank when he spits water? By now he probably associated you being next to the tank with food, so if you are going next to the tank when he does that, you are reinforcing that feeding behavior.
 
I agree, it is feeding behavior. Do you immediately go next to the tank when he spits water? By now he probably associated you being next to the tank with food, so if you are going next to the tank when he does that, you are reinforcing that feeding behavior.

^^^ Exactly.
 
Lol - who is training who...

Learn something new every day though. I really enjoy this sub forum.
 
I agree, it is feeding behavior. Do you immediately go next to the tank when he spits water? By now he probably associated you being next to the tank with food, so if you are going next to the tank when he does that, you are reinforcing that feeding behavior.

I feed 3 times a day. Algae sheet before work, pellets when I get home and a cube around lighting ramp down.

It just started doing it yesterday that I noticed.

It/they most definitely associates me with food and they even know the difference between me and my wife which is pretty wild to me.

The trigger runs from my wife and comes to me. Haha!

Thanks for the replies guys!

I did read up on triggerfish "jetting". Pretty crazy.
 
I feed 3 times a day. Algae sheet before work, pellets when I get home and a cube around lighting ramp down.

It just started doing it yesterday that I noticed.

It/they most definitely associates me with food and they even know the difference between me and my wife which is pretty wild to me.

The trigger runs from my wife and comes to me. Haha!

Thanks for the replies guys!

I did read up on triggerfish "jetting". Pretty crazy.


Fish can absolutely recognize faces, it's been studied and proven with Archer fish at least. http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/07/health/fish-human-face-recognition-study-trnd/

pretty cool. whether *all* fish can do this or not has not been studied, but odds are they can recognize us. My firefish for one, has way more personality than I expected for such a little fish. If anyone gets really close to the glass to peer into her world she bolts, but if it's me she makes sure I'm in her field of vision no matter where I look (Getting coral closeups can be impossible from this).

My melanurus also associates me with tapping on the glass as extra treat time. She stopped this behavior when I moved her to a QT, and I'm assuming she'll pick it up again later... But i'd tap my fingernails on the glass and she'd bolt out darting around and looking for food before she even smelled any.

All this stuff fascinates me, sorry I'm a bit wordy here but it's a pretty cool subject!

EDIT: Here's the most important lines for ya

What did they do?

They presented the fish with the picture of the face they wanted the fish to learn and a bunch of new faces. Up to 44 new ones. The fish were able to pick the familiar face correctly 81% of the time.

Impressive. And then?

The researchers decided to make things a little harder. They took the pictures and made them black and white and evened out the head shapes. You'd think that would throw the fish for a loop. But no, they were able to pick the familiar face even then -- and with more accuracy: 86%!

Finally, for the big one: Does my pet fish know me?

Possibly.

"There's something like 30,000 species of fish. A blind fish is not going to be able to do this, sharks are fish and they can see color -- so maybe," Newport said.

Then she [Researcher] shared this observation

When strangers walk into her lab, the fish "act skittish," she said. "When I walk in, they start spitting at me -- many cases right in the eye."
 
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I know for a fact that fish learn to recognize the people that feed them or that are often around the tank. I observed with my fish that they would all be out when I came into the room, but if anyone else came that they didn't knew they would go into hiding.

It has also been proven that fish that live in pairs can recognize each other. Hans Fricke did some interesting research with Amphiprion bicinctus in Eilat, Israel that also showed that they have a pretty good long term memory when it comes to their partners and territory.
He also studied the behavior of Odonus niger and found them to be quite intelligent.

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def a feeding behavior but also, nest building/tending, defense, and, lol, to get our attention.

from a study done with archerfish.

"The research, carried out by a team of scientists from the University of Oxford (UK) and the University of Queensland (Australia), found that archerfish were able to learn and recognize faces with a high degree of accuracy—an impressive feat, given this task requires sophisticated visual recognition capabilities.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

First author Dr Cait Newport, Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University, said: 'Being able to distinguish between a large number of human faces is a surprisingly difficult task, mainly due to the fact that all human faces share the same basic features. All faces have two eyes above a nose and mouth, therefore to tell people apart we must be able to identify subtle differences in their features. If you consider the similarities in appearance between some family members, this task can be very difficult indeed.

'It has been hypothesized that this task is so difficult that it can only be accomplished by primates, which have a large and complex brain. The fact that the human brain has a specialized region used for recognizing human faces suggests that there may be something special about faces themselves. To test this idea, we wanted to determine if another animal with a smaller and simpler brain, and with no evolutionary need to recognize human faces, was still able to do so.'

The researchers found that fish, which lack the sophisticated visual cortex of primates, are nevertheless capable of discriminating one face from up to 44 new faces. The research provides evidence that fish (vertebrates lacking a major part of the brain called the neocortex) have impressive visual discrimination abilities.

In the study, archerfish—a species of tropical fish well known for its ability to spit jets of water to knock down aerial prey - were presented with two images of human faces and trained to choose one of them using their jets. The fish were then presented with the learned face and a series of new faces and were able to correctly choose the face they had initially learned to recognize. They were able to do this task even when more obvious features, such as head shape and colour, were removed from the images.

The fish were highly accurate when selecting the correct face, reaching an average peak performance of 81% in the first experiment (picking the previously learned face from 44 new faces) and 86% in second experiment (in which facial features such as brightness and colour were standardized).

Dr Newport said: 'Fish have a simpler brain than humans and entirely lack the section of the brain that humans use for recognizing faces. Despite this, many fish demonstrate impressive visual behaviours and therefore make the perfect subjects to test whether simple brains can complete complicated tasks.

'Archerfish are a species of tropical freshwater fish that spit a jet of water from their mouth to knock down insects in branches above the water. We positioned a computer monitor that showed images of human faces above the aquariums and trained them to spit at a particular face. Once the fish had learned to recognize a face, we then showed them the same face, as well as a series of new ones.

'In all cases, the fish continued to spit at the face they had been trained to recognize, proving that they were capable of telling the two apart. Even when we did this with faces that were potentially more difficult because they were in black and white and the head shape was standardized, the fish were still capable of finding the face they were trained to recognize.

'The fact that archerfish can learn this task suggests that complicated brains are not necessarily needed to recognize human faces. Humans may have special facial recognition brain structures so that they can process a large number of faces very quickly or under a wide range of viewing conditions.'

Human facial recognition has previously been demonstrated in birds. However, unlike fish, they are now known to possess neocortex-like structures. Additionally, fish are unlikely to have evolved the ability to distinguish between human faces." phys.org
 
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