Luohan For Beginners: What You Need To Know?

Q. I am interested in keeping luohan. What is the minimum tank size I should keep it in?

Buy a good fish. As the luo han is a territorial species, keep only one fish per tank. If you want to bring out the best in your fish, get a tank at least three feet long with drip trays and overhead filter system.

Q. I would like to know how often I need to feed my luohan. How do I enhance its color?

You should feed it two or three times a day at most. Give it spirulina-based food to enhance the color.

Q. Does feeding dried shrimps help to enhance the red color in my luohan’s body?

Yes, but not the “hae bee” type.

Q. Why does my jingang luohan keep changing its color? It turns to a dirty brown, then orange. How long will it take to develop fully into a solid color?

The jingang luohan is a strain of the flowerhorn. When they are juveniles, they look like conventional flower horn fish. While growing up, they undergo a color changing phase, where the black markings fade and the fish turns yellow with a deep red patch around the first-third of its body.

When the colors are changing, pigmentation is quite unstable and may revert temporarily to the darker markings. In times of stress, these black markings can also be more prominent.

It is hard to tell when color changes will take place. There are fishes with small three-inch color changes. Some change color only when they become adults.

Q. Is it true that heated water set at 30 – 32 deg C helps stabilize the flowerhorn fish and enhance the growth on its head?

The size of the hump is genetically predisposed. You can help your louhan attain the maximum size its hump is genetically programmed for, but not beyond that.

A balance diet and good husbandry will contribute to optimum conditions of growing your fish. Keeping an optimum temperature is just one of the many factors involved in making the environment stable for your fish.

Q. My Luohan appears very frightened, often turning black for no reason. Is there any way to remedy this condition?

There are various reasons why the color of a fish changes or fades. One important attribute is the bloodline of the fish. If it has a good bloodline (or breeding), it is more likely that the color of the fish will remain stable. Another reason could be that the water temperature in the aquarium is too low, so perhaps you should use a heater with a temperature gauge and set it at approximately 29° to 30°C.

Q. My luohan’s tail seems to have something that looks like a tear in it. I think that this could be due to an infection caused by some sort of microscopic mites. What can I do about this?

Try changing 50 per cent of the water and keeping the salt level at 0.05% for at least a week.

Q. How do I differentiate the sexes of the flower horn fish? Is it by the black dot on the dorsal fin or the hump on its head?

Black patches on dorsal fins in the earlier varieties of the flowerhorn were good indications of a female fish. However, with increasingly complex hybridization of flower horns, themselves a hybrid, this does not seem to hold true anymore.

As for the hump on the head, males tend to have a larger hump than the females. However there are always exceptions in hybrids.

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