December Featured Fish: Kuhli Loach

Looking for an interesting freshwater fish for populating the bottom of your tank? Kuhli loaches are easy to find at most tropical fish stores, and they’re fairly easy to care for.

Take a look at what you need to know about keeping kuhli loaches.

Snake-like appearance

If you’re a fan of exotic pets, you may like the kuhli loach for its distinctive appearance. Though it is a fish, it looks quite a lot like an eel or a snake. The way kuhli loaches move, in fact, simulates a slithering motion. It’s the fins that give away that it is actually a fish.

Another unique part of the kuhli loach’s appearance is that its scales are extremely small and somewhat spaced far from each other. This gives the fish the appearance of being scaleless. It’s not, but some of its skin is exposed between the scales. However, the exposed skin (especially at the head) can make them sensitive to disease and to medication doses, so you’ll need to be especially careful about what is added to the water in tanks with these loaches.

Loaches do come in different color patterns, but you’ll often see kuhli loaches with a striped pattern. Their coloring tends to be dark brown or black with gold stripes and a golden pink underside, and they grow to about four inches long.

Scavenging bottom dweller

Kuhli loaches are aquarium bottom dwellers. This makes them a good tank mate for fish that like to live near the middle or top of the aquarium. They’ll stay out of each other’s way.

These fish are omnivores that mostly eat meat-based foods that they can find along the gravel or substrate in the tank. Because of this, they will need some kind of sinking food, not the fish food that floats at the top of the tank.

You can feed these loaches a prepared food, such as Aqueon Bottom Feeder Tablets, but they will also need a regular diet of live foods. Good choices include:

• Bloodworms
• Brine shrimp
• Finely chopped meat

They will also occasionally eat algae or algae discs, despite being predominantly carnivorous. As scavengers, they may even help keep the aquarium clean by eating detritus (rotting organic materials).

Social animal

Kuhli loaches are what is known as shoaling fish. This means they live together in groups, but they do not swim in an organized pattern like schooling fish. What’s important to know for keeping these loaches, however, is that they fare better in groups of at least five of their own kind.

They are also excellent candidates for a community tank. You may have heard that loaches tend to eat snails and shrimp, but kuhli loaches are safe to pair with these species and typically will not eat them.

Tank needs

If you’d like to keep kuhli loaches, you’ll need a warm tank environment, as is the case with many tropical fish. They prefer seventy-five to eighty-five degree temperatures.

These fish are inquisitive about any dark space they can find, especially if it’s filled with potentially scavengeable food bits, so it’s an important safety measure to add a pre-filter to your filter. This is sponge material that prevents the loaches from entering the filter itself, which does happen.

They also prefer to have plenty of dark hiding places. They will come out more readily at night, and hide less when provided with companions of their own species. Talk to a team member at The Tye-Dyed Iguana if you’re interested in kuhli loaches or have more questions.