Anybody ever have this problem?

[Tom Mroz <tmroz@art-inc.com>]

This one goes under the "It figures" column - let me know if you get this 
too:

I bought a "pair" of A. trifasciata late last winter.  The "males" looked 
marginal (as males, that is), but I took the chance anyways - sometimes you 
see males with poor dorsal fin development, and besides, these "males" did 
not have the normal black ventrals.  Anyways, as you may well imagine, 
there was no spawning and eventually I concluded that these were both 
females.  One died, the other has lived a very healthy life, sharing space 
with an equally lonely female A. linkei.  As luck would have it, my local 
store just brought in some new trifasciata last week (bless their hearts!), 
and so I bought one of the two males in the tank (about 15 females, talk 
about skewed sexes).  I popped him in the tank with the female(s), and he 
was half-heartedly chased around by the female trifasciata for a few days. 
 She also chased around the female linkei.  Eventually, they settled down a 
bit, and I saw him around the tank, though the female was still more 
dominant.  No spawning yet, kind of surprising.  She was fattening up 
thought, which seemed a good sign.  Well, it appears that instead of 
getting ready to spawn, she is contracting a good case of dropsey and thus 
has little time left.  In fact, I went to the store again today to pick up 
another female.

I have seen this all too often.  Add a spouse to a lonely heart candidate 
(for apistos anyways), and very frequently, the lonely heart ends up 
kicking the bucket and you are left with the opposite sex, again alone. 
 And I must emphasize that I see this very often where the original tank 
inhabitant is the more dominant (but not so aggressive as to cause real 
fighting), which rules out the suggestion that they were picked on.  It 
seems that the stress of the addition and/or the surge of hormones weakens 
the fish and they contract disease.  It just seems strange to me that the 
fish that SHOULD have the lower stress level (the original inhabitant) is 
the one that dies.

Any similar stories out there?

Tom  (trying yet again with A. trifasciata)