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Fish Aquarium Advice
minerman
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Hello, this is my first post here. This is a little random but I hope its not inappropriate
A couple weeks ago, I set up my first fresh water fish aquarium. There are 12 fish and a sunken pirate ship. Take a look at what I've got and let me know what you think I should do with it next. Post your aquarium pics too!
Here are some of the fish in my tank (some species unknown):
1. Tiger Oscar Cichlid
2. Albino Tiger Oscar Cichlid
3. Tiger Barbs (3)
4. Firemouth Meeki Cichlid
5. Kennyi Cichlid
A couple weeks ago, I set up my first fresh water fish aquarium. There are 12 fish and a sunken pirate ship. Take a look at what I've got and let me know what you think I should do with it next. Post your aquarium pics too!
Here are some of the fish in my tank (some species unknown):
1. Tiger Oscar Cichlid
2. Albino Tiger Oscar Cichlid
3. Tiger Barbs (3)
4. Firemouth Meeki Cichlid
5. Kennyi Cichlid
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XBL : lJesse Custerl | MWO: Jesse Custer | Best vid ever. | 2nd best vid ever.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
The tiger barbs will be food, probably in the next year, since the oscars will be 10-12 inches at a year old, and 12-14 at final size. 18 inches is unusual in captivity - most captive raised oscars top out around 14. You can get wild caught ones at 18 sometimes, but both of yours are domestic breeds.
Tiger barbs are tough little fish, but they're not very smart, and will pick a fight with a fish vastly larger than them, which tends to guarantee if they have tankmates capable of eating them, they'll be the first fish eaten. In the long run, anything that can fit in the oscar's mouth will end up in the oscar's mouth - even some things bigger than the its mouth - last year my favorite oscar tried swallowing a pleco longer than himself and actually dislocated his jaw and choked to death. The firemouth should be ok (but will lose a straight up fight with an adult oscar), as long as the oscars don't outgrow him too quickly, but the rest look like food.
Either way, short term's more important, cycling. Pick up a water test kit if you didn't (I use the API freshwater master kit) and watch your ammonia and nitrite levels daily at least. Keep both low through water changes - you've got hardy fish, but anything above .25 ppm risks permanent gill damage, and nitrite binds to hemoglobin and effectively nullifies gill function. Nitrate is harmless, other things will go wrong in the tank before nitrate reaches dangerous levels. The only stuff you'll need to add to the water is dechlorinator - the rest of the stuff pet stores try to sell ranges from snake oil to poison.
Only a handful of bottled cycling aids work (and those are expensive and still unreliable), and leaving the tank run for X days does nothing more than adding fish immediately. The cycle starts when an ammonia source is added to the tank, either fish or fishless. Fishless cycles usually take 3-4 weeks, though soft water makes the process touchier. Fish-in cycles, which you're likely in, usually take 4-6 weeks.
Add a second filter, too. Hang-on-backs aren't bad, but they're often rated for much more tank than they can handle, and particularly in long tanks, they don't get enough flow. Looks like a 4 foot tank and an aquaclear filter? I've switched most of my tanks over to canisters, but still run my 55 with two of the same filter. You can't overfilter unless it gets to the point that the fish are being slammed into the glass, at which point you can add spray bars or screen to break up the flow. A bare minimum flow rate is 5 times the tank volume, but with hanging filters I'd bump that to 10 times - adult oscars demand major filtration either way.
A good immediate step would be to join fishforums.net - it's where I learned the ropes myself, and I hang out in the newbie forums answering questions as I can. There's a lot of resources, indexes of people who can provide filter media. Names to look for for the good newbie advice would be Miss Wiggle, backtotropical, rabbut, and waterdrop (I left my name off the list, but my advice mostly matches theirs, since they taught me). There's a few good fish sites out there, like Aqua-hobby, but I'd stay away from fishforums.com particularly - there's not as many people giving newbie help there, and what there is isn't as quality as the other two forums I mention.
Whatever you do, don't buy a second tank (aside from a quarantine tank). It's possible to be happy with one tank forever. Once you give in to that second tank, you're doomed. Before you know it you'll be like me and have filtered kiddie pools full of guppy fry in your back yard and snails having sex in every room of your house.
At this point its the firemouth meeki that is the tank bully. It never stops chasing, but never is quick enough to catch any of the others.
I fear that once the oscars reach adult size, I'll feel the need to buy a 265 gallon. 8-)
Yeah you've got some jerks in there. I hope they get along with the tiger barbs. The cichlids can be a bit rude too.
Look into picking up a pleco or a catfish. For catfish i'd suggest a raphael stripped cat. They're fun little guys but be sure you have some sort of light schedule as they can be a bit nocturnal (it could enter that ship, right?)
I got my first tank back in September. It was a little plastic tub, half a gallon, and it housed two tiny plastic plants and a betta named Aleister. (Actually, it was this tank, but I added an extra plant).
I've kept my Alliefish alive and swimming for almost a year now, and during that time I've learned a lot about what fish need. I've upgraded his tank twice - first to a one-gallon model with a light in the hood and a little airstone that really did nothing, then more recently to a nicer three-gallon tank with a height-adjustable overhead light, a power filter, and a 25w heater. The temperature is a constant 79F, the light is on for about 12 hours out of every 24, his tank is on the kitchen counter out of direct sunlight. I feed him Hikari Gold betta pellets, 4-5 pellets twice a day, and once or twice a week I give him a few freeze-dried bloodworms for lunch as a treat. I treat the water with both a standard dechlorinator (even though we're on a well, so our water is probably chlorine-free to begin with) and a bacterial cycler, and I do 10-15% water changes once a week. His home holds a little stone bridge and two nice plastic plants, and every couple of weeks I pull them out and give them a good thorough scrub to clean off the bit of algae that builds up - no soap, of course, just really hot water and a stiff-bristled plastic brush.
That's for a single fish. A single betta, the standard fish for absolute beginners, the fish that most people keep in a completely unfiltered tank barely big enough to turn around in, with no temperature control and only the most sporadic water changes. And if the people on the various betta-specific message boards are to be believed, my care for Aleister just barely meets the lowest minimum standards. (I actually had a horrible nightmare yesterday in which I had left Allie under the care of someone at a pet store for a few days while I went away, and when I came back I found that they had moved him back to a tiny little tank, and added two other fish in there with him, and one of the other fish had been infected so now Aleister had fin rot and it had already spread to his body and I woke up feeling absolutely miserable and wretchedly guilty).
There's really a very narrow middle ground when it comes to fish care. On one extreme are the people who let their fish swim around in their own filth until the water is too thick to see through, cheerfully exclaiming "They live in puddles in the wild, this is what they're used to!" On the other are the people who claim that adult male bettas require ten gallon tanks to themselves to be happy, with at least 50% of the tank devoted to natural plant cover, fed a diet of fresh bloodworms and brine shrimp and dosed with de-stressers twice a week. I think I've found a comfortable balance between the two, but the lesson has been a year in the making. And that was starting with a single small fish. Trying to learn on aggressive, incompatible species in a large tank sounds a whole lot harder... and while fish frantically chasing each other all the time might be amusing to watch, I can't imagine it would be good for the fish themselves
A practical suggestion, to balance out the foreboding: get some plants in there. They don't need to be real, as long as they're not made of the jagged fin-shredding variety of plastic. Plants make aquariums look better - more natural, less empty, more interesting. They also provide places for fish to hide, making them feel safer and more comfortable.
My male betta is in a 20 long with 10 gallons of water in it. They don't live in puddles in the wild, they actually live in very large bodies of water, but also very shallow. More space is always better for fish, but there is an effective upper limit when you never see the fish anymore. Sadly most of the betta specific forums out there are junk - I know of about thirty websites full of people keeping them in vases and "feeding" them flower stems. I don't know which ones you've read, but it can't be that bad, since you're at least feeding them a good carnivore diet. The forum I recommended above has a very active betta community with a few professional breeders. They set me straight and let me salvage my ruined breeding project when I was about to give up. I still did give up, but in the end it was because I got sick of hovering over the breeding tank with two nets all day waiting to intervene when they started killing each other.
Plants also contribute to your biofilter. There's really no downside to live plants - even the occasional snail infestation is easily controlled without resorting to snail eating fish or copper based snail poisons. If you don't go heavy planted, CO2 injection isn't necessary either. Aquatic plants utilize ammonia over nitrate when it's present in the water, and don't release nitrite as filter bacteria do. Very heavily planted tanks with light fish stock can sometimes be kept with no filtration, but I don't recommend it except for very experienced aquatic gardeners.
To the OP, though, you'll never be able to keep plants in that tank. The oscars will eventually start rearranging the tank, digging pits in the gravel. If you put some plastic plants and driftwood fragments in there, they'll squabble about which end of the tank it should be at, which is very fun to watch. Live plants will be destroyed in short order, though.
If so, not really enough room for two Oscars, and you're kind of pushing it with one.
Fish selection may also be a problem. For the most part, compared with other South American Cichlids, Oscars are whimps. If you don't pair them with anything more bad ass, they can run a tank, but when you start mixing in some Africans, they can get torn up.
You also have to watch out for Hole in the Head with Oscars in tight/stressful spots.
If you decide to go with Chichlids, decide which type, South American or African, both are very awesome and make for beautiful and interesting tanks.
I'd suggest going to http://www.cichlidforums.com/ and http://www.theoscarspot.com/ for more detailed information.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I'd add some kind of a background to the tank, purely for aesthetic reasons. Fish look pale against a white wall. I prefer taping simple black, blue or green paper or plastic on the outside of the tank. Some people like fancier background images.
Here's a "filtering" option to supplement your actual filter, in case you're into tinkering with things a bit: Since aquatic plants are out of the question (Oscars will shred and/or uproot everything, and the firemouth will help them), an effective way to deal with Oscar-generated waste is to grow a fast-growing hydroponic plant or several in the aquarium water. Plants consume the end products of fish and fish food waste very effectively, and hydroponic terrestrial plants won't have carbon dioxide shortages like aquatic plants do. If the aquarium cover allows it, you can just devise some kind of a makeshift holder for the plant (some kind of a well perforated box/cup filled with gravel that hangs from the side of the tank; just pot the plant there so that the roots are below water level but the plant itself isn't, and it'll start growing roots into the water). I've grown bamboo plants from an aquarium without any kind of a pot even; I just used rubber bands and metal wire to attach them to the side of the tank. You can actually make this kind of thing look pretty attractive. You'll need some light for the plants, and you may need to add a chelated iron supplement to the water if they stop growing and the newer leaves turn yellow (available in aquarium stores, or (much cheaper) in gardening stores in case you want to research the proper dosage, although the chelated iron is harmless to your fish at least unless you overdose by several orders of magnitude. Basically just buy the stuff from a gardening store, imagine your tank is full of soil and then dose according to the instructions on the package).
Well that was supposed to be just a quick suggestion, but got longer than intended. Note: if you choose to do this, either buy hydroponically grown plants, or grow your plants from seeds, or if you buy a potted one, rinse the roots carefully with room temperature water.
Personally I'd keep one oscar and return the rest. Oscars are some of the best fish to keep in my opinion. Also, they will share a tank with an algea eater, cant remember the name of it right now. But get one close to full grown. I have one in my tank thats 1' long and no oscar has ever fucked with it more than once.
Edit: Oscars are almost impossible to kill as well. As long as you have a big enough tank and feed them well they'll flourish.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
My suggestion is, keep all the fish for now. Once the tiger barbs start disappearing (or it becomes obvious that they'd fit in the oscars' mouths if they decided to have a snack) you'll know your oscars are big enough to need a bigger tank (or you need to get rid of them at that point; they may live in a too small tank but keeping them that way is cruel). The other cichlids will do fine in that tank forever, although the firemouth is far, far more colorful and interesting if you keep them in mated pairs.
Get a pleco (armored, grows big, eats algae if it feels like it)*. Also, Clown loaches (you always want more than one) and Leporinus tetras get along with oscars. You need to get them now so they can keep up with the oscars' growth though. The Leporinus species are all big, fast and belligerent enough to hold their own against any cichlids, and the clown loaches, who also grow pretty big, have razor-sharp defensive switchblades under their eyes that they use to slash attackers; other fish learn to not bother them more than once. Clowns are also very efficient at keeping the gravel clean of fish food left over after the messy eating habits of the oscars.
* Later on, if you get more involved in the hobby and become interested in breeding your oscars, get rid of the pleco. It will most likely eat their eggs at night.
All fish will potentially reach full size in a small tank, even if it means they grow until they're touching all four walls. If that's still not big enough. Water quality's the limiting factor.
This just isn't true at all. They don't need pristine water conditions, but they won't thrive without good water quality. They're almost as prone to hole-in-head as discus, so they need good water quality and a proper diet.
The diet's something I didn't bring up before, but I noticed in your post on fishforums.com (.net is better, IMO, but all the same in the end) that this has already been touched on. The oscars will need a good meaty protein rich food like Hikari Gold, but if the other cichlids eat that, they'll develop bloating problems as mbuna need a primarily vegetarian diet.
If you are at all interested in breeding oscars, you'll actually want to buy about six to eight more juveniles and wait for pairs to start forming (they mate for life, but do sometimes "divorce" which usually means a fatal fight), at which point you can sell off the unpaired individuals. If you get more than one pair, I'd sell them at a local fish club or specialist dealer, because oscar pairs can fetch well over $100, where individuals are lucky to get $15 store credit. They've nearly impossible to sex unless you see them spawning, and even so, with only one option available many times the pairing behavior never comes out.
Sorry If I wasn't clear but when I said near impossible to kill I meant that they will survive easily minute changes in tank chemistry and temperature. Things that could easily kill other weaker fish. Of course they need great water quality and good food to thrive. For a beginner though the oscar is a decent starting fish as long as you respect how big they are going to get. I rescued a 12" oscar from a 20gallon tank at a fish store once. Poor thing couldn't even turn around.
Basically just watch all your fish right now. If they become snacks, or are about too, then act. Just make sure to keep up on the water changes and feed good quality food.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981