what is a good sive for a silver and any one got any info on them
how much for a small one

This post has been edited by jarcher1390: Feb 18 2006, 09:18 AM

Silver what?

Cheers,

Neale

tank size is the bigger the better!. a fullygrow silver can reach 4ft with enough room and space but a 3ft captive silver is doing well.
so depending on what size you want depends on what size tank you need. if you start off with a 6" silver then a smaller tank will do for a short time, then you must upgrade as the fish grows. a simplerule to tank size is 3x as long as the fish and 1.5x for the width.
my personal opinion is a 6x3x2 to be minimum for a silver aro but ide recomend a bigger tank to care for it properly.
as for price ide say £15/£20 for a decent 6"er would be ok for around co,durham,

This post has been edited by sharp tooth: Feb 18 2006, 09:58 AM

Ultimately you are going to need a tank in the region of 10x3x2' as a minimum for keeping a full grown silver arowana, they are the largest growing of the arowana species and fish of over 30 inches in length are not unheard of in captivity, wild specimins can reach around 4 feet. Obviously you dont need a tank this large straight away as the fish will take several years to reach its full size but you will need a minimum of a 75 gallon tank for a 6 inch juvinile with the view to upgrade to a 180 gallon within a year at most, the first two years is when the majority of the growth takes place and growth rates of at least 1 inch per month can be expected for the first 12 months.

Silver arowana's suffer badly from droopy eye, a condition which causes the eyes to push out and downwards, the causes of this are unknown but there are several theories as to its cause.
The first is diet, silver arowana's are cheifly insectovors which prey on spiders and other large terristial bugs which they catch by knocking them out of trees above the water surface. In captivity people tend to feed them lots of foods full of fatty proteins like shrimp, fish and mussels, and it is believed these fatty proteins are difficult for the fish to digest and form as fatty tissue in the back of the head behind the eyes which pushes on the eyes. Try to mimmick their natural diet by feeding them a menu of mainly crickets, locusts and mealworms, stick insects are also good too and easy to breed so can be a cheap source of food, supplement this with every other day feedings of a good floating carnivor pellet food such as the Hikari floating carnivor sticks.
Another possible cause is movement at the bottom of the tank drawing the arowana's attention to look down which is quite unnatural for them, the murky waters of the Amazon mean that visability is cut down to just a few inches down so the fish never sees what is below it and its attention is always focused upward looking for possible prey. For this reason it is best that bottom dwelling tankmates are kept to a minimum and should be fairly inactive so as to draw the minimum attention, i have also heard of people placing floating rubber ducks in the tank which keep the arowana's attention focused at the surface.
The third theory is water quality, arowana's need near perfect water to stay in their best condition, keep the nitrates as low as possible at all times and stick to a strict regular maintainace schedule of water changes and vacuming to keep dissolved organic solids in the water column to a minimum.

i thought they grew big and my tank could not hold one in size


a silver arowana