60 Litre 'new' Fish Tank How Many Fish Can I Have?

[Superdream]

Hello there fellow fish lovers,


About 8 weeks ago I was given an Elite fish tank by a friend that I believe to be about 60 litres with an Elite 15 stingray filter and a heater. It also came complete with 2 Guppys.( The tank was in use for 12 months prior to this.)

I've never owned a fish tank before so have done a few newbie errors such as clean the filter with hot tap water when I got it home. To transport the tank in the car 80% of the water was removed but replaced as soon as I got home with properly treated tap water, I then left the tank for 3 weeks before I went out and bought some fish from my LFS.
I purchased 3 more guppys in assorted colours, 6 quite small neon tetras and a sucking loach- not half an hour after getting him home I realised that purchace might not have been the best idea as fairly quickly the tetras just started to vanish, no sign of them what so ever until I had just the one neon tetra left.

I've then left the tank again for 3-4 weeks and apart from vanishing tetras have only had one hiccup: my 3 year old nephew decided to feed the fish when no one was looking and emptied a full tub of fish food into the tank. After a few hours of hoovering up gravel with my home made syphon and many water changes later everything is back to normal and no fish died (I went out and bought a nitrite/nitrate testing kit about half an hour after the incident and tested twice daily) There was a bit of an increase but I did 50% water changes then retested after 10 minutes or so and did another change if it was still high.

So yesterday I went out to another LFS and purchased 10 more neons though bigger ones this time, a gorgeous purple siamese fighting fish and 3 more guppys with lovely big tails.
Now this LFS had in his tank of 100 or so tetras, a sucking loach. When I asked him about my loach eating my neon tetras he said it wouldn't do that and he wouldn't keep his neons in with one if they were in danger of getting eaten. So where have mine gone then??


Anyway that was 2 days ago and to recap I have in my tank:

1 siamese fighting fish
1 sucker loach about 2 inch long
11 neon tetras
8 assorted guppys


Sorry about the long read to get to my question, which is: How many fish is enough in a tank of my size? It would be lovely if you could have loads and loads of different kinds but obviously that's not how life works. But if posible I'd like perhaps 3 more different community fish so if that's possible what would you recommend?

Oh and yesterday I bought some algae wafers to try to stop my sucking loach turning his attentions on my tetras but all I've seem to have ended up with is a very fat guppy despite hiding the wafer under the bog wood where he hides out 90% of the time.


Many thanks if you've stuck with me this far, I look forward to reading your expert advise and opinions on my firstcouple of months with my fish!!!

 

[SJ2K]

*Edited* See youve actually already got those fish so its too late to say its a bad idea...Good Luck

 

[fluttermoth]

Well, the best guideline for beginners is one inch of fish per gallon of water.
As your tank is only 13 gallons, you're already overstocked...(I guess you could use US gallons, but that still gives you only 15 inches of fish)

As you washed your filter out in tap wate, you will have killed all the beneficial bacteria, I expect it is was poor water quality that killed the neons and the other fish will have eaten them once they were dead.

Sorry, I don't mean to sound harsh to you or anything; fishkeeping at the beginning is a steep learning curve! You'll get there in time
I'd suggest you have a read of the 'Beginner's Resource center' that's stickied at the top of this forum.
Good luck!

 

[Mo1959]

Your three guppies with their lovely tails may well be seen as enemies to your Siamese fighting fish I think.

 

[Curiosity101]

I would say that tank is fully stocked, and potentially problematic in the future.

Male betta often mistake male guppies for rival bettas and have regularly been known to kill them. This isn't true of all bettas, and of the threads I've seen it's prob around a 50/50 chance. The main problem is that they don't always neccesarily attack as soon as they're placed in the tank, sometimes they need to get settled first before starting to show signs of agression. And sometimes they show no signs but you just wake up one day to find guppys with chunks missing out of their tails or dead fish.
Make sure you're ready for the possibility of it happening to you.

The original neons likely weren't killed by the loach. If it's a golden algae eater or similar

These are normally peaceful and vegetarian for awhile, but soon become territorial meat eaters as they mature. They're too big for a 60l tank anyways, but when they do go for fish it tends to be flat bodied fish that they can get a good grip on such as gouramis, disk shaped tetras etc. Again... something to bear in mind, if it is a golden algae eater I would return it straight away as it's not suitable for your tank long term.
I reckon the more likely explanation for the neons dissapearing was them dying due to ammonia poisoning and getting sucked up into the filter. Neons are very very sensitive to ammonia and nitrite, when you added lots of fish (3 guppys, 6 tetras and the loach) when the filter previously had only had to cope with 2 guppys, there will have been a reasonably big spike. Certainly big enough to kill neons (even over a long period of time).

So back to stock, with the loach gone you've got a reasonably well stocked tank, I certainly wouldn't plan to add anything else in the near future. Just give the other fish some time to mature and grow and make sure your stats hold.