Can I keep a group of Honey Gouramis?

[Aulonochromis]

I have a 100 gallon tank, 4x2x2. I am wondering if 5 to 10 honey gouramis would be ok?

 

[Mr Miagi]

Aslong as there is heaps of room and hidy places, i cant see a problem. The amount of males you have could determine the amount of fighting and bullying so i would see if i could get fewer males. Sounds like its gonna be my kinda tank. What else are you going to put in it or what else is there in it?? Is it planted??

 

[Aulonochromis]

Is is easy to sex Honeys?

The tank is planted with some java fern, anubias, crypts, and vals. The other creatures I want to add are 6 SAEs, 6 YoYo loaches, adn maybe 3 or 4 Clown Loaches. I have cichlids in the tank now, I can't wait to find them a home so I can start my loach/gourami tank.

 

[Mr Miagi]

Yeah, it sounds like it will b an awsome tank! Goodluck! I think male honey gouramis show quite a bit more colour than females. You could try your luck, i think it should be a big enouf tank for fish to escape the bullying of certain indeviduals!

 

[sylvia]

Don't worry about it at all - even if you got all males you probably wouldn't have trouble. Honeys only get to around 2" and 100 gallons is plenty of space for them. However, if you want to do what's best for the fish, I'd get more females than males. 2 females to every male is a good number - so maybe get 3-4 males and 7 females. You can sex mature fish by looking at the color but younger ones can be harder to distinguish. Males will develop a dark blue-black throat when in breeding condition and are generaly brighter. This will not be obvious in young individuals though so your best bet is to get a good look at their dorsal fins and try to get 2-3 with very pointed dorsals and the rest with more rounded tips. The pointier ones will hopefuly be male while the others will hopefuly be female. I would urge you to get a couple less 'males' than you realy want in case some of the fish with rounded dorsals turn out to be male (which almost always seems to happen when you don't want it to ). You can always remove, replace or add other honeys in future.

Anyway, sounds like an interesting tank. Do post pictures when it's done

 

[mandi]

Yay! Great choice!! I love my honey gouramis !

 

[coryd]

The honeys are awesome. My 2 males are hardly ever near each other but when they are there is no aggression.

 

[Aulonochromis]

Glad to hear it will work.

There is a bunch in a tank at the lfs and there doesn't seem to be any agression. In fact they seem to enjoy each other's company. I watched them for quite some time, that's what made me want a group of them. They are really beautiful.

I really like the dwarf gouramis as well. I used to have one and he was an awesome fish with a ton of personality. All I see lately are the hybridized (or line bred?) powder blues and flames. I prefer to keep natural fish, I think the natural dwarfs look nicer, and I also have read that due to inbreeding the hybrids are susceptable to disease. Is disease common in the hybrids?

 

[sylvia]

Well they aren't hybrids. The only hybrid dwarf gourami is a cross between the honey gourami and dwarf but it doesn't look like an ordinary dwarf anyway (looks like a cross actualy ). The color morphs you are reffering to are mutants - random mutations that resulted in new colors and which are now selectively bred to keep up the various color strains (like half-black guppies or blue budgies or cinnamon-point cats ). I personaly quite like the powder blues but that's my opinion. The real problem is that no wild stock is introduced into the colored and selectively bred bloodlines as it would pretty much destroy them. That means these fish are line-bred and in-bred to 'improve' coloration. This means a lot of bad traits become more significant and has resulted in weakened immune systems for many of the fish and this means they often carry disease and can often be very easily stressed and highly susceptible to things other fish would not normaly catch if in good condition. Unfortunately, this doesn't only apply to powder blue, neon blue and flame reds, it also applies to the wild-type fish that have been bred for generations to show more blue or more red in their striped pattern than their truly wild counterpart. What that basicaly means is that pretty much any dwarf gourami could, and probably is, significantly in-bred somewhere in its background and has a likelihood of becoming diseased, indirectly, because of this. So to answer your question, yes disease is common. However, it doesn't usualy affect tank-mates and only usualy results in the premature death of the infected fish. I personaly still like to keep dwarfs - even if their lifespan is shortened by several years due to the bad breeding (when was the last time a dwarf got to 7?).

 

[Aulonochromis]

Would a pair of pearl gouramis get along with a group of honeys?

 

[Mr Miagi]

I cant see a problem with keeping pearls with dwarfs. Anyone else?

 

[sylvia]

I agree - pearls should be fine. Great choices BTW

 

[Pompeydave]

I have Pearls in with Honeys at the moment and they are fine. However, like all Colisa Gourami's they are prone to Dropsy. The Dwarf is particulalry susceptable, probably due to the aforementioned inbreeding that weakens the strain. I've found that the best way to counteract this is regular, substantial water changes.

 

[metfan581]

who much room(gallons) dose a honey grammie need