Cichlids Or Planted

demonmagus

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I am stuck between a cichlid (mbuna) or a planted (neons, shrimp, cories) set up in a juwel 240 and am just wondering if anyone has a pros and cons list thing to help me make my mind up.

Thanks
 
The planted will give you more variety in terms of the species you can keep, and, in my opinion, more beauty. If you like green. :D

The cichlid tank will allow you to have awesomely colored fish, and let you watch lots of territorial fish interaction.

Maybe you should get cichlids and then have a smaller tank to breed pairs in now and then.
 
how much time do you have spare for maintenance? planted tanks take a lot of work to keep looking tip top. i'll let you into a little secret. pics like these do make me proud (sorry really not trying to boast) but what you dont see is the work that goes into it. my tanks look awesome for about a week in a month. the rest of the time you are waiting for something to grow out, redoing one corner or another and so on. when it's perfect we take a pic and say look how good my tank looks. funny enough yes of course it looks good you've just spent 2 weeks getting it up to scratch

rekord601.jpg


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the point is, a couple of weeks later it looks like this

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so you rip it all apart and start over

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i do love my tanks but it is more of a full time job than a hobby.

realistically you'd need a bare minimum of 2 hours at the weekend and 10 mins a night spare for a sucessfull planted tank. if you miss a water change on a mbuna tank you wont have many problems however plants dont stop growing just because your busy they just take over and lead to twice the maintenance next time.

then theres the cost of lighting, co2, ferts etc..

i'm not trying to put you off rather prepare you. i will always keep planted tanks as i get so much enjoyment out of it, i enjoy ripping it apart and redesigning the layout etc however if your not the kind of creative person who would enjoy that maintenance side then it will soon become a pain and the tank will fail as a result.

mumba are beautiful fish but once your aquascape is in place you would rarely move things about. if you want a tank to look awesome with very little changes or fiddling on your part go for mumba, if you want a big boys toy you can play with and fiddle with at your leisure go planted (chuckles to self on reading that last sentence LOL)

hope that helped, let us know what you decide on.
 
What jimbooo says is true but there's a great upside to all that maintainance. You foten see people getting bored of their tropical tanks and either slacking on maintainance and neglecting their fish or over-stocking and bringing disaster upon themselves. With a planted tank, things are constantly changing and needing to be looked after. It keeps you busy and, as it's never exactly the same, you don't get bored of the tank.

the same, however, is applicable to mbuna - the fish are constantly breeding, giving you plenty to do.

Having said that, I'm not one to spend all that much time caring for plants. I get easy-to-grow, hardy plants and let them grow to their xylem's content. As such, i'd be more inclined to suggest mbuna or another not-so-planted setup. I'm not saying carefuly pruned and designed planted tanks aren't beautiful - they are - I just preffer to either let my plants go wild or stick to something different altogether.

I thinks it's very difficult to make this decision without an idea of your own fishy preferences. What do you already own? I'd expect you want to try something new and different in a 60 gallon - plenty of space for all sorts. I have little doubt, however, that having seen jimboos stunning pictures, you'll be thinking along the lines of planted...

Keep in mind that going for planted, though it may mean no mbuna, doesn't mean no cichlids - think, dwarf cichlids, discus, angels, dwarf acaras, pulcher/kribs, firemouths even, severums, festivums etc Plenty of non-rift lake options.

And you can get just as much color in your average tropical community as you can with mbuna - rainbows, livebearers and gouramies demonstrate this clearly.

The downside to planted is, as mentioned, the maintainance and the fact that the fish are rarely as hardy and easy to breed and care for as mbuna cichlids.

If you still can't decide, you could always go for the choice that best suit's your tap water's pH/hardness and your budget. :)
 
hmmmmmm, thanks, I do like purple spotted gudgeons, and I like cichlids because they are intelligent (apparently :D). However, the rockwork in the mbuna tanks sometimes look boring to me...
 
Jimboo's right. Planted tanks (such as Jimboo's prime examples) are really hard work (at least initially) and can be quite costly :crazy:
So just depends how much time you are willing to invest and you'll have to do a fair bit of reading on water / algae / light / hardware etc. etc.
After several months I'm still trying very hard to get anything vaguely looking like Jimboo's tanks :/
So much so that I've more than once thought about switching to Cichlids ! :lol:
 
he he. i can see the steam coming from your brain... what to do hey, decisions decisions

for low light plants have a read through my 50G cube journal in my sig. theyre all low light the tank has about 1.3 WPG and it's 2 foot deep.

thats definatly low light and it's been quite sucessfull.

thanks for the compliments people.... it's always nice to hear appreciation for my efforts.
 

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