Getting Tanked Up

[Helen G]

Well, my cube will soon be cycled, so the time has come to start thinking about stocking it up.

The tank is a 40 litre p.H about 6.4, KH between 0-3 and GH 3.

Obviously I need to work out how many cm's of fish I can have.

I would like to have a centre piece pair, a couple of guppies, and a small group of shoaling fish.

I don't want anything too drab, I like them to be interesting. I was thinking maybe half a dozen black phantom tetras as my shoal, as I have had these before and I loved it when the 'flared' at the females, but I know that having that many will affect the stocking levels.

 

[mark.w.jones]

You have room for around 11" of fish in that tank give or take. In my opinion, black phantoms are little too big and too active for a small cube tank. I also would tend to shy away from livebearers like guppies as with breeding their fry will very soon plague your tank. You'll soon get bored of culling them as well. I would suggest you take a look at the pinned article in my sig. for suitable 10 gallon tank species as there are some crackers in there. Particularly the small rasboras and the sparkling gouramis. If you want to go for livebearers I think that Endlers are a far more interesting and less common option.

 

[Helen G]

That's great thanks!!!

So would-

3x sparkling gouramies
4 x endlers
and a shoal of something small (not sure what yet)

-be ok?

 

[mark.w.jones]

That sounds fine to me. In terms of your other schooling option you are extremely limited. I would advise going for a school of 4 of either spotted rasboras or Pygmy cories. Cherry shrimp would also be a fabulous addition although you may have to phone around a bit to find them. They add virtually no bio load though so you can add them to a fully stocked small tank like yours. I also find them more interesting to watch than the fish in many ways.

 

[Helen G]

Great! I love shrimp! (in both senses of the word!!!) I had a japonica shrimp for about 15 months in my old tank and I used to love it when he flew round and round.