What is the maximum number of fish i can stock in a 60L tank?
I have 5 baby patties, 1 adult platty, 1 guppy, and 1 Plecostomus
I was hoping to add a few more guppies 3 and maybe 2 Pearl Danios
Taking me tank to about 12 fish + Plecostomus
Is that too many or about the maximum i could have?
Cheers
Well, I'm never very good with the stocking guidelines off the top of my head. There used to be others and perhaps there are newcomers I don't know who will come along and help but since I've seen this I'll take a first stab at it for you:
You have roughly a 16 US gallon tank (sorry, I have to think USA) and for me that says that if we assume a fairly normal rectangular tank with normal surface area (ie. not too deep or strange is some other way as to shape) and if we stick to fairly small torpedo shaped fish, we can start by thinking our tank will limit us to 16 inches of fish body (we are always talking about how big they will get at most mature size under normal healthy conditions.)
The 16 inches comes from what we refer to as the "inch rough guideline" (not a rule at all) and it is quite a wonderful thing for beginners to embrace during their first two years or so of starting in the freshwater hobby. After that they will be more advanced and can perhaps think about pushing things more, but that is a different story.
The difficult part of creating a stocking plan is the busywork of running around to different sections of TFF and other web sites and getting some reasonable estimates for the mature size expected for each of your chosen species. So, for instance, perhaps a platy might be considered to grow to 3 inches, or perhaps 4 inches as it's maximum adult size. Let's say it's 3 inches (I've not looked recently, I don't particularly keep livebearers any more and I really don't remember, yikes!) and you have 5 babies and an adult.. well, that's 18 inches of fish body right there and you are overstocked just on platies! Unfortunately, that's the way the guideline for overall stocking works.
The reason it is important is that during your first two years of fishkeeping you want to try to obtain the baseline experience of what a correctly working tank "feels" like in terms of how your weekly and monthly maintenance keeps it all working correctly. If the tank is overstocked, it is possible you will have fish deaths and problems that hinder you gaining that "feel" for correct fishkeeping.
(By the way, I'm just trying to give you some good discusson and things to begin thinking about. I'm sure some of our good members will come along with lots of specific suggestions for you about the details of how you could change your stocking plan.)
The Plec will need to be identified more carefully with the members so you can find out if it is one of the many that can grow to enormous size and might therefor be completely inappropriate for your tank size unfortunately.
Other phases of forming a stocking plan go beyond simple tank calculations. Some fish need to be in groups of their own species and the group may need to be of a minimum number. That's not a problem for your platies or guppies but for danios it is a good idea for them to be in a group. But danios have yet a different consideration that is part of the stocking problem - they are extremely fast and like a tank with a lot of length, such as a 20 gallon long as a bit of a minimum. So need for special tank shapes is another stocking consideration. Finally, another consideration is to look at how each species "gets along" with each other species.
Sorry for so many words, but hopefully I've outlined the stopping off places on the road to a good stocking plan. I'm sure the members will offer some more helpful and pointed suggestions and queries!
~~waterdrop~~
