Need To Pick Your Brains...

[trina1982]

Hi there,

After searching the internet for what seems like years (read weeks, probably hours lol), I have just purchased an upgrade tank. You people seem a lovely helpful bunch so i may be burdening you with lots of questions Hope thats o.k.

Quick history: About 6 months or so ago a friend of mine left the U.K and i took on her fish tank (for the huge sum of £20!). Its a 25 litre Sicce tank and had a few Danios, 2 platys and (what i now know) a plecostomus (I'll come to him later). Anyways, we lost a platy after the move, and replaced with 4 tetras (as lfs kept mentioning babies and i didn't want to go down that route just yet). So, this little tank has given me the bug for a bigger one.

I currently have a 96 litre tank sitting in my living room ready to start fishless cycling. It's an mp Eheim Aquastar. I've added gravel and plants, and some planted bogwood from lfs (that isn't all that local which is why i've added plants now to save myself another trip). Plan to add some media from the current tank to help it along the way. Off to get some ammonia today and have an API test kit ready to start recordings. So, is it so far so good?

Once the tank is cycled i plan to add the Danios first, and give them a few days. Do i keep measuring levels to indicate when to add the tetras and the platy? The plec is, as yet, unidentified. I think he's a common, but i've seen sailfins that look a bit like him too. Tbh i don't see him much, he's very shy, but he has grown a couple of inches i reckon in the time i've owned him. Having researched a bit i cannot understand why her lfs would have sold him to my friend for a 25 litre tank (but then from what i gather she was sold the whole set up in one go, including fish !!!!) So, next question. My lfs have said they will take him, but i'm worried what happens to him then? The lady i spoke to said if he is a sailfin then he'll go in the display tank (which is huge), but if not I presume he gets sold on or .....? I have always said that all my pets have a forever home and i'm feeling bad for needing to part with him, but don't want to keep him in a tank that will eventually be way too small. Any thoughts or suggestions welcome.

My next, and last, question (for now) is what does everybody do with any fry? I'd love to have a nice community tank eventually with some more platys and maybe guppies but the whole breeding thing bothers me a bit, surely i'd be overstocked quite quickly (assuming some fry survive). Does the lfs normally take them?

Whew, sorry for the long post. Any help gratefully appreciated. I'm willing to do this as slowly as neccesary as having read around a bit now i realise i have made some bad mistakes in the past with goldfish, and am feeling a lot of guilt

Thanks in advance
Trina x

 

[JustKia]

If you fishless cycle your tank (link in my siggy) then once that is complete (including your qualifying week) you do a huge water change and are ready to fully stock, well I think most reccomend just under fully stock. The fishless cycle means you don't have to go through the process of adding just a few fish at a time as you have grown your bacterial cultures to cope with the full bioload. If you add significantly less than full stock after completing the fishless cycle you will lose some of your bacteria as there isn't enough food (ammonia/nitrItes) for them and you will (probably) then go through a mini cycle when you increase the number of fish.

Sounds like you are well on the way with your setup. Is your API test kit a water based one - the strip tests can be wildly inaccurate. Great idea to add mature filter media.
Now, I could be wrong here but I believe that as your current filter has enough bacteria to support your current stocking that you could run it alongside the filter in the new tank and providing you acclimatise the fish, dechlor your water etc etc that you can swap your current stock over to your new tank. Probably best to wait for someone with more knowledge than I to deny or confirm that though.

Being able to admit that a particular fish (or any animal) is/will be too big for the home you can provide is part of being a good pet owner, so don't feel bad about doing the right thing.
As for the fry, can't help you there - livebearers scare the heck outta me LOL, so I stay away.

 

[trina1982]

HI

Thanks for that, that is exactly why i needed to ask questions. The adding fish pretty much up to fully stocked bit is so obvious now you've pointed it out. Glad i asked! I'll await more info, as i said i'm in no hurry. And the API kit is a liquid one. Thanks again.

Trina x

 

[Keithbaxter]

I have a tank of Guppies and have recently added Platys and Now mollies.

The thing with Live bearers i like is they are either easy or difficult. You can eithr leave them be and let them eat the young they eat (i did this with the first batch and all got eaten) or you can get a breeder net and either catch the pregnant mum, or the fry. I caught the fry and had 17 in the net and im happy to say that i still ahve 17 fry now not looking very fry like. Im planning on keeping my tank almost all live bearers bar the corys, pleco and shrimp.

I would introduce fish a few at a time into a new tank, im not saying JustKia is wrong infact she is very right but If your in no rush then running them side by side and moving some over every week is good to. Its entirely your call there are many ways and as people will tell you some fish survive in a brand new uncycled tank aslong as water changes are done and stats are monitered.

Just enjoy it and as far as the fish you might have to take back, dont fuss about it Ive had to swap 5 fish so far because of bad advice from LFS luckily the pets@home near me takes them back and looks after them, the guy i talk to alot has actually taken 3 of mine home for his own tanks.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, good advice from Keith and Kia I think,

Keith is correct, there is no need to push your stocking plans close to fully stocking just to try and preserve the full amount of bacteria you've grown. The main benefit growing the bacteria to support the 5ppm level and watching during that final week that its stable at that level is so that the biofilm structures are mature and very unlikely to mini-cycle on you, no matter what size your initial stocking is.

Its a side benefit that if someone intended to fully stock at tank with very hardy species that could all go in right at the beginning then the 5ppm level would support them. And it makes RDD's article simple and the overall process more straight-forward.

But here in the "New to the Hobby" forum, the most common thing we find is that beginners usually plan a community tank with quite a variety of species, some of which are hardy and some of which are delicate. In this case it makes perfect sense to introduce the hardy species right after fishless cycling and gradually add various delicate species at later points in time.

An example would be introducing perhaps danios, rasboras and platies right after fishless cycling, or other species considered hardy like these. Then, fish that are introduced later are introduced in amounts of 2 or 3 fish at a time, or perhaps more in the case of small tetras. Usually the bacterial colonies will increase so quickly after these introductions that you would not even be able to detect a mini-cycle. Fish that are delicate, like neon tetras, otos, etc. are often introduced only after 6 months or so of running the tank. Also, many people will wait to introduce "centerpiece" fish, such as angels, after many months simply because they may be more expensive, even if not that much more delicate than the hardy ones.

Determining whether particular species are "hardy," "delicate," or "in-between" is very subjective and, while you can get a feel for many of the ones commonly labeled these ways, such as the ones in my examples, others will be pretty subjective and you just have to get a feel for them over time by reading various species write-ups, asking among the members here or gaining direct experience for yourself over the years.

Good luck and enjoy!

~~waterdrop~~

 

[trina1982]

Thanks for the replies. Now i have choices...arghhh. I think i'm going to cycle the tank for now, and whilst it cycles mull over the next stage a bit. I'll probably end up moving the danios over with some new danios too (probably another 3), along with the platy. Maybe. Decisions, decisions!

Thanks waterdrop for the rasbora idea, just looked them up and they look ideal for what i'm wanting eventually. I'm setting the tank up as a hobby for me and my partner, but also for my baby to watch (and grow up loving hopefully), she's 4 months old and loves the little tank we have. I just want some nice colourful, busy little fish that are reasonably easy to keep. Hence the idea of guppies or platys, but not too sure i want to go down the livebearer route yet. Any other suggestions?

Anyway, thanks all.

Trina x

 

[waterdrop]

Trina, Its very hard to say about the livebearer route. Most of them, platies and swordtails in particular are very hardy, easy fish, which is great for beginners (guppies are easy too but sometimes genetically weaker in recent years and mollies I find unpredictably difficult, sometimes needing more brackish water and not fitting in in some other ways.) On the other hand, livebearers nearly always breed and force beginners to deal with fry, thowing everything into a new tizzy of problems and learning right when the beginner is still a beginner and often doesn't need this extra stress. The easiest solution is to simply do nothing and allow as many of the fry as possible to be eaten, but some beginners are upset by that and just like in nature, some of the fry may indeed survive and may quickly cause your tank to become overstocked. For this reason, there are good arguments for the beginner to forsake livebearers and learn to love tetras!

A classic tank is one with a small school of cories tending the bottom, a couple of "centerpiece" fish if there's room and a couple of schools of non-aggressive tetras in numbers based on tank size, with attention paid to significant live planting so that the tetra shoals will come in and out of the planted areas. Of course, there is nothing in the world that should dictate what you should and shouldn't do as its all about what makes you happy, its just that stocking is not a free-for-all and one finds over the years that experience helps one get better and better at it. Experienced members here try pretty hard here to pass on various tips, but in truth its quite difficult to pass on the dozens of little rules that go on as one thinks about various combinations.

One general approach to sequencing the stocking decisions is to first worry about eliminating fish that will grow too large or fish that need a special shape of tank (some fish need great horizontal distance for high-speed darting, some fish, like angels need tall vertical space or they feel cramped for example.) Next we might worry about which fish need what minimum size of shoal so that we can see whether our overall stocking would be exceeded when we form the minimum shoals. Finally, we need to always go species by species and ask whether our fish are compatible with each other. A particular species might be aggressive with one species but not with another. And then there are odd things like the fact that angels eat neons as their natural food, but that if there are larger neons already there that they grow up with, they are less likely to eat those! Or another oddity is that many cichlids have different levels of aggressiveness, individual by individual, just like humans, so there is no predicting them sometimes.

I'm not particularly good with stocking recommendations myself but there are many members here who are, so you can usually just form various hypothetical combinations and ask away and people will help.

~~waterdrop~~