What Are The Best Or Hardiest Tropical Fish To Put In A New Tank

[OldMan47]

Form a nano tank like that there are also livebearer options like Heterandria formosa with an adult size of under an inch or golden teddies, Xenophallus umbratilis, or even black chins Girardinus metallicus, with an adult size of just over an inch. There is a blackchin picture here

my golden teddies pictures
Male

Female

My Heterandria
Male

Female

 

[N0body Of The Goat]

If you are really eager to get fish in the tank pronto, you would need to research real plants (and make sure they are true aquatics, unlike my first purchase 12 days ago, which were then exchanged 9 days ago). You will need to buy enough plants to cover most of your tank's base and most of those will need to be fast growers. But then fast growing plants need good lighting and often need a CO[sub]2 [/sub]supplement plus nutrients added to the water and/or under substrate.

If the above conditions are met, you could entertain doing a "silent cycle" which might enable you to add a few fish in 7-10 days after having the above in place. I've just gone down this route and bought my first fish, some Pearl Danios, once the critical chemical values (ammonia; nitrate; (to a lesser sxtent) nitrate) had dropped to safe levels and were verified by the LFS too. "Silent cycling" often requires many >50% water changes during the first couple of weeks and it is absoluely vital that you use your liquid test kit to test for very toxic NH[sub]3[/sub] and NO[sub]2 [/sub]twice a day.

 

[OldMan47]

I would avoid trying to grow plants for the first time while relying on them to remove poisons from the water. Although a properly balanced NPT can indeed handle all fish waste problems, simply adding lots of plants, dumping in ferts and praying will not work and cannot be used to good effect. Once you become experienced at growing plants and have a flair for it, you could indeed start a new tank, get the plants established and add in some fish.
Learning about growing aquatic plants and getting good results will take far longer than simply cycling a tank using the fishless methods. Twice daily chemical testing is not required in a tank going through a silent cycle. A silent cycle, by definition, never shows any ammonia or nitrites in the water column. If you were an experienced plant person who just didn't want to bother doing a fishless cycle, you could get more time between water changes by testing and using plants to limit the number of water changes in a fish-in cycle. That is not a silent cycle, it is simply impatience.