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Recently I have become fascinated with the black ghost knife. I work at a lfs and have unsuccessfully attempted to keep one of my own twice. I get them fairly young, about 4-5 inches. After my first one only lasted a night in my tank, I waited for a new extremely healthy and active one. I kept it in a 29 gal with a small blood parrot and elephant nose. I even hand fed it bloodworms so I know it ate. Even with my extra precautions it only lasted a month. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

The tank may be too small, or if there are electrical fields nearby it could be affecting these fish. Have a read of this thread which may give you some clues as to what is necessary for the care of these fish:

http://www.fishprofiles.com/files/threads/30678.1.htm?18#

To just build on what waldena said:

Elephant noses also use sensory electric fields. What you had were two fish producing competing electric fields in a really small tank, which would be extremely and constantly stressful. BGKs should never be kept with elephant noses, or any mormyrids for that matter.

yea i wouldnt mix peters with BGKs.

they might have territorial fights.

I was like you, at first i had problems keeping BGKs, but now i have figured it out, i had about 20-30 of them and currently i have around 8 of them in my tanks.

Really what i can tell you about them, is becareful with water changes. VERY sensitive to water temp. Alot of my failures have come when i let others change my tanks and they add colder water to the tank, puts them right into shock.

Hiding places are key, if you have any ghost tubes or pipes, that is much liked by them.

Really i cant think of anything else. Again it took me awhile but now my BGKS are all fine.

Just on a side note, yor 29 g wont be enough. my largest was still stunted and was about 23 inches long.

thanks for the info... I knew that the elephant nose used electric sensing, but had no idea it would compete with the bgk. As far as tank size goes I did have had 55 and 75 to eventually move it to but left it in the smaller tank so it would more easily find food. I was worried about a "seahorse syndrome" where it would be unable to find the food I was feeding it. Thanks again for all your help, I'll probably try a bgk again sometime in the near future.