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I've decided after keeping lots of different species in various community tanks that I want to concentrate on just 1 species for my 55g. Now what I don't know. It's moderately planted with mostly hardy plants like anubias, java fern, wendtii crypts, crinums, and several anubias species, 195watts pc lighting, packed with driftwood, open top currently but will probably add a mesh wire top. I'm looking for something fairly easy to keep(frozen food is no problem but nothing that requires live) that won't mind our hard tapwater so I don't have to constantly mix up ro water like I've been doing and that might possibly breed without much intervention. Nothing extremely common like guppies or extremely rare and expensive. Most of my spending money has been going into my saltwater tank. I was thinking maybe US natives like a sunfish species but the ones I've caught locally seem like they would be rather destructive in a planted tank and other species I've seen for sale prefer more acidic water. If it was easier to get female rams here I'd probably just setup the whole thing as a ram breeding tank but it took me months and many tries to get a good healthy female and I'd rather not have to keep maintaining the entire 55g in softwater when my natural tapwater is nearly 9.0ph. I don't have alot of time lately and don't always have RO water on hand so my tanks that I was keeping the ph low in were starting to suffer. Seems most of the hardwater fish I come across are also hard on plants.

How about Darters? I'm pretty sure you have at least a few species in Iowa. You could probably keep like 10-15 in there, depending on how territorial they are.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

I've been trying to find some but while I'm told there are lots of native darter species noone I talk to has actually seen any. I also haven't seen any in stores or found anyone that keeps more than the odd 1 or 2. I can think of one place we might find some but we haven't had time to take a darter hunting trip. Since I haven't managed to come across any I haven't taken much time to research their care or breeding requirements yet.

http://www.aquabid.com/cgi-bin/auction/search.cgi

55G Planted tank thread
19G Container Pond
[IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y118/Wingsdlc/Ric

A fish that will do well in hard, alkaline water and won't attack plants?

Say hello to Telmatherina ladigesi, the Sulawesi Rainbow Fish (or as it used to be known, the Celebes Rainbow Fish).

Stunningly coloured, a shoaling fish (so you can keep about 20 in your 55!) and a species that has been bred in the aquarium. Easier to obtain than the natives you've been looking for (oddly enough), and will probably cause you far fewer headaches than your proposed Darters because the species is well known in aquarium circles, well documented and what's more, chances are it'll spawn in your 55 with no more encouragement than reasonably diligent attention to water cleanliness and an intemittent live food treat.

EDIT : Oh look, a profile no less!.

Enjoy!


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

How about these guys. I believe they only grow to a few inches in length, and it says in the auction they prefer planted tanks.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

Fishbase page for Enneacanthus gloriosus, the Blue Spotted Sunfish

This page may also prove useful if you are going to run with these fishes.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Those look pretty neat. I don't know much about them but someday I would like to try them.

55G Planted tank thread
19G Container Pond
[IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y118/Wingsdlc/Ric

I saw the bluespots on there but every site I found said they needed soft acidic water. If I can't find any hardwater fish I like then I may go with those but my situation doesn't make it easy to keep a large tank with low ph. I've got liquid rock for tapwater and things like peat moss or driftwood have zero effect(except a black tank). It also requires so much RO to tapwater to lower the ph that it wasn't worth it and I just went to using straight RO with powdered minerals added back in. Problem is while it seemed simple to start with there is nowhere in this apartment to store water containers and they won't let me hook an RO unit to the pipes. I never find time to refill the containers and haul them up the stairs into the apartment, my boyfriend complained about the containers being everywhere, and I never got around to mixing the powders in. That's one reason I only have a 20g salt tank. I can just keep one 5g container of premixed saltwater and a gallon jug of distilled instead of the several large containers it takes for my 55g. Keeping enough water on hand to change the 90g was a nightmare.

According to Fishbase, the water in which they are found in their natural environment has a pH of up to 7.5 and a dH of up to 12. I bet with enough peat/driftwood you could get your water down in that range, and they probably tolerate water a bit more hard/alkaline than that.

I'm pretty sure most Darters are tolerant of hard and alkaline water, though.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

Tapwater is near 9ph and with enough peat moss/driftwood to make the tank look solid black(while using chemical filtratio to remove some of the color) I can get a ph of 8.2.

Your tap water has a pH of 9.0 ... ???

Where is your water company sourcing its water from - a soda lake?

Sea water only has a pH of 8.3.

Sounds to me as if you have some very interesting dissolved mineral issues in that water - I'd check to see if it contains dissolved sodium carbonate straight out of the tap, because if it does, then that is going to make for some less than delightful maintenance issues even if you keep Tanganyikan Rift Lake fishes ...

Sodium carbonate will rocket the pH well into the alkaline region even in small quantities (though still not as badly as something like sodium hydroxide, which you would know was an issue if it was present because it would give you stomach ulcers if you drank it!) and is one of the defining features of that oddest of biotopes, Lake Natron in Africa. Here's a picture of the lake in question. At times, Lake Natron has a pH of - wait for it - 10.5 - which is almost as alkaline as a laboratory solution of 2M ammonium hydroxide!

Now, because sodium carbonate (like all sodium salts apart from some very unusual compounds used in ion exchange resins) is soluble in water, checking for its presence usually involves titration and a lab. However, you can get a good 'feel' for its presence by the simple expedient of adding copper sulphate to the water in a class container. If you end up with a visible precipitate of green copper carbonate in there once the solution is allowed to settle, then your tap water has a large carbonate hardness value, and the only compounds that will create that kind of carbonate hardness value are soluble ones such as sodium carbonate. It might even be worth your while having the tap water analysed by a public analyst to check for its contents in detail - while this will involve paying for the service, and won't be cheap, it could alert you to some other issues that may be lurking in there and which could compromise your fishkeeping before you even start.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

The water is pulled from an underground spring that runs through the limestone quarry about a mile upstream. Lots of limestone quarries here and I had much the same issues when using well water. The ph of water I've tested in my hometown and this one(only about 5miles apart and much the same water source) always comes out at least 8.6 and the kh around 18-20. During fall and winter it often tests 8.8-9ph and 22-24kh. My filters and heaters are always coated in calcium deposits. They don't bother to try filtering water here to make it softer but instead pump co2 into it so when you run a glass of tapwater it bubbles like pouring a glass of soda. I've never drank any of it and we always have bottled water on hand. Thus my reason for trying to maintain all my tanks in "artificial" water using RO and mineral powders. Surprisingly though aside from very softwater loving fish none have really seemed to mind except when I try to breed them. A few people have even had rams spawn in this tapwater but eggs always fungus and never hatch. I have had yoyo loaches and blue gouramis live 5+years but I would prefer not to try to keep a fish from soft waters that had not been captive bred for several generations in these water conditions.

I decided against the sunfish for various reasons. Then I considered cories but I never had much luck with cories. They always slowly died off especially pandas. The unidentified spotted cory lived 2years and the mystery cories from walmart lived over a year but they never seemed to do great even when everything else in the tank was doing wonderful. Maybe it's the water but I guess cories won't work. I tried to find killifish at one point but never came across any I liked, were available here, and didn't cost a fortune. The spiketail gouramis also have my eye but the tank is a bit deep for raising labyrinth fry and I don't want to setup several tanks for breeding.

Maybe I'll just pack it full of shrimp and call it a day....

There's always Telmatherina ladigesi that I linked to above Sham - that species likes hard, alkaline water.

Your other option if you're looking for something special to put in there is a nice Tanganyikan Cichlid called Cyprichromis leptosoma, which will love your tapwater, as it lives in 'liquid rock' in Lake Tanganyika. Different from the other Cichlids, it's actually an open water shoaling fish! Don't let the common name of 'Sardine Cichlid' put you off, some of them are amazingly beautiful (look for the colour morph known as "Blue Flash" - it'll be expensive but worth it).

Take a peek at some Cyprichromis Cichlids here. Another beauty in the list is Cyprichromis coloratus, which well and truly lives up to its name. You could have six Cyprichromis Cichlids and possibly some individuals belonging to one of the smaller Julidochromis species as well. At 8.5 cm max SL, julidochromis ornatus is probably your best bet. Cyrpichromis coloratus, if you can find this beauty, is a 10 cm fish, while Cyprichromis leptosoma is an 11.0 cm fish. So, six Cyps and a gaggle of Julies should, in theory , live happily in your 55, and will probably breed too, which means you can recoup the cost of buying your juvenile Cyps with the offspring, which are very desirable among quite a few Tanganyikan Cichlid keepers. In fact, if you can find somewhere to rear the young, you could even make a profit given how desirable they are in some circles


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Aside from threadfins which were interesting for awhile rainbows have never interested me. The cyprichromis are neat but I'll have to see if I can get any here. The ones on ebay and aquabid were either expensive for the fish or really high shipping.

that's the BIG problem with Cyrpichromis at the moment - they ARE woefully expensive. Here in the UK they're £12 each for juvenile leptosoma, and if you get the Blue Flash morph, that jumps to £20 per fish - around $36 US. But, while they ARE that expensive, if you can invest the cpaital in buying a group, raise them to adulthood, and persuade them to breed, the offspring will fetch a nice sum of money when you sell them on, and consequently you'll be able to recoup the costs. Once again, there but for the lack of backing capital go both you and I - if I had the funds, I'd be looking at the drop dead gorgeous Benthochromis tricoti as a breeding project, but that species has a truly coronary inducing price tag - it's a special order in the UK at a whopping £250 per fish ... so a breeding colony would set me back around £3,000 (yeep) ... but the money I'd be able to make from the fish if I HAD the capital to start with would be something else - sell the juveniles on for £100 a shot, and I could make £10,000 in about six months.



Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Noone can get cyprichromis and right now I don't really have the money for the type of price tags I've seen online. If I had lots of money I wouldn't be posting that I can't find anything to breed in my tank. Instead we'd be deciding which of dozens of expensive fish I should choose. My favorite aquarium store can get in spiketails for $5 each though... I would have to dilute the water some to bring down the hardness so I could lower the ph but I'd only have to get it to around 8.0 according to several breeders I talked to online. I also can get 2-3 at $7 each from another store nearby that already has them giving me a diverse breeding group. I just have to decide if the tank seems too deep for labyrinth fry to develop properly.