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I currently have a 20 gal long, got a 55 gallon in the wings, waiting to be cleaned up and moved in. I lost my opaline gourami in the several consecutive moves I've made in the last half year or so and would really like to have a centerpiece fish again.

I'm pretty sure I'll go with a gourami... I miss the opaline. I don't want a fish so big that it's going to dwarf the rest of the fish in the tank. (The rest of the fish are betta girls and cories, mostly, with a couple cherry barbs and a BN thrown in.)

I'm also pondering putting in a school of rosy barbs... I saw the most beautiful long-finned variety at the LFS today. I see potential size of those as 5" or so... though in doing research, I see various sites that say 2-6 inches, nearer to 3-4 in captivity.

What would you suggest as the biggest fish for a 55? I really like the barbs and wonder how they'd do with the rest of the fish in the tank, including the gourami.

Current stock contains the following:
*Motley cory crew - corydoras cats (6 pandas, 1 rabauti, 3 trilineatus, 2 ambiacus, 1 schwartzi, 1 or 2 'san juan' cories
*4 betta girls (three seem to be rather small examples of their breed)
*2 cherry barbs (both male, I lost a female, and the other "turned" male)
*1 black neon (left over from a school of seven)
*Tipsy, the BN pleco (looks like she's not going to get any bigger... about four inches from nose to tip of tail)

I definitely want to work on adding to the 'lonely' cories in my crew, if I can find them. Other than that, I just want to add maybe the rosy barbs and the centerpiece gourami.

Looking at something along the lines of a blue/opaline/gold or pearl gourami. I HAVE just found a lovely variation on the opaline, though and I may just go ahead and get one... LFS nearby is calling it a lavendar gourami, looks like a cross between a blue and an opaline (has the marbling effect of the opaline but still shows the distinct spots of the blue), with a delicate light purple sheen to it. Definitely unique to anything I've seen before.

I think I want something in the blue end of the spectrum, the only colors in the tank are the vivid red of the cherry barbs and the blurred red/blue/green of the betta girls. A gold would blend into the yellowish/tan gravel in the 20, though I intend to have a darker gravel in the 55. I think the rose/gold of the rosy barbs would make a good splash of color and still compliment the cherry barbs and the darker red of the betta girls.

I'm rattling on here. Any suggestions, ideas, etc? With the stock I have now, plus a gourami, how many rosy barbs would you suggest? A pair? Two? A school (of how many)? Also, would the average 4-5 inch gourami work as a centerpiece against the rosy barbs? Or would a bigger gourami be better, and then, what would you suggest?

Edit: I forgot to mention I could also split the stock between the 20 and 55... Other than the stock I've mentioned, I have 3 male bettas in a divided 10 gallon and five minnows (yes, the type you bait a hook with, leftover from the bf's fishing days of summer) in a 12 gallon. I want to shut down the 12 gallon soonish... I don't expect the minnows to live too terribly long, they're obvious products of poor breeding and bad living conditions with warped spines and such.

~Meow. Thus spoke the cat.~

I would exercise caution with the Rosy Barbs.

Given enough space, Rosy Barbs can indeed reach 6 inches. They usually top out at 3 to 4 inches in an aquarium, but they have the potential to grow larger, and ideally should be given an aquarium in which they can. A 55 would be OK if they were the only fishes in there, but if they're going to share an aquarium with other fishes, then a 75 or a 90 is a better bet.

The other problem with Rosy Barbs is this. All Barbs are fishes with hearty appetites, presenting few problems with respect to the matter of persuading them to eat. However, appetite is related to body mass in these fishes, and body mass is related to body volume. Thus, a 2 inch Barb will have a fairly vigorous appetite, but a 4 inch Barb will have an appetite that is not twice as vigorous, but eight times as vigorous (8 = 2 cubed). This factor leads to Barbs, particularly any Barbs growing to 4 inches or more, being labelled 'pigs with fins'. These fishes are basically self propelled garbage compactors that will chomp their way through whatever is offered to them, and in quite astonishing quanitities in relation to the size of some of them. By the time you are considering Tinfoil Barbs, which reach 14 inches in length, you are looking at fishes that are capable of eating on an industrial scale - standard fish foods are next to useless for these fishes because they're capable of shredding a whole lettuce at one sitting or eating dog food straight from the can!

Rosy Barbs are, while not as extreme as Tinfoil Barbs in this regard, assiduous gluttons nonetheless. Worse still, they will, if allwoed to, gorge upon food. This has the less than happy side effect of the now full and burping Barbs passing partially digested food out of the back end, which multiplies their filter bioloading considerably. Which means that the aquarist needs to take fairly decisive measures to control their appetites - usually by dint of feeding small amounts several times per day instead of administering one large meal. Failure to control the Barbs' tendency to gorge will result in fairly lurid fouling of the aquarium water, even in aquaria with good filtration systems. With any of the medium or large Barbs, the safest rule of thumb is this: think of a filter system, then go and buy one that's twice the size with twice the throughput. Chances are with some Barbs (Spanner T Barbs are another species that come to mind here) such an approach will be needed, because their capacity for gluttony is quite frightening to watch!

With respect to the Rosy Barb, my Braz Walker pocket book from the 1970s says:

Omnivorous: all fish foods eaten with gusto.

That is putting it mildly - if you've ever seen how a Labrador Retriever can wolf down food into the black hole of its stomach, then this should give you an insight into the Rosy Barb. Plus, while it is not an aggressive fish, being a typical shoaling Barb, it IS a VERY vigorous competitor at the feeding table, and will hoover up the food the moment it hits the water, denying slower moving fishes the chance to feed. It's technique is simple but effective - open mouth wide, suck HARD. It's a fish that, at feeding time, seems to adopt the attitude that it has to engulf ALL of the food before it as if there is no tomorrow, a trait it shares with with quite a few of the bigger Barbs, and decent sized adults can swallow a fair amount in one go. Because of this tendency to treat each meal as it's last on this Earth, and therefore to try and stuff itself to bursting point, the aquarist needs to exercise careful control over its glutttony, and try wherever possible to avoid gorging followed by dumping large amounts of partially digested food out of the back end, because it will only take a few instances of that happening for the Rosy Barbs to outpace your filter unless you've got something seriously powerful hooked up to the aquarium.

Likewise, if you are planning on a Gourami of some kind as a 'centrepiece fish', Gouramis tend to be rather stately creatures, whereas the Rosy Barbs would be darting about snatching most of the food before the poor Gourami (or your female Bettas for that matter) got a look in.

Oh, another issue to take on board with larger Cyprinids is this - they are more than usually susceptible to chlorine poisoning if you don't meter the dechlorinator precisely during a water change. The bigger the Cyprinid, the worse this phenomenon seems to be (Tinfoil Barbs are also sensitive to excess carbon dioxide, but then they're not likely to be in a heavily planted tank because they'll eat quite a few aquarium plants, which means that use of CO2 injection systems in a Tinfoil Barb aquarium is extremely unlikely), and one can expect Rosy Barbs to present something of a problem in this regard. Drop them in water without adequate dechlorination and trouble starts.

Apart from the dinner table hogging and the complications that ensue from their 'garbage compactor' activities, however, Rosy Barbs have a fair amount to recommend them. You just have to be prepared to plan ahead for their lack of self control at meal times.

As an alternative that might prove to be less gluttonous and more likely to let the other fishes share in the bounty at meal times, I'd think about Rainbow Fishes in the 8 to 10 cm size range. Go here and have a browse for some nice Rainbow Fishes that should prove to be colourful, active, yet peaceful and with appetites that are healthy without being over the top.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Thanks for taking the time to write one of your - as usual! - immensely informational novels.

I had no idea barbs were such problems at dinner time. Don't know if you were involved in the posts that happened at the time I saved the barb fry from a chain LFS... well, I thought it was a few-day-old livebearer fry, but turned out to be a rosy barb. "Baby" grew to be about 1 - 1.5 inches long before he died of unknown causes. He never seemed more than normally hungry at meal times, but then, he was still the baby his name signifies.

Rainbows are a really good idea, too. I hadn't even thought about them, but they're lovely fish. Gives me something to think about. Anyone else have ideas for a school of fish that would bring some life and color to this tank?

~Meow. Thus spoke the cat.~

Calilasseia just wanted to add my little word of thanks to you, personally... I've read many of your threads - and especially appreciate the fact that you provide information in easy to read language... AND many times you provide links for further research.... MANY THANKS! /:'

To thine own self be true...