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A lot of community fish can go in a semi-aggressive setup. Most of the bigger bodied tetras - black widows, black phantom, serpae, etc - can easily stand up to tiger barb bad behavior. Silver dollars and at least some of the bigger rainbowfish can stand up to the abuse from big cichlids, so...

Depending on how warm the house is, you can keep a lot of tropical fish in "cold" water. Without some kind of special attention (chiller or ice bottles or something), the tank will never be cooler than the room it's in, so if you keep your house hot in the winter and don't run air conditioning...

Most commonly sold fish do quite well in almost any pH - changes are bad, but anything between 6 and 8 is fine for all but a few particularly sensitive species, unless you're trying to breed them. Do you have a liquid test kit to cover ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate? These are the important water...

IMO, the inclusion of pacu and pangasius makes it more a list of fish you shouldn't buy than a list of fish that shouldn't be taken from the wild, as both are heavily farm bred. Sort of like talking about leaving cows in the wild instead of bringing them home as pets. There's enough species in...

An APC 45 minute, I'd have to find the documentation to get the wattage. APC make the best ones on the market, but they are a bit more expensive than some of the competition.

I see it in pet stores occasionally, but not that often. Symptoms are loss of coloration (it's most noticeable early in the red stripe), white lumps and in advanced cases deformities like a bent spine. I don't know if the climbing perch would be susceptible in the off chance that the neons had...

Torn between this one and one of my favorite sailfin molly, but going with this one of my male keyhole cichlid.

If you turned off the air pump, you'd probably get no difference in oxygen levels. The bubbles aren't in contact with enough water to really make a difference, however they do help create surface movement, which is good for gas exchange - most power filters do this on their own. With light...

Something that occasionally gets mentioned when thinkfish stocking comes up is power cuts - the more highly a tank is stocked, the more quickly it can get out of control during a power outage. If you really want to push the stocking density on a tank, I'd look into some kind of backup power - an...

All three species basic wild form has the same striped form, which is why I pointed out the upturned snout - leopoldi are sometimes called long-nosed angelfish as well. Congratulations, if they are, like I said - a nice rare find, I was looking for them for quite a while before I found out how...

I don't have anything under my substrate, with or without CO2. I use root tabs monthly and flourish excell daily. Read the directions carefully with root tabs - some brands I've seen have hopelessly complicated directions involving varied spacing and redosing schedules. Special plant substrates...

Personally, I like my quarantine tanks to have strong filtration and good surface area (in the case that you need to medicate, you want good gas exchange because many medicines reduce oxygen levels). Also, you don't really want to spend much on a quarantine tank - a standard 5 or 10 gallon glass...

They'd be find with the snail and most smallish community fish, but I think the CAE will eventually pose a problem. They do grow quite large (6+ inches, too big for a 10 gallon, really), and eventually do turn to a more meaty diet.

The problem with this is that a great many bacterial strains are antibiotic resistant, and misuse of antibiotics tends to promote those strains. If there's no fish to harm, it's safer, not to mention cheaper, to wipe them out by brute force, chemically (bleach, alcohol, etc) or environmentally...

About the dwarf angelfish: If it's a P. leopoldi instead of P. scalare (which 99% of the angelfish on the market are, and most of the rest are P. altum), it'll get about 3 inches. There isn't a dwarf scalare angelfish, however I've seen a great deal of stores sell young fish as dwarfs, but they...

It's the method I use. Most disease bacteria won't last long without a host. Any time I have a fish die in quarantine, I dry everything out and leave it for a week or so before using it again.

Stay away from stuff like Nitrazorb and Zeolite that absorb ammonia or nitrite - your tank can become dependent on these media, because they can be efficient enough to starve out the nitrifying bacteria you want in the tank, so you have to keep it refreshed or dare a sudden decline in water...

I honestly don't know about small crayfish. My P. clarkii has only molted once in about three months, but he was a good 5 inches when I got him, so he's probably not got much growing left to do. You can usually see it coming - mine laid on his side for a while and wouldn't eat leading up to his...

Best to start another thread for unrelated questions. But in general, no. With enough space, an armored plec might be safe, since they're hard to hurt and will fight back if bothered, so piranhas learn not to mess with them. Ask down in the predatory fish section, though. Not all piranhas are...

One thing about assassin snails, they'll turn to scavenging after they finish with your snails. They breed slower than most pest snails, but they'll still feed on the same things sustaining the pests, so you might end up with an infestation of expensive snails. At least you could try selling...

They are freswhater. Most of the really nice invertebrates are marine, but they don't have the monopoly on them.

No, I added tank measurements because you just decided to assume it was the smallest 4' standard size on the market., the only thing in it was 4' You can come over and measure the damn thing yourself. Secondly, you can convert any time you want if you do it correctly. You accumulated errors...

In the UK, Homebase gets mentioned a lot. You want a standard household ammonia, but without dyes or fragrences, and without surfactants (the stuff that makes suds - if you shake the bottle and it foams, it has surfactants. If it acts like a bottle of water, you're good) The process is covered...

I've got some books that cover it pretty well, so here's the rough rundown - as usual when people are playing scientist, there's probably a dozen variations (the books disagree on a few things, as well). Having never actually done anything like it, I can only give a rough review of the books and...

As somebody who's probably well on his way to that many: Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Some people spend twelve hours a day cleaning, some people play Pokemon or World of Warcraft, others have fish.

Provided you have at least one male and one female, they could. They do have to lay their eggs out of water, and they form big pink globs, so if you check under your hood regularly, you can prevent them from breeding excessively. If you want to get a few babies, but not too many, get an extra...

Try garden centers and greenhouses. Places like Home Depot (not sure the UK equivalent) can be a good start.

That's what you're looking for. Chlorine isn't a critical test, since we have access to cheap products that remove it almost instantly which can be safely overdosed. Even under-dosed, chlorine isn't that toxic really, and it won't nuke an established biofilter.

Jallen, I'm aware of how big my tank is. Where are you getting those dimensions from, anyway? They aren't mine. If they were, you're off by several gallons anyway - convert at the end, don't convert back and forth between measuring systems.

Assuming it's LxWxH, 18 inches tall is the standard recommendation for angels.

Well, first, you have some stocking issues. The plecs can get 12-18", the tinfoil barb 15". These fish will need a tank upwards of 75 gallons for long term housing. The red tail shark, while only 6", will likely get aggressive as it matures, and may become a terror in a small tank. It and the...

It takes some practice to clean sand without sucking it up. Put some in a bucket with water over it and practice cleaning it first. The trick is to wave the siphon above the sand to stir up the fish poop without stirring up the sand. If you're up for sand, get black sand. Very neutral color...

I can probably outdo everything you've said with an LFS rundown in my area. My particular favorite were the "Salt-and-Pepper Tiger Barbs." These are regular tiger barbs with ich, and cost an extra dollar. We've all seen some horrible stuff, and the more you shop around, the worse it gets...

Stringy poo can be internal parasites or bacterial infection. White spots can be a lot of things. Whitespot (ich) looks like the salt on a pretzel. Overstocking and poor water quality are often root causes of both - you've had several threads regarding your stocking, is your sig still accurate...

I had this with some new driftwood. It's some kind of fungus. It didn't hurt my fish, but it grew rapidly and made a horrible mess in the tank. Removing the wood and boiling it for a half hour, then hanging it to dry out entirely before putting it back in the tank got rid of the stuff, and it...

Well, they are beneficial to the system, though it depends on what type of snail you have. Trumpet and ramshorn snails together form about the best cleanup crew you could hope for - far better than any bottom feeding fish can hope to. Some ramshorn snails are quite attractive. I've got a number...

Somebody in this year's Intel international science fair took it a bit farther and actually trained one goldfish to teach OTHER goldfish how to run a similar maze (the fish would push them towards the openings and block the holes if they tried to swim the wrong way). But LITTER train them...

Amano should, if I'm not mistaken they can be kept in light brackish. Not sure about cherry shrimp. On the other side of the coin, I've never used salt and never gotten a disease outside of quarantine (which salt wouldn't save me from, since the fish brought it home with them). Most diseases...

He did concede in his thread in tropical discussion and say he was getting (Or I guess getting mom and dad to buy) a 300 gallon tank. However, that was before his post down here telling somebody they needed 60 gallons to mix a clown knife and chocolate knife, so I'm guessing he's just a troll at...

I remember when it came out, the original product photos showed four of them, and two of the bettas were dead in the picture. Great advertising, guys, hope you get a raise. 1 gallon anything is less than ideal, but not disgusting. I'm sure we all saw the live fish keychains a few months back.