cooledwhip said:
I probably won't be decorating it, so I can probably do a 55 or 75. it really depends on what I can find at a garage sale.
If you want a monster tank, I'd go for the 75 gal. It's large enough to have options, but a 120 long or 220 is what I'd personally go after.
With a 75 you can keep some solo monsters like: ruby red spilo piranha, gold mac piranhas, black rhom (buy at juvie size), red wolf fish, gold wolf fish, an oscar, polypterus, Jack Dempsey, green terror, or a gulper catfish.
There's also blue whale/shark catfish (Cetopsis.coecutiens), which are one of my personal favorite predatory/parasitic catfish. I'm currently growing out 3 juvies in my 75 gallon. My biggest cat is 4" and the other two are 2.5", I have them co-inhabiting with 20 zebra danios. They max out at 10" in length.
These catfish are basically miniature freshwater sharks, in appearance and behavior. Look like a miniature cross between a great white and bull shark, but behaves like a cookie cutter shark. They're constantly swimming/zipping around the tank, and go into insanely fast frenzies during feedings.
In the wild, they travel in schools and target larger fish. These guys literally go in for the attack (burrowing into their prey/host and eating them inside out), you can watch this happen if you use a small fillet of white fish.
These catfish like their water clean, warm, and with good flow. Decor for these cats is suggested to be very minimum. I have my 75 scaped out with just 3.5" depth of pool filter sand and some round river rocks scattered here and there.
Search the scientific name on google images and watch some Youtube vidoes of these little monsters. Think you'll find them as amazing as I do
A 75 gallon with a school of exodons/buck tooth tetras (Exodon.paradoxus) is an amazing setup as well (more so if you have the tank planted out with some vals).
Use to have a group of these, and enjoyed them just as much as keeping piranhas. Beautiful and active fish species, that stay at a manageable size (2"-3" is the biggest I've seen so far). Heard of people keeping small schools of 10-20 of these little boogers in a 75 gal with no issues.
