New 3ft Tank, Help!

[h_ceri]

Hi everyone

Wondering if you could help a relative newbie at this. Owned a 2ft tank for the past 6 months or so and kept it as a succesful community. Last week was at my lfs and picked up a new 3ft tank (36 x 12 x 16") and have decided to set it up as a cichlid tank (i think!)

My current tank has got the standard jewel filter in it but am pretty set on picking up a tetratec ex700 tomorrow to either replace or work with the internal.

Would appreciate any help or advice i can get when it comes to keeping cichlids, i know that many grow huge like oscars and i have no delusions about keeping anything like that, but was hoping someone could give me any advice about smaller species and what would be suitable to keep? oh, and in my community i have 2 convicts (was told they'd be fine for community - when i bought my first tank...) but have sort of fallen in love with them!

thanks for your time, any help would be appreciated!
C

 

[zach537]

Since you have Convicts in your tank try to keep stuff with the same temperment and size as convicts. Fire mouths usually work good with cons. the only issue you might run into is if you have a male and female con your tank could possibly get run over little cons. And cons can be very bossy when they have eggs. 4-6 fish of this size would be pushing it in a 3 ft tank IMO

I dont know why i found this cool, but i saw a 75 gallon setup with 2 cons, 2 firemouth, a lima shovel nose cat and an elephant nose. wish i had a pic of the tank, but just hadnt seen any tank like that setup with the above listed fish.


the most common ive seen in a 75
cons,firemouths,plecs,oscar, which i think is a little but crowded
or the same above except swap the oscar out with a JD or GT.

 

[ox5477]

Very true when it comes to cons pairing. One of the TFF members has a 350USG tank with many large cichlids in it and had a pair of cons in it take over almost the whole tank (forcing many of the occupants to the opposite end) so they can dominate a tank to protect their offspring.

With only being 30G, it doenst have much room to do alot. I would say if you hadnt bought the 30 already then would say to get a 55 and you could have two firemouths with the cons. I would say no on alot fo the dwarf cichlids as the con will prob end up just bullying the smaller guys. Just move your 20G into the 30G and maybe get a few more community fish for now. Then one day if you wanna go bigger (say atleast 55G but even better 75G) then start looking at fish like GT's, acaras, jd's, fm's, jewels, etc

 

[DiscusAngel]

if there both females, i think you could get one more female con and leave it at that, or get a plec and some dithers

 

[h_ceri]

Thanks for the advice

I've been reading some of the fish profiles etc on this site and it seems a few max out at about 4 or 5 inches in length. Taking some general stocking calculations (1fish per gallon etc) this would seem to give me some room, considering I have an oversized external tetratec filter. Or is it not so much the size that matters and its more to do with the aggression?

I'm relatively new to this and don't wana muck up!

Thanks again

 

[ox5477]

With cichlids, unless your dealing with dwarfs like rams which have a little less aggression than normal, aggression is always an issue because they are very terriotrial fish. most grow to a good size too so this increases the territory issue as well