Tankmates For My Guppies

[chase18]

Hey - My tank has just been balanced out - all zeros with ammonia & nitrite. I have a 10 gallon tank, no heater, but the temp stays about 72 degrees. PH is on the higher end, between 7.2 and 7.6. I have one male and two female guppies. One of the females is closer in size to a mollie... and the male won't seem to breed with the smaller female although I'm sure she's fully grown as well. Any suggestions there?

My other question, as per the topic I listed, is what are good tankmates? My husband originally wanted neon tetras, but everyone told me they were nearly impossible to keep. I also liked the look of the black skirted tetras. Please, if you give me a suggested tankmate, please tell me how many I should have at a minimum. Obviously I have a small tank. I do have lots of plants, I do want my guppies to reproduce but I also want most of the babies to be naturally...limited...in their numbers, so I don't mind fish that eat babies. I don't want my tank overrun with babies, in other words.

 

[logansmommy41306]

Hi
The general rule is 1 inch of fish per gallon (adult sizes). Black skirt tetras will nip at your guppies tales. In my tank I have guppies and swordtails. I think you can also add platys and mollys with guppies. you may also want to get a heater as with small tanks the temp can flucuate.

I hope this helps you some. I am fairly new to the fish keeping thing, there are lots of more knowlegdable people on here. So if you have more questions just ask

 

[theotheragentm]

Where are you located? Even though the weather may be temperate, temperature swings from day and night might be more than ideal. I would suggest a heater, just in case. A Gourami might be a good centerpiece fish, and it will help keep fry in check.

 

[chase18]

Thanks guys - we live on an island in Japan and the temperature between day and night doesn't even change by 10 degrees. Although I have been looking into getting a heater. At the moment my LPS suggested that I have two filters to help my tank through the nitrite cycle (which people here told me was pointless) so as soon as I get the second one out of there we'll have room for a heater. On the other hand I also heard that having a heater in a small aquarium can be bad because it might be too much heat...something like that.

 

[chase18]

I heard mollies would pick on the guppies because they're smaller. Mom had guppies, mollies, zebras, neons, and...one other very small fish I can't remember, in her tank. Some lived, some died. But it seems every website I check says the PH for two types of fish are different, or one picks on the other, or...I'm just having a really hard time figuring fish that are compatible.

Gourami: just one of those? How big are they? I don't think we have those here.

 

[theotheragentm]

Heaters should be temperature controlled. The only problem would be too much heat output in one area, but that is highly unlikely. To avoid this, you just put the heater where your circulation is greatest. It will evenly distribute heat.

Unless one of the filters is already mature, there is little need for two filters on a tank. The general rule though is that you can have too much current, but you really can't have too much filtration.

There are lots of types of Gouramis. See here. For a 10 gallon, I would recommend a Dwarf Gourami.

Having the precise recommended pH is less important than a stable pH once a fish is acclimated. I have fish that don't have the exact same ideal pH levels naturally. The best way to go about things is to drip acclimate your fish when you get them. This is assuming you don't have your pH levels way off to one extreme normally in your tap water. Float the bag for fifteen minutes. Then remove some water from the bag, tossing it out, and replacing it with the same amount of tank water. Do this over and over every five minutes or so, and your fish will have slowly acclimated to your tank's water, at least better than dumping them right into the tank.

Give a list of fish you are interested in and we can possibly help point out whether you will run into problems.

 

[chase18]

Excellent, thanks for the suggestion on placement of the heater. Besides my two filters - which are both the type that dump water back into the tank, I also have a bubble wand running on the side of the tank. I heard while cycling that maximum air flow would help get rid of bad stuff faster. So, do you think that's too much "current" or am I not understanding what you said? The one filter I've had since the beginning (about a month now), and the second I got a few days before my ammonia hit zero. One of my friends just got a beta and I told her if she'd put it in a bigger tank - instead of the little cube that they had him in in the pet store - that I'd give her one of my filters. Figured a cycled filter would help cycle her aquarium faster. She's just not ready to get the bigger aquarium. So I figured I'd keep running both filters while adding new fish, make sure everything was balanced, then cut down to one filter.

Really I don't have any specific fish in mind. My husband wants a "pretty" fish, like something colorful. They have these really expensive guppies at the pet store - it's in Japanese so I can't tell what they're called - but they've got these enormous tails that appear to be so heavy the fish has a hard time keeping it from drooping. They cost about $40 each I think, females are closer to $15. We both think they're colorful but too expensive for our dinky little tank. He likes neons, wanted to get 10 of them. (We started out the tank with 10 of them and one by one they died - I didn't know about cycling.) But I was told by a few people on here that it's nearly impossible to keep neons, even if they're in a tank by themselves.

And like I said before, I wouldn't mind having more fish in the tank that DON'T spit out babies like there's no tomorrow, so that my guppy population will rise, but not dramatically. Natural selection. I can tell you that our pet stores here don't have a huge variety, and that I will only be able to identify a fish by it's picture (so thanks again for including those links). I've been reading around and now I don't remember what the fish was called, but it's like a guppy but it starts with an "E". I know they have those type of fish mixed in, at least with their male guppies, at the pet store. Thought I'd go find some of those. I also saw a picture of a swordtail I think that looked similar that I liked.

Oh, and thanks for the tips about adding water to the bag, too. I'd rather go into getting new fish knowing everything I possibly can, in hopes of avoiding the massive fish death I had when I started out...And by my research I've been told that if I have three fish now, I shouldn't add any more than three at a time, and preferably closer to one or two fish so my tank has time to catch up.

 

[theotheragentm]

The only thing I would be concerned about when giving a filter to your friend is that Bettas like relatively still water. You would want to adjust the flow way down and raise the water level up higher.

Take pictures if you're not sure what a fish is called. 10 gallons is not a huge tank, and even if a fish fits, it may not be the best as swimming room may be limited. I would avoid Swordtails as they move quite a bit. One fish that may work that still small is the Celestial Pearl Danio. They used to be called Galaxy Rasbora until they got a name. The males of the species have a great red color.

 

[sadielmorris]

I have a few reticulated corydoras that I've put with my guppies. They seem to get along great, except the guppies seem to be a little pushy at dinner time.