you can get like 5 of each color and a few plecos and cats and some snails with a few shrimp in there and itll be fine. u dont have to cram your tank full. put in a few neons and itll be very colorfull. especially if u plan a bunch of things and wrap the back with a dark blue or a dark green background. get a nice light on em as well. i got a 50-50 light and its quite nice. it makes algae explode in growth, but its not a problem in my tank, so its ok. i got an otocat(not sure how to spell it, but sounds like auto cat) for that. those lights are great, they provide two kinds of lighting in one. one is good for growth and one is for color. so u get the plants and algae growth(some algae is actually not a bad thing because it occurs in their natural habitat, so its allright) and the fish colors just POP. mine arent really that colofull, but i can see blues and green in their bellies when they zip around under the light, so i can only imagine how bright the stripes on neons will get.
I wish I could put in a beta and not have to worry about him. :sad
They are so pretty.
Have you even owned a big tank before? There not easier to take care of. I’ve owned everything from a 5 gallon all the way up to a 55 gallon tank. I owned a 29 gallon salt water tank and the big tanks are NOT easy to take care of.
Right now i’ve down sized all the way to a 10 gallon tank with 1 african cichlid in it. I add water to it when it gets low and clean every once in and a great while. Small tanks are much easier to take care of.
You put one bad fish in any size tank and it’ll kill off just about everything in your tank. I know first hand because it happened to me once.
And that’s why there are four fish in a 55 gallon tank at my house right now. :lol
How often do I have to do the whole drain, clean, and refill thing?
Sounds like a pain in the ass for a cool room decoration.
i had experience with that as well. i came back once to a fat looking fish alone in the tank. i stick to smaller fish now. my biggest one is like 2-2.5 inches long. theres nothing in the tank that fits in its mouth, so its ok. it actually tried nipping at the new small cat last night, but it noticed that it cant fit in its mouth so it just left it alone.
bettas are agressive, so id keep it in its own tank/bowl
I know, it sucks. But they are one of my favorites.
Honestly, if your looking to do a small 10 gallon tank I hardly ever do it. The tank isn’t very clean at the moment but this fish I have in there has been kickin for 2 years strong in it now. You drain about half the tank down with a tank vacuum that you can pick up for like $15.00 from Eddies or any other pet store and it takes literally no time at all.
The 55 I had required hours of cleaning and it was on a very regular basis, atleast twice a month. It all really depends how many fish you have in there.
I would definitely recommend starting with no more then a 10 gallon tank. You can put a nice arrangement of fish in it too, to get you started.
clean the glass when it gets dirty from stuff floating around or algae growth. u can do a water change every few months. dont obviously just drain the whole damn thing and add new water. i take out like a 1/5th at a time. dont just dump in new water. slowly put it in. you will need to clean the substrate as well. that one you can do as u change the water, actually. u get a bucket or a plastic tub or something like that and get a 2 inch tube or hose. put one end in the dirty water basin, this will be the water u drain out and throw away. put the other end in your tank. make sure not to suck in fish. what you do is get the water flowing from the tank into the basin. you can just suck the water out of the hose, kinda like siphoning gas. then stick the hose into the substrate and pull it up about half inch to an inch over the area you put it in. then hold it there a bit and move on. what that does is get all the crap floating in the water and the hose will suck it out with the water, but because the hose or tube youre using is big, the substrate falls back down and sinks instead of getting sucked up into the hose. follow me? do that around the bottom till uve drained about 20-25% of the water and replace the lost volume with new water. you basically end up vacumming fish crap doing that. which helps reduce nitrogen and ammonia build up. you dont have to do it as often if those levels are low, but every now and then you still have to do it. the bigger the tank the more time youll spend cleaning it obviously. like JRubino said, the more fish u have the more u have to clean it. goldfsih are actually pretty dirty fish. they tend to raise nitrogen and ammonia levels more than other fish.
JRubino, i dunno man, my friend had a 65+ for a while and it didnt require that much work actually. it was way less than my 5 gallon. once we got his stable, it was quite nice. he had it for close to a year and it recently sprung a leak that he couldnt fix so he had to empty it and give the fish away and stuff. we actualyl got our tank at the same time and his requred less attention than mine.
I’m giving my first hand experience. I personally have owned a variety of different size tanks and my 10 requires hardly any work.
Like I said before, to get someone started, a small 10 gallon tank is a very good starter. It’s cheap too. It’ll cost a lot to fill a 55 gallon tank.
Still partin out my 01 mk4 , swap some parts for that 55gal tank…LMK,
whats wrong with it?
it definitely costs way more to fill up a 55. 5-10 is a very good starter, so i have a 5 right now. i definitely want to step it up later on, though. i really like shrimp and crustaceans more than fish, so im going to see if i can get a large shrimp colony in mine. see if i can get em to breed in captivity.
I used to get these neon blue lobsters. They look like little crayfish and their south american. Not sure what you have. I used to mix them in with African fish and they always did well until the fish got bigger and wripped them apart. You should try them out. I know Eddie’s always them in stock.
for sure! all my fish are at the size theyre normally at in the wild, so i wont have anything nipping at them. i have a bamboo shrimp right now. for a long time i had ghost shrimp, but they basically died of old age. ill definitely look into some small lobsters for my next tank. i might actually just get one from price chopper or something. nothing HUGE, i want like maybe crayfish. something in the 6-8 inches in range and some smaller ones
I had a betta in my tank with various little cleaner shrimp, some neon tetras, and many other fish MUCH smaller than the betta and never had an issue. Son’ bitch lived for about 4 years too and never bothered any other fish.
Maybe that’s the trick. Put him in with all my little guys.
:confused… you actually think they sell lobsters that small at PRICE CHOPPER?! :idiots
their lobsters are for consumption. Smallest they may have would be just over a pound. I don’t think it’s even legal to catch that kind of lobsters when they are that small.
When I had my first tank I put my beta in with the rest of them and had no problems either.
motor popped,turbo LESS. Clean body ,int mint. Longbeach wheels ,All the goods.It has 140k ,not worth much, so i figuerd i’ll just part it out,