Possible overcrowding/feeding

[sumadis]

I have had my 75gall up and running for about two weeks. This is what I have currently:

2 small sized angels
2 honey gourami
2 opal gourami
2 golden gourami
2 pearl gourami
2 powder blue gourami
1 black fined tetra
1 sun catfish
1 rubber liped pleco
2 mollies
and 3 zebra danios

I was currently feeding 1 cube of food in the morning and 1-1/2 cubes at night. My water is pretty cloudy, I was going to cut back feeding to maybe once a day or once every two days to see if that helps. I am also dealing with some ich issues and am on the third day of treatment, I am also doing 25% water changes daily to help with treatment. I have temp of aquarium at 80-82 to help as well. So I am not to sure if the ich treatment would be contributing to the cloudiness. Any help would be great.



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[ScotJudd]

You don't give any water stats. Ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, Gh and Kh.
My gut feeling is that you can't cycle a tank in two weeks and then overload with high stocking.
I think that you may have set yourself for massive problems. Tanks once cycled, if yours was cycled, need the stocking to be gradual. When it's stable then add some more fish. Ich is a parasite but gets a much stronger hold in under cycled and over stocked tanks.
I think it might be time for a rethink.


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[sumadis]

Thanks for the reply, I had an established 20 gallon tank prior to setting up the 75 gallon, I let the tank run a few days before adding any fish. I squeezed what was in the established tank sponge into new tank before adding any fish. I saw some bacterial growth after a few days and added 3 danios. I have an emperor 400 for new tank. All fish were then gradually added after that. The nitrates and nitrites are pretty much 0, the ph is around 7, KH around 120ppm and GH 120ppm. Hope this helps.


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[CoronaBlue]

I'd have to agree I think you created a huge problem for yourself. Tank probably wasn't cycled and you added a huge load to it. Also all those gouramis could cause stress issues.

 

[Luananeko]

Agreed with above. That's a lot of bioload for such a new tank, even if you seeded the filter with mature media from another established tank.

I also see some potential problem areas in your current stock that may cause you some problems in the long run:

1) Mixing dwarf and large gourami often results in the dwarf gourami getting bullied to death, especially when mixing with the more fiesty Opal and Golden varieties. The pearl gourami may get bullied a bit as well depending on the gourami personalities, as they're usually not fiesty enough to stand their ground against the Opal and Golden types. You may get off okay since you have a large group of gourami, so the aggression will tend to be dispersed, but keep a close eye on them... Especially the males, as they're particularly territorial!

2) You've got pretty small numbers of schooling fish that are known for being nippy. I'm assuming you mean Black Skirt Tetra by the "black finned tetra". Both they and Zebra Danios will tend to nip at long Angel fins and Gourami feelers if they don't have a large enough school (at least 8+) of their own kind to distract themselves with.

3) Sun catfish get BIG when full grown (max size of 18"). Much too big for your 75g tank to be a long term home. You'll be wanting a 120g long or larger for it by the time it's nearing full size.

At the very minimum, I would recommend rehoming the sun catfish. You also might want to rehome the tetra and danios (for now), as you've already got way more bioload than you want so early in the cycle and don't have space to add their full school yet.

I strongly recommend you try plugging your numbers into Aqadvisor.com's stocking calculator before trying to add more stock. It's not perfect, but it will help identify potential problems before you have them in your tank and can be a great starting point.

 

[Brookster123]

Test strips don't show ammonia, ammonia is the precursor to nitrites, nitrates come last.. you'll probably need to take some gourami back. I don't know a ton about them but I know they shouldn't be kept in those numbers. Lots of frequent water changes and a proper liquid test kit.

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[Fishfur]

I think your chances of having any of the small gouramis live for long is slight at best. They are fragile fish, and they need a tank with dense plantings, broken sight lines, very minimal current, like Betta fish, and a lot of shade from floaters. It's actually often hard to find female dwarf gouramis, because the females are so dull in colour by comparison, but even if you had pairs, you'd still have problems.

The quality of the stock in the small gouramis, especially the colour variants like the powder blues, has deteriorated so much in the past ten years, I gave up trying to keep them at all. Not saying you can't have them, but if you want them to have any decent chance, you really have to keep them in a tank set to suit their needs. They also don't care for fast moving tank mates, such as danios, or even the mollies. The angel fish would probably bully them too when they grow a bit, as will the larger gouramis.

And, as has been pointed out, male gouramis, regardless of species, will fight if they don't have enough space to set up individual territories. Even if you have pairs, you've still got a lot of these fish. I'd be taking the powder blues and honeys back, at the very least, before they up and die on you, and probably the opals too.

And I agree as well, it's not quite fair to keep schooling species like danios and tetras in such small numbers. They really need pals of their own kind. Groups of six are about the smallest you should keep. Try for more females than males for the danios at least, so females won't be harassed.

I'm sorry if it sounds picky but for a tank to succeed, you need a bit of patience, for one thing, and the comfort and well being of the fish is important for long term success too. It's both costly and depressing to invest in a bunch of fish only to have them start dying off quickly. It's great you were able to seed the new filter, but even so, this many fish in only two weeks is not gradual stocking. It takes the BB in the filters 24 hours, give or take, to reproduce themselves, so a few fish per week is quite a bit safer in terms of adding stock.

 

[Luananeko]

Very good points about the bad stock quality of dwarf gouramis these days... I stick to the larger ones so I forgot about that. Even more reason to carefully reconsider the gourami stock now, before things go south quickly.

As a general rule when keeping gourami, you ideally never want more than one male per tank. In a 75g, you could in theory keep more males, as they have more space to set up territories, but even then you want 3+ females to each male and would need the tank to be designed with distinct territories. Gourami usually do best in pairs, harems, and sororities of similar species 5+. Mixing and matching different species rarely ends well.

 

[sumadis]

Thanks for all this input, the danios I only added to help build up bacteria for the filter, and the black skirt terra came from the other tank, once I get everything under control I will purchase a few more.


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[Fishfur]

Good luck.

I was, at one point, trying to breed dwarf gouramis. They are so lovely, there's no question about that. But they just kept dying on me.. it got truly depressing. I had everything set up to be just what they like, one male and I was lucky to find a few females for him. He even built a bubble nest, but he only lived about 3 weeks, poor thing. His successor lived only two. Then two females died as well. One day they would look fine, the next they would be lying on the bottom, looking really sad and the day after that, they were gone. I kept testing water and finding nothing wrong and reading up them and eventually I came to the conclusion that I wasn't doing anything wrong, but that the fish were just not very good quality.

It is truly a shame, because they are so pretty. Some of the articles I've read say that a disturbingly high percentage of the fish coming from the farms in Asia are infected with one or more diseases, and it's not getting any better.

Wild caught would likely be much tougher. Even the wild form is rather pretty, but they don't have the intense, saturated colours we've come to like so much and the females are virtually colourless.

 

[44Paps44]

Also suggest upping the temp to at least 86 degrees for the next 10-12 days to deal with the ich issue. Fish have enough stress going on with the cycling issues so I wouldn't medicate. Lower your water level a bit when you raise the temp to keep some oxygen in the water.

 

[mrvincent]

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