Cichlid tank, needs?

[ctsniper86]

Just got a 1.14m long tank and stand and am wanting to make it into a chiclid tank.

Just wanting to know what is the best things to have in the tank.

plants?

gravel?

stones?

etc?

Any advice greatly received.

Ben

[cichlid7]

i would say no plants

it also depends which type of cichlids aswell

[David R]

Its not big enough for cichlids.

oh, you were talking about africans? :roll: :lol:

[ryanjury]

lol Yeah if you tell us what cichlids you want then we can give you the advice your after

[ctsniper86]

Like electric yellows/blues, convicts.

I didn't know chiclids was so broad, sorry I should have done a bit more thinking first.

What I really want to have is a display tank with a big rocky background, and i read somewhere people were making them for their chiclid tanks.

[ryanjury]

So your interested in keeping african cichlids?

Your yellow's and most of the nice "blues" you may have seen are african cichlids but the convicts are american cichlids so you cant really keep all of them together.

If your going for africans plants don't usually last all too long, some have mild success but I haven't, they need and like rock work to hide in and establish territory's.

Gravel, you can use whatever you want to really, africans like hard water with a high PH most people choose to use a substrate that helps them achieve this such as argonite or crushed coral, however you can buffer your water with a mix thats easy and cheap to make and there are plenty of recipes on the net..

Also keep in mind that your tank is relatively small (in terms of what some of the african species require) and some of the fish you may see may cause trouble best to research them and/or ask here before buying them :

You cant go wrong with electric yellow's for a good start though.

Good luck

[diffgirl]

we keep all of your first pics together and they work fine, for a tank that size you could look at jags or jack dempseys too, they can get quite big, upto and over a foot long but super cool fish.

we have river wood in our tank for our cleaners the plecos, but the others like the hiding holes too, the color does leach into the water though and it took about a year to stop hapening, but with good filtration it was not too bad.

Your gravel color can affect the fish colors, eg bright gravel like white will brighten them and visa versa.

Big rocks we used blue rock from a quary my hubby was doing work at, and it gave cool places for everyone to call home, but be sure to put them in a way they cant be shifted by the fish cause ours move their stuff daily.

Plants, we have none, they got dug up and eaten, even the hardiest of plants make for something to do for our guys, they just dig and dig.

We like to keep ours natural looking so everything in the main tank either came from the earth or was growing at some stage, our food tank where we breed minows to feed to the biger fish we do have some man made ornaments which you could use too.

When we set our tanks up we had a look at pics of others tanks and at heaps of diferent forums.

Hope this helps KB

[Afrikan]

I agree with Ryan, if you are wanting to start with an african, Electric Yellows are relatively easy to start with When starting out, sometimes it is better to start with one species together and then feel your way and research alot, compatibility with africans is a trial and error thing, some work, some don't... I would definately keep a solely african tank tho, and give the idea of adding convicts a miss Your tank is relatively small so territory as fish mature and get to a decent size will be a factor, might then be time for an upgrade :lol:

Have you ever looked at Dwarf Cichlids (American) they do well in a nicely planted tank.... Rams, assorted Apistos, Dwarf Nano's, Bolivian Rams are available here... very addictive to some :lol:

Or maybe some Tanganyikan africans that don't get overly robust and big, like Brichardi, Pulchers, Julidochromis... Brichardi are easy to start with 8)

Anyway, keep us posted and good luck!

[smidey]

it can depend on the water supply in your area. my local water supply is hard as, high ph so is perfect for africans. your aiming for a ph of about 7.8 or more so you'll need an arogonite (crushed marble) substrate with some limestoe rocks maybe to help the PH. thats what i have & it works well. i have heaps of filtration, 10 times the tank volume per hour & have the fish in my sig in there. they also mix well with very little aggression. i have found plastic plants to be the best, real ones get hammered & dug up.

[ryanjury]

I find it best to recommend some buffering of the water regardless of what the PH is out of the tap some tap water can sometimes have a low KH and be very unstable.. People have mentioned measuring their ph out of the tap when doing a water change and having it high and then measuring their tank the next day finding it low..

All depends exactly what cichlids they are wanting to keep! As Mekhaela pointed out there are dwarf cichlids and even discus are cichlids..

[Afrikan]

Yeap the added buffer is good for africans... tap water can most definately change. Frenchy gave me the dinky buffer recipe which hellishly saves pennys not having to buy the expensive buffers on lfs shelves... 8)

[Gannet]

we keep all of your first pics together and they work fine, for a tank that size you could look at jags or jack dempseys too, they can get quite big, upto and over a foot long but super cool fish.

i completly disagree, you could not keep a jag in a 1.14 tank thats just mean...

as for keeping all those others to getha yes it can work but normally the fish come from different pH hardness etc so by putting that extra stress on the fish will most problly lower the life span of you lil guys...

[diffgirl]

i completly disagree, you could not keep a jag in a 1.14 tank thats just mean...

as for keeping all those others to getha yes it can work but normally the fish come from different pH hardness etc so by putting that extra stress on the fish will most problly lower the life span of you lil guys...

Well all I can say is that is what we do and I have had our different setups looked at by alot of different people with common interests and with similar fish and a tank that is 1.14 meters long if I read that bit correctly when you work out the varying formulas for deciding what fish should suit this size tank Jags would be fine, I have seen silver arawanas kept in simmilar tanks and they are fine too yet another big fish. at max size growth keeping in mind that is not always as big as they will grow but how big they could grow, being 30cm that is able to be divided into 1.14m nearly 4 times and all info I found when looking myself was you must have 3 times their length available to them to be healthy for the fish.

Another point that was made to me when we started out was you can always up size your tanks if your fish get too big for the tank and our jags started out at 2cm when we got them and if we had put them in a 1.14m tank we would have never seen them. they are 1 year old and they are about 15cm and now breeding, they are happy healthy fish and we are not being mean to them, our tank they are in at the mo is not as big as the 1.14m tank, although we will be moving them into their 4foot tank soon and that will be their home untill they look like they are too big for that which is not for quite some time, if at all.

This is just my opinion and what we do, but be sure before doing what we did I did get peoples opinions and advice and researched all over the world for info on what was best to do and this is what we did, all I can say is get as many ideas and opinions as you can find and make your own opinions and try for some info that has logical reasons for doing what they say with measurements or if it is a particular rock or stone to use for example what are the benifits to using it etc.

[diffgirl]

here is an indipendant guideline by one of the global moderators of monster fish keepers it is in inches and us gallons but the conversion is 1"=2.54cm and 1US gallon=3.78L

" The "one inch per gallon" rule

This is something that comes up fairly often and is rather misunderstood therefore I will attempt to clarify the original meaning of the general guideline of "one inch of fish per gallon of water".

This is a suggested guideline for a well maintained and filtered tank.

It does not apply to all fish as some have differing requirements.

Here is the part that is being misunderstood.

The "rule" does NOT refer to the length of the fish!

The "rule" applies to the cubic inches of fish in the tank.

This means that a 5" gourami should be measured in this manner,

length overall (5"),

thickness, (1/2"),

height, (2 1/2"),

so for this fish you multiply the following, 5x 1/2x 2 1/2, this gives you a total of 6 1/4 gallons of water.

For small fish like glo-light tetras you will end up with something like this,

1 1/2"x 1/4"x1/2", this comes to 3/16 of a gallon (about 1/5), and that gives you 5 fish of this size per gallon (quite reasonable)

For larger fish you end up with something like this, my example here will be a silver arowana at 24" long, 24"x 4"x 1", which gives you 100 gallons of water.

As you can see this works fairly well.

You do also have to apply some common sense and allow for such things as potential growth, the fish types' tolerance for crowding, and of course the width and length of the tank (a 24" gar will not work in an 18" wide tank even if the tank holds 100 gallons).

So please people, accept that this is just a generalized guideline to figure potential stocking levels, not a hard and fast rule.

Also remember that just because you don't like it doesn't mean you should slam somebody for using it.

And lastly, please don't flame someone by saying a 10" oscar doesn't fit in a 10" tank.

Of course it doesn't,

but the rule never said it would."

Hope this may help stop any argument

[ryanjury]

We all know the formula's and I know for sure I don't use them I just go with what looks right, having kept fish for 10 years now I have a fair idea what I can get away with. And with keeping africans I stick heaps of fish in there and do alot of water changes.

Personally I wouldn't stick a jag in a tank that small well of course I would to grow him out, but when he reaches the 15-20cm mark id move him on.. There are some people that say as long as a fish can turn around in a tank its big enough, it all comes down to what your happy with, me I hate seeing huge fish in small tanks I think its cruel these fish in nature have so much room its not funny and I dont think its fair to keep them couped up. Also I thought male jags had a rep for being girl beaters and can just randomly pack a sad kill their partners? Although of course that would depend on the fishes individual temperament.