Gourami aggression

[Catz]

Hi all. At the moment I don't have any tanks, tho I've had a couple of fairly big community tanks in the past. I am looking to get another tank but being in a rental, I'm gonna have to keep it small, contrary to my natural impulse(i used to breed goldfish in a  4 ft deep para pool lol). I'm thinking at this point 65-75 litres. Big enough to house a nice small community, anyway. So, between visits to the HFF to price out a heater and a good power filter, and work out if it's cheaper to buy or build one(buy, believe it or not), and looking at options for lighting, I've also been trying different stocking permutations using the AqAdvisor, as you do. Now the tank I'm looking at would mostly be a mixed tetra school(prob glowlights and neons, about 16 or so), maybe 3/4 dwarf corys, and a couple of dwarf gouramis. With the small fish I want 1 or maybe 2 larger fish. I DID consider Angels, and they WOULD work, as long as they were smallish, and the tetras were biggish lol, so I thought I'd try plugging in a couple of pearl gouramis. And it recommends not keeping pearl gourami with dwarf gouramis. Or for that matter, any of the gouramis together because they'll fight......which is weird, cos I had for many years a tank that was basically, ALL gouramis, apart from a small mixed school of tetras. I had 2 dwarf, a couple of moonlights, a gold and a pearl, all of whom got on fine, tho the male dwarf could be a little territorial at times, it never got beyond a little posturing. Now maybe I was just lucky, or it may just have been that the tank was larger in volume(I can't remember how big it was but it was def bigger than 75 litres) but I'm just wondering if anyone else has had issues keeping different types of gouramis together?

[Caryl]

The bigger the tank the less aggression as they have space to move away.

I found dwarf gouramis did not go well with standard sized ones but others have had no problems. A lot depends on tank size, planting and the nature of the individual fishes. Blue gouramis are stroppier than the others and, if I remember correctly (it was a long time ago) the pearls caused problems too.

I would stay away from angels in a tank that small (and they will grow faster than the tetras so the neons would have a shortened life span) and stick to dwarf gouramis as a feature fish..

[nays]

I feel pearl gouramis are a bit too big for a 70ish litre tank.  A dwarf or honey would be perfect.  You might want to get a few more corys as they are also a schooling fish.