agabr123

I asked a few questions regarding my tanks last night, and have a few more today. At the moment, my 10gal tank has one male dwarf blue gourami and one female of the same. We also have two leopard cory cats (not julii but similar?). We had one female betta in there but have pretty much decided she cannot stay in there (very fat/constipated in a separate temporary tank).

We had read that dwarf gouramis would do better community-wise if there was a female to accompany the male, but as they have settled in (4-5 days in the tank so far), he has taken to chasing her quite a bit (especially evening/nights).

Should we get another female to distract the male? We would also like to get 2-3 small schooling fish of some kind. Overstocking is not a great concern for me as we monitor the tank fairly closely and clean often enough to stay on top of it.

My tank is all artificial plants at the moment with two structures. I would love a planted tank but we live in a college dorm, so we are going to wait until we can get an apartment (so there's no twice yearly breakdown) and larger tank(S). However, I would like to do some floating plants on one side of the tank for the gouramis. We have iridescent lighting so I am not confident we could keep live floating plants. Our LFS never have artificial floating style plants but they do have live ones, and I am reluctant to have artificial ones shipped from a website, having never seen them in person before I pay $15-20 for one plant.. including stupid shipping.

Now that you've had the long of it, here's the short:
1) should we get another female dwarf gourami?
2) or are there small schoolers we could get that would distract him in the same way? (even in addition to another female)
3) please don't worry about mild/moderate overstocking issues... I kept a very full loach/cory tank with NO issues until a temporary care-taker didn't stay on top of it... oh no!
4) can we get live floating plants with iridescent lighting? (reading about planted tanks and trying to get my head around all the details makes my head hurt)

Some other shorter questions:
5) at the moment we have a 10i Whisper internal filter but I do not like it. The carbon is nasty and I have mixed feelings (and information) about how that works. I also don't like the huge bulk inside the tank. I used to have a HOB but when it died, I bought the whisper in a rush. Any recommendations on a budget?
--I'd like a stronger filter with adjustable flow (slow flow for gourami ideally) and minimal bulk inside the tank
6) snails! I would love a snail but need to know if there are any to AVOID in a 10gal freshwater community... LFS are so vague on what they are selling
7)shrimp... I've never had them but I've read their bioload is minimal. What type are the best? And will dwarf gouramis eat them? (I haven't been able to find anything on shrimp + dwarves)

Thank you so much for reading if you got this far! If you feel like I should split this up into different venues for different subjects for further in depth answers, let me know! I'm only two days old here

Edit: added picture of the tank for a general idea, welcome to suggest redecoration. I'm likely to redecorate soon anyways. It feels rather full.

Attached Images

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Lucy

Your tank looks great, very nice job.

I can only address a couple of things here.

3) Even if you stay on top of water changes in an over crowded, if they feel too cramped there could be aggression issues.

5) I don't use carbon except for filtering out meds, as you said it can get nasty but also it expires and can leach toxins backinto your tank.

7) Ghost shrimp are fun, but I don't know if you gouramis would eat them.

Good luck, I'm sure the other members will be able to help you further.

agabr123

3) thank you.. that is a valid concern... hmm (I'm truly used to weather loaches and cory cats!)

5) what do you use as filter media?

7) I know regular gouramis will eat them, but dwarves are smaller and "nonaggressive" so hmm....

thanks for replying though, again...

Lucy

In my whisper I open the pouch and dump the carbon out and put that back in.
For my HOB's I use the catridge after dumping the carbon.

You can also buy filter floss that can be cut to the size of your filter.

Ghostfish

I keep ghost shrimp in my tank as a food source for my black ghost knifefish and angel fish. I am not sure your dwarf gouramis could eat them. I keep mine with young pearl, gold, and plat gouramis and I have never seen them try to eat the shrimp. Ghost shrimp run about .36 each, so they are a pretty reasonable priced food source for some fish.

I currently use carbom, but I believe I am going to just take it out after debating for a long time.

There aren't a lot of floating plants I am familiar with. You could pick up some duckweed. You probably can get it free from some places. Most people consider it a nuisance plant. It doesn't require any extra upkeep. Persoanlly, for a 10g job that I didn't want to spend a fortune for plants on, I would put in a microsword and maybe a java fern. Usually you can get both at a Petsmart for $5-7 each.

I would avoid mystery snails. They are a huge bioload. Most snails are expecially for a small tank. You could look into some of the smaller breeds. Malaysian trumpet snails are good if you are using sand. The smaller breed of Columbian ramshorn could be ok too. Be careful with snails because they multiply quickly. I started with 3 mystery snails and I probably have close to 200 counting babies. I give away as many as I can. The rest I will likely turn into fish food because its bad for the eco-system to just release them. There are even laws against shipping some across state boarders.

agabr123

Thanks for the information. Yeah, if we were to get snails for the time being it will just be one because we've had experiences with more than one in the past and it did not turn out well.