tinah

Okay, so I am not adding anything else to my tank, unless its vegitation, until after the holidays. . . but I have no idea what to get. Cory catfish look neat, but I don't want to overload my tank, and I can't seem to find out if my fish will eat shrimp or not. . . and i've always kinda liked snails. . . any input?

platy ben

Well for a start, what fish do you already have? and what size tank do you have?

Would love to see pics

EDIT: dont worry about those questions, i just read your aquarium info. Well i would say you could get 2 corys in there aslong as you keep checking your water parameters and do water changes every now and then

pepetj

Hi tinah, you seem to be a careful fishkeeper, glad to hear you are taking your time to do this right.

One or two Nerite Snails would make your tank a lot of good as they keep algae in check. They have a relative small bio-load, say 1" each.

Ghost Shrimps, on the other hand, have virtually no bio-load but I have no clue if the Bleeding Heart Tetras would tolerate them or not since they are carnivorous. If they do, you could go for a Nerite Snail and three Ghost Shrimps.

That would leave your tank with a bio-load of 11 or 12" for 10gallons, actually a bit higher since the substrate, plants and decor displace some of the 10gal volume of water, so keeping a thin substrate might be a good idea. As far as you keep good maintenance routine, and provide adequate filtration -which your biowheel should provide-, I don't expect you to have any problems whatsoever once your tank is stable.

I keep some overstocked tanks as most of my fishies are growing up and I aim at MTS big time, but I don't recommend this to others, since it implies more costs (e.g. multiple filtration systems, higher energy bill as well as being ready to set larger/more tanks short term) and could push easily into more frequent water changes.

I wouldn't go for the small sized corydoras (e.g. Adolfoi, Pandas, Bronze) since they usually are schooling fish, and add 2.5" each.

If I may ask/suggest: Are your light lamp(s) fluorescent or incandescent? If fluorescent you seem have a lot of light there (3.0WPG), consider downgrading to half (1.5WPG) in order to achieve two objectives:
1) avoid algae bloom problems (go with low-light plants), and
2) Bleeding Heart Tetras are kind of shy and bright lights might stress them.

Pepe
Santo Domingo

tinah

I discovered the hard way that my swimmers are frightened of lights. . . I now have incandescents, after sending them to the bottom of the tank for half a day with CFL's. I am worried that I don't have enough wattage for the plants; but I'm not sure what to do about that. I do have 25 watt incandescents I can put in instead, but again, I don't want my fishies to have heart attacks. I may go get them another plant in a few hours. . .
After googling, I really like the idea of a handful of ghost shrimp! And I could get some rocks and more moss and I think they'd be pretty happy.

pepetj

I have Anubias Barteri growing healthy, although at slower pace than in other tanks, in a 5.5gal tank with an incandescent bulb rated at 15W. Doing the math, incandescent bulb's efficiency (as for how much light a plant can use to grow) is around 25% of its rated value, so I have 0.7WPG there.

Pepe
Santo Domingo