Hello guys.. so am confused on what to choose between peaceful or aggressive fish.
I need some advice and I prefer colorful fish in general.
I did get 15 peaceful fish during my cycle and sadly they all died.. at the moment my tank is ready and I have 1 Cichlids fish right now but shes very aggressive as I understood from my research.
thank you.
I watch my tanks to calm down in the midst of otherwise overwhelming days, so I really *need* peaceful fish. I once had the horrible experience of waiting an hour for a very late dentist and having to watch the huge cichlids attack, maim, kill, and eat each other in the monster tank that literally took up a small room. I found another dentist after that. While buying 2nd hand tanks, I've met so many people who gave up and were selling of their equipment because their cichlids were just too violent. I do think that's part of the reason why there is a glut of used equipment in my area. The water is very hard, so the LFS have tons of cichlids, and then people can't deal with the daily bloodbaths.
So I've gone with more peaceful fish, specifically smaller
livebearers, such as
Endlers, Micropoecilia Pictas (who still have a wild behavior), and Heterandria Formosa gold morphs. In the past, I've had
gouramis (blues that can deal with the hard water and pearls were my favorites) and
neon tetras. The gouramis and
tetras definitely did better in softer, and I ended up cutting our water with REO water that I got from the machines at the grocery store.
Honey gouramis are sweet, but they're more difficult. I also combined larger gouramis with shoals of cherry and
gold barbs in a more aggressive tank. Their colors were so bright, it was wonderful. Another larger shoaling fish that can handle hard water would be BosemanI rainbows, but I would only keep them with
cory cats. Don't mix with other colors of rainbows because they'll produce muddy babies if they're happy enough to reproduce.
Hope this helps!
