+1 for Apistos. Check aquabid for a nice variety of apistos. The ones raised in hobby tanks are more tolerant to your home aquarium. The wild caught ones are less tolerant. Test your local water, if it's soft, the West African or Amazon tank is just right. If it's hard, a little additional African salt and you can have some nice Tanganyikan cichlids.

If "I" were you, I'd take that 75 G, fill it with Seachem Flourite/brown aquarium gravel mixed 50/50, puts lots of driftwood, and pack it with plants (java moss, jave ferns, amazon swords, cryptos, etc.) Research the net for low light plants unless you're going to go with over 2 watts/gallon lighting. I use around 1 watt/gallon and wouldn't have it any other way. I can't grow those light hungry plants, but I also don't have to trim the garden every few days either. That's the thing with a balanced aquarium, the poop feeds the plants and the plants absorb the nutrients before algae can get it. Next a couple big schools of dither fish - small tetras, cyprinidaes, etc. Get 20 or more that love to school and get a couple different kinds. Bolivian or blue rams are nice and you could handle 8-10 of them. Apistos are nice. Search for South American cichlids. Join a freshwater forum or lurk on several to get intell. Be very careful what you put in there, though. Once that tank is full of stuff, it's almost impossible to catch some of these guys to remove them. Add some cheapies to start with to slowly cycle the tank and after a couple of weeks, start gathering your stock. It'll take it a while to balance out, but it will eventually. Read, read, and read again. It's fun! Good luck.
[Reply]

I agree with Jamie on the Apistos. Many are raised in tap water and are not that hard to take care of at all. As for being aggressive, they may be feisty with each other, but are definitely community tank material. They are pretty harmless fish.
If you go with cories, loaches, or spiny eels (another awesome group of fish) make sure you have a fine substrate like sand. I'm not sure what the best balance would be substrate-wise to take care of plants though. You would need something fine enough not to damage cory and loach barbels, but something suitable for plants at the same time. Maybe Jamie can chime in on that one or look around on the plantedtank.net forums.
[Reply]

:-)
you've peeked my interest about a tank. some good info here already, Time to start reading more I guess. Just having some some plants and some shrimp in a very large mason jar would be fun:-)
[Reply]

Ok, Jamie. You and Ray now have my interest piqued regarding dwarf cichlids. Especially Blue Rams. I also visited a LFS in Manhattan called Pacific Aquarium where I was knocked out by their display tank which looks like this...

Image

So, as you suggested, I'd like to test my local water to see what my starting point is. That means I need a kit of some sort, yes? I'm excited. It'll be my first aquarium-related purchase. Looking online, there seems to be dozens to choose from: quick dip, battery operated, etc. Can you guys recommend one that'll suit my needs?
[Reply]

With regards to testing your water there are numerous brands available and they certainly range in price. A freshwater test kit should come with all necessary test solutions (ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, and pH). To test for hardness you will probably have to purchase a separate kit for GH (general hardness) and KH (Carbonate hardness).

That should give you a good baseline to start from.
[Reply]

Drs Foster Smith - Test Kits

Dr Fosters & Smith is a good site to do research on available products.
[Reply]

I like this one - http://www.drsfostersmith.com/produc...1&pcatid=13521

Also, see if Pacific offers water testing. Keep the money local and help your LPS.
[Reply]

Cigars and aquariums - a great way to never have extra money! :-)
[Reply]

Yeah, no kidding.
[Reply]

Roger that! I went from freshwater tropical (30g -> 55g), then turned the 55g into a planted freshwater. Both a 65g and made it into a saltwater reef. I ran both planted fresh and reef tanks for about year before I moved and shut down the fresh. I then upgraded the reef from a 55g to a 150g. Got into cigars about that time as well.

I ran the 150 for a little under 2 years and shut it down. Now I have a 12g freshwater biocube with neon tetras. I am itching to put plants in it. But then I realize that I will fall back into the trap.
[Reply]

That was in August of last year - no pruning since then until this weekend. I could barely find my fish any longer. :-) All 4 tanks needed landscaping.

First picture below is the jungle. After pulling out nearly a 5 G bucket of plants, the second picture is where she stands now. You'll notice the crypts in the front against the glass really did well over that 5-month period. I wish the pictures did them justice.

All together 2 - 5 G buckets of plants went into the compost. Incredible!

Image


Image
[Reply]

Thought I'd bring this back up!

After a really tough few months (never getting anything to live in my tank, no matter what I did) I gave it up for about a year.

Decided to start it back up recently. Figured maybe my water was the problem, so I've got brand new substrate along with only bottles spring water (5 gallons at a time) Now I've got a real simple tank with 4 guppies and 4 ghost shrimp.

So far so good, checking levels and keeping up with the water changes, hoping this time things work ou!
[Reply]

I want to re-start having tanks when we move to a slightly bigger place. Being a city-boy I never have space for anything bigger than a 35G.

Flynn, I remember making a majorly dumb mistake once with an old tank, I just couldn't get the more sensitive fish to stay alive (rams especially) and was getting a lot of illness.

I realized that I was gradually increasing the salt concentration in my water changes... mainly because I was an idiot. When I did water-changes, I never took evaporation into account. Lets say I had a 35G tank, and that over a 3 week time there was about a half a gallon of evaporation... when I did a 30% water change I'd take out 10G, but replace that 10G with 10.5G of new water. As I always added a small amount of aquarium salt to my new water, that 0.5G replacement of slightly salted water was raising the tank salinity slightly every 2-3 weeks.

I don't know if this is a problem with your set-up, but it took me a while to figure it out... I just had a blind spot to that issue. I think it wasn't until I was looking at some salt-water tank videos and they were discussing automatic pumps to add fresh-water to maintain the strict salinity that I realized I was probably really screwing stuff up.
[Reply]