Advice on tank stock swap

[Beano]

Hi everyone. I've always kept large aggressive cichlids. Currently have a texas cichlid pair with an xl pleco in a 60"Lx24"Wx30"H tank (think its 700L/155G).

I'm looking to get rid of all 3 fish and start a community tank. Thinking with stocking it with something like this...

2-3 severum (probably rotkeil)
3-4 silver dollars
2-3 angelfish (maybe)
10+ black skirt tetras
20+ corydoras
Few small L number or bristlenose plecs

Thoughts on that stock list? Any other ideas/swaps?

I don't know too much about the smaller tetras, but wanted an active shoal of something small.

Any alternative peaceful center piece fish instead of the severums?

 

[Fishyboy🐟🐟🐟]

Hi everyone. I've always kept large aggressive cichlids. Currently have a texas cichlid pair with an xl pleco in a 60"Lx24"Wx30"H tank (think its 700L/155G).

I'm looking to get rid of all 3 fish and start a community tank. Thinking with stocking it with something like this...

2-3 severum (probably rotkeil)
3-4 silver dollars
2-3 angelfish (maybe)
10+ black skirt tetras
20+ corydoras
Few small L number or bristlenose plecs

Thoughts on that stock list? Any other ideas/swaps?

I don't know too much about the smaller tetras, but wanted an active shoal of something small.

Any alternative peaceful center piece fish instead of the severums?

Discus are very pretty but are very fragile

 

[Snajrog]

Hi everyone. I've always kept large aggressive cichlids. Currently have a texas cichlid pair with an xl pleco in a 60"Lx24"Wx30"H tank (think its 700L/155G).

I'm looking to get rid of all 3 fish and start a community tank. Thinking with stocking it with something like this...

2-3 severum (probably rotkeil)
3-4 silver dollars
2-3 angelfish (maybe)
10+ black skirt tetras
20+ corydoras
Few small L number or bristlenose plecs

Thoughts on that stock list? Any other ideas/swaps?

I don't know too much about the smaller tetras, but wanted an active shoal of something small.

Any alternative peaceful center piece fish instead of the severums?

Rummy nose tetras and Cardinal tetras are great schooling fish and look great with a group of 50-100.
instead of the black skirts look for candy cane tetras. Similar in body shape but with a splash of color.
You can never go wrong with Corys.

 

[Beano]

Rummy nose tetras and Cardinal tetras are great schooling fish and look great with a group of 50-100.
instead of the black skirts look for candy cane tetras. Similar in body shape but with a splash of color.
You can never go wrong with Corys.

Thanks for the suggestions. I kept a lot of different types of Corys a few years back. One of my favourite species.

 

[duanes]

That sounds like a reasonable stock list, especially if you have neutral to slightly lower pH, soft water parameters.
To me SDs might be a tad disruptive because they can be jumpy, under certain circumstance such if the tank is in a fluctuating traffic area.,
The suggestion posted of using slightly smaller tetras may be a better choice, and avoid overstocking when all cichlids hit mature adult size.

 

[Beano]

That sounds like a reasonable stock list, especially if you have neutral to slightly lower pH, soft water parameters.
To me SDs might be a tad disruptive because they can be jumpy, under certain circumstance such if the tank is in a fluctuating traffic area.,
The suggestion posted of using slightly smaller tetras may be a better choice, and avoid overstocking when all cichlids hit mature adult size.

Thanks. Useful advice. Do you think the smaller tetras would be okay with the severums though?

 

[Cal Amari]

I'd be careful of the smaller tetras with the sevs, I had 3 sevs in a community tank, 2 rotkeill and 1 redspot gold, and brought home 8-10 cardinal tetras, thought they'd be a beautiful school turns out they were a beautiful snack, the sevs slurped them all down in under 10 minutes.

There are some other peaceful cichlids to look at besides severums, though I loved my sevs, they are a great choice. You might look into chocolate cichlids or uaru, but they may get bigger, or have slightly different parameter requirements.

 

[duanes]

Depends on how small, cardinals, as stated above will be feeders, something in the range of Colombian tetra size would be more apropos. It all depends on the original size of the cichlids. It’s going to take a while for the Severus to reach adulthood, and by that time the tetras may be close to aging out, getting three years out of many tetras, is pretty good, sellable size is often already a year old.

 

[Beano]

Thanks all. Some good ideas and info here. What I might do is stock the tank without the sevs and let everything grow on a bit, then add some juvenile sevs later down the line.

 

[Omrit]

My experience with Discus is they are not hard to keep it is just very important you start with the right Discus. Anytime we have gotten discus from an online store or at the LFS they have had a rough few months due to various diseases. Now we get them from a local breeder and they are no trouble at all. Even though all the discus are healthy now, the locally bred ones just have more vigor than the others. They also breed a lot more often. Really a night and day difference between them. I think the angelfish/severum tank is nicer for that size tank though than Discus.


Anyway as for your stocking I would drop the silver dollars and the black skirts for a larger school of a prettier tetra. My personal choice would be bleeding heart tetras. Large enough not to be eaten by Severums, but not so large they disrupt your slower moving fish the way a silver dollar can. If you want two schools I also like the diamond tetra, and I find they compliment the bleeding hearts very well color wise.


You could also add a couple Acara(numerous species would work) or an eartheater of some kind. Most species of both typically hang around the bottom, and in your current set-up you are likely to really only have the cories on the bottom so more activity down there would look nice in my opinion.