I've been trying to read up on keeping crenicichla with discus, but most searches turn up questions and answers about the more aggressive lugubris likes, which I already know from personal experience won't work. I had a pair of tapajos red with my nhamunda heckels in a 240 gallon about 5 years back and the pikes terrorized my discus. Incidentally, I had an atabapo 2 kill a juvenile motoro ray too.
I've been away from the freshwater hobby for about 5 years dabbling with the marine side of things. Finally conquered having a successful sps tank, and I'm about to move to a new place and decided to tear the marine tank down in preparation for the move. I'm done with high maintenance tanks so I decided to go with a biotope style tank at my new place. The tank will be 7' x 3' x 3' so about 450 gallons and I'm intending to go with wild discus, some eartheaters and either Santa Isabel or Altum angels. I would very much like to have a pair of pikes in the tank, but am not sure if it's possible.
There's a thread I came across in the discus subforum where someone kept a group of saxatilis pikes with his wild discus and apparently the discus even bully the pikes sometimes so I guess as a fallback plan that's possible. However, my regular lfs has managed to bring in multispinosa in the past year, and they are regularly able to bring in zebrina, and I really like both of these species. I've read that both these species tend to be very laid back so I'm seriously considering keeping either of them in my tank. Would much prefer multispinosa of course, but I'll settle for zebrina if my lfs is not able to bring them in again.
Would it be possible for me to keep a pair of either of these pikes in my tank? I will have a couple of spare tanks set up for qt/breeding purposes so I'm also open to getting a group to house together and get a bonded pair before introducing them into the tank.
I've been away from the freshwater hobby for about 5 years dabbling with the marine side of things. Finally conquered having a successful sps tank, and I'm about to move to a new place and decided to tear the marine tank down in preparation for the move. I'm done with high maintenance tanks so I decided to go with a biotope style tank at my new place. The tank will be 7' x 3' x 3' so about 450 gallons and I'm intending to go with wild discus, some eartheaters and either Santa Isabel or Altum angels. I would very much like to have a pair of pikes in the tank, but am not sure if it's possible.
There's a thread I came across in the discus subforum where someone kept a group of saxatilis pikes with his wild discus and apparently the discus even bully the pikes sometimes so I guess as a fallback plan that's possible. However, my regular lfs has managed to bring in multispinosa in the past year, and they are regularly able to bring in zebrina, and I really like both of these species. I've read that both these species tend to be very laid back so I'm seriously considering keeping either of them in my tank. Would much prefer multispinosa of course, but I'll settle for zebrina if my lfs is not able to bring them in again.
Would it be possible for me to keep a pair of either of these pikes in my tank? I will have a couple of spare tanks set up for qt/breeding purposes so I'm also open to getting a group to house together and get a bonded pair before introducing them into the tank.