oscar tankmates?

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
I have 2 O's 2 Red Hooks 1 Royal Clown Knife and 1 Common Plec. in a 150 gal tank and everyone gets along most of the time. People who say that you have to have a giant tank for O's because they are to dirty are nuts IMO. Stop feeding them every 15 min and your tank will clean right up. any fish that you feed many times a week and you give them a handful of food is going to make a big mess. I feed my fish 3 times a week and they do just fine and my water is clean.

I would say that you can put most fish with O's as long as there not small enough to fit in the O's mouth. Also something that is fast or as aggressive as the O should be just fine.
 
I have to agree with all the posts about them not being that aggressive to other fishes. I have 6 oscars right now (4 tigers, 1 red and 1 albino) all ranging between 7" and 12" and they really don't care about anyone else in the tank besides themselves. I think that possibly one mistake people make is to put only one oscar in a community tank - after a while they'll get bored and start picking on other species. However, in my experience, as long as you have two or more they'll be more concerned with each other than with other fishes. A friend of mine said he'd put a ping pong ball in the water for them to attack whenever they got bored!

I had four of them in my 75 gal with plecos, RTC, blood parrots...no issues, I upgraded to a 250 gal and moved them over and added the other 2 tigers and they were great - all the way up until two of them paired off. Now the two breeding pair are in the 75 gal by themselves and the others remain in the 250 gal. Personally I find that having a ratio of 1 : 1 of oscars to some type of 'cleaning' fish is a good way to keep the water clean. In my case I have 1:1 ratio of Oscars to Plecos/Catfish/Blood Parrots. Funny, I never thought of the parrots as cleaning fish, but they love to follow the oscars around during feeding and pickup all the little pieces after the oscars chew up whatever it is they're eating. My parrots range in size from 2"-5" and the oscars largely ignore them. Also, the post about overfeeding is very true, since they always act hungry it's very tempting to over-feed...and pellets are the worst! I prefer minnows, crickets and worms and only use pellets as a last resort.

As far as breeding is concerned, the best way to go about it is to choose 6 specimens and let them decide who will be mates. Note: they only breed after about 2 yrs old. However, once they pair up you had better segregate the pair to their own habitat as they get incredibly vicious to all other tank mates! There's lots of info on the Internet regarding breeding, the biggest things are 1) have their own tank (not even plecos!) and 2) have flat surfaces for them to lay their eggs on.

Good luck!
 
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