oscars in a 250g

[IKeepPacu]

thinking of changing over my 250g to an oscar tank to pick my interest back up after losing my rays, as some of you have read from my post in the general forum.

i wanted to do atleast one of each of the different colors of oscar. couple questions however.....will they all get along being different colors, since there all oscars in the end?? or do they need to be the same to not beat on each other too badly. this is assuming ofcourse that the old "you have to keep 1 or 6+ oscars in a tank" is true. the single oscars ive kept have always seemed rather calm with other fish their size, but never kept a shoal of oscars before.

and in an 86"x26"x26" tank, how many oscars everyone think i could house? i was thinking maybe 6-8 safely, 10 pushing it. does this sound ok, or no?? ill be keeping my one 18" pacu, who i doubt will grow much more since he's already 5+ years old, and was kept horrible the first 3 1/2 yrs with his 1st owner.

 

[cris]

an oscar is an oscar regardless of colouring. i now have 4 in my 220 but you could problably go with six without too much probs.the only issue might be if you get breeding pairs but that wouldn't be for a while.

 

[pcfriedrich]

sorry to hear about your rays. that is gonna be a pretty sweet tank, with a swarm of oscars. of course, if you get all males, you don't have to worry about breeding pairs (I have two female convicts that are paired up, and I hear oscar females will do the same).

 

[Toby_H]

I have a 6’ round 300 gal stock tank… that I bought 5 years ago to be an Oscar pond…

I started with 8 Oscars not expecting them all to work out… I started with 4 dark and 4 white all about the same size, but from 8 different sources (to avoid inbreeding just in case).

For an unexplained reason the 4 dark ones hung out together and the 4 white ones did…

There was no aggression at first (small fish in a huge tank)… They always stayed segregated by color… The white ones (in my case) were meaner and faster growing…

To make a long story short… over the course of one year my peaceful pond went from housing 8 Oscars to housing 4... I lost one white one and 3 dark ones… the smallest dark female was allowed to survive, then later killed by a Severum…

I also thought that a 300 gal would be suitable for a nice group of Oscars… I learned the hard way… I how have a sterile white female who trades between the remaining two white males… although she has seemed to settle on the weaker of the two as a long term mate (over a year now).

Although I cannot imagine a more desirable tank (to me) than a huge tank full of Oscars… I just don’t think it is going to happen (long term)…

Now I have the 3 O’s, 6 or so female Dempseys, female GT, 8 or so W African Jewels, 12” BGK… probably some others I’ve forgotten about or didn’t know got in there… I assume there are Convicts (feeders who survived) in there although I’ve not seen any in a long time…

In my experience… the toughest species in the tank is most likely to fight with it’s own species… weaker species are more mellow probably because they do not want to draw aggressive attention to themselves… If your Oscars are the dominant species in the tank I would expect lots of trouble from 8~12”…

 

[twhittle]

While I can't predict aggression, bioload wise I would do 6, 8 would be doable but pushing it.

 

[AMG]

I would go with 6 of them. Pick your favorites and enjoy.

Nice choice of fish for a new tank community.

 

[scratanut]

I guess the stocking should be done as 1 adult oscar per 25-30 USgal of water. Gudluck!

 

[Camphilophus]

If you're going to do oscars in a tank that big think about this.. As nice as it would be to grow out babies, you'd be doing the fish community a favor by taking in "the fish that outgrew the 10gallon." You could take them in 1-2 at a time and see how the aggression goes. You can get 14" oscars cheaper than 4" oscars from my experience with the LFS's. I'm not saying to take any old oscars either, if you do it this way you can hand select nice looking full grown oscars. Lets face it, they're all cute when they're babies but when they get big most of them are hideous.

 

[japes]

For an unexplained reason the 4 dark ones hung out together and the 4 white ones did…

There was no aggression at first (small fish in a huge tank)… They always stayed segregated by color… The white ones (in my case) were meaner and faster growing…

Even fish are racist

I'd never do an Oscar only tank because of their commonly noted conspecific aggression.

 

[ctenopoma]

I think the more oscars the better, but the maximum you should do is 6
because of their aggression and all the waste they'll produce lol