Hi all! Greetings from down under! My love affair with fish began with my uncles gold Asian arowana in Singapore. However, since I live in Australia, basically all arowana are illegal to import, so I never thought of them as an option. I only started getting into fishkeeping 8 months ago and I am now setting up my 3rd tank, which was planned as an Oscar and SA cichlid tank.
You know what the say about the best laid plans. I was in my LFS the other day and I saw that they had baby Scleropages Leichardti ("Lei's") in stock!! I didn't know what they were and googled them. I was floored that there were native Aussie arowana that are legal to be kept. These are also known as southern saratoga, red spotted arowana, etc.
I have done some research on them, some of it from the what I searched on MFK. But info is pretty sparse. So far my understanding of the fish is as follows.. Please correct me if I am wrong.
They are similar to Asian arowanas, just not as beautiful or docile (or costly!). Apparently they can grow to 3 foot/90 cm+, but more like 2 feet/60 cm in the home aquarium. They are quite slender fish, weighing max of 4 kg/10 lbs, which is much less than jardinis or other arowanas. My 6x2x2 is the bare minimum required to keep an adult for life. They can be territorial and aggressive, though not as much as the jardinis. They will eat anything that fits into their massive trapdoor mouths. They can be skittish and are very strong jumpers, even more so than oscars. For tankmates, some people recommend keeping Leis with large semi-aggressive/aggressive CA/SA cichlids, and large armoured plecos, but very few people have direct experience, as this species is quite rare in Australia and not particularly popular overseas. So I am looking for direct experience please.
Thus my question.... anyone kept one of these beauties with an oscar (the whole reason for me to get his tank in the first place?). Of course I will try to match their size and growth rates as much as I can so they don't become food for each other. I'm also thinking of another catfish tankmate that's on the bottom to scavenge dropped food so that the toga will ignore it eg., pleco? Although I heard they are even higher bioload than oscars. Those are the only 2 tankmates I can think of. Did you have issues with aggression? What size tank? I am very interested. And lastly, what other tankmates would you suggest? Many thanks!
You know what the say about the best laid plans. I was in my LFS the other day and I saw that they had baby Scleropages Leichardti ("Lei's") in stock!! I didn't know what they were and googled them. I was floored that there were native Aussie arowana that are legal to be kept. These are also known as southern saratoga, red spotted arowana, etc.
I have done some research on them, some of it from the what I searched on MFK. But info is pretty sparse. So far my understanding of the fish is as follows.. Please correct me if I am wrong.
They are similar to Asian arowanas, just not as beautiful or docile (or costly!). Apparently they can grow to 3 foot/90 cm+, but more like 2 feet/60 cm in the home aquarium. They are quite slender fish, weighing max of 4 kg/10 lbs, which is much less than jardinis or other arowanas. My 6x2x2 is the bare minimum required to keep an adult for life. They can be territorial and aggressive, though not as much as the jardinis. They will eat anything that fits into their massive trapdoor mouths. They can be skittish and are very strong jumpers, even more so than oscars. For tankmates, some people recommend keeping Leis with large semi-aggressive/aggressive CA/SA cichlids, and large armoured plecos, but very few people have direct experience, as this species is quite rare in Australia and not particularly popular overseas. So I am looking for direct experience please.
Thus my question.... anyone kept one of these beauties with an oscar (the whole reason for me to get his tank in the first place?). Of course I will try to match their size and growth rates as much as I can so they don't become food for each other. I'm also thinking of another catfish tankmate that's on the bottom to scavenge dropped food so that the toga will ignore it eg., pleco? Although I heard they are even higher bioload than oscars. Those are the only 2 tankmates I can think of. Did you have issues with aggression? What size tank? I am very interested. And lastly, what other tankmates would you suggest? Many thanks!
