Are there any bottom dwellers of any kind (Snails etc) that won't get eaten, can survive sub-tropical temps and won't eat living plants that can be kept with pulchra? Just thinking about algae and dead plant matter.
Short advice & what can i keep my snakehead with ??
- Thread starter pallestopheles
- Start date
Hi,
all my channa (pulchra ,too) eat snails. And If your filtration is good, some rotting plants should not put up your nitrate or phosphate levels to feed the algae.
Cheers brucki
all my channa (pulchra ,too) eat snails. And If your filtration is good, some rotting plants should not put up your nitrate or phosphate levels to feed the algae.
Cheers brucki
also you do not need mega lighting , i think that it where a lot of people get algae problems , i use 1 standard t8 tube per tank ,as long as you stick with easy low light plants have plenty of filteration you should be fine , you can of course suck out all the dead stuff when you do a water change but personally i leave it along with the almond leaves that have started to rot ,i just shove some fresh in there , and have had no problems , if your really worried about it you could use fakes on the botton and the water lettuce on the top , but genrally the more real plants the better the water stays.
brucki converted me ,and iam am glad he did ,my tanks look far better now when i look into them ,and nitrates allways show very low
cheers col
brucki converted me ,and iam am glad he did ,my tanks look far better now when i look into them ,and nitrates allways show very low
cheers col
WTF??? I can't believe another thread like this is being PINNED!!! 
god... I just get to upset. don't even know where to start, but how much have you tried to comm your snakeheads col?? anything at all? didn't you start to keep snakeheads like a couple of months ago... feels like that anyway!
god... I just get to upset. don't even know where to start, but how much have you tried to comm your snakeheads col?? anything at all? didn't you start to keep snakeheads like a couple of months ago... feels like that anyway!
hi mate everyone is welcome to there opinion and if your opinion is that the information i have provided is wrong then feel free to write a peice of your own on the pros of mixing channa in comms , as i said not everyone will agree and some people will not listen until they have tried for themselves , i have no problem with that , i just wrote this for those who want to listen to what i have found works best through experiance .
you are right to ask me why i feel qualified to write the article and what experiance i have. so i feel it is only right to tell people then they can make there own mind up
i kept my first snakehead , well over 15 years ago more like 20 , back then there was very little information and the type of species available was also very limited , since i got my first tank of my own at the age of 17 in fact i have allways had one type of snakehead or another , i started keeping them in groups in species tanks around a year ago.
to directly answer one of the questions the species i have tried to comm or put in a comunity tank are as follows
channa maruloides
channa marulia
channa pseudomarulia
channa micropelties
channa asiatica
channa micropeltes
channa gachua
channa behleri
channa sp assam
channa pleurophthalma
channa aurantimaculata
although my main pasion was for breeding tropheus for a good while ,i allway have kept a com tank with oddballs in.
iam not saying you can not com or mix a snakehead with other stuff , but what i am saying is that it is far better to class them as a species tank only type of fish ,
for the most part of keeping them i allways thought snakeheads belonged in two catagories , bottom dwellers and open water swimmers ,because of the way i kept them this is how they allways behaved ,still i had a interest in them ,there was allways something that drew me to snakeheads , when i stopped keeping tropheus i decided to try a large snakehead comm ,after all this was the only other species i was trully interested in. i shot some african cichlids in there that where left over from ofther breeding projects , and stocked the tank with 3 micros , pseudomaruila , marulia , aranti maculata and asiatica , as allways the micros , marulia and pseudomarulia swam about the top ,the asiatica and aurantimaculata sat on the bottom , to be perfectly honest , i had never seen autantimaculata or asiatica before ,theese where fairly new species that did not appear in lfs very ofter. after asking on here for an i.d for the auranti , i got a reply from pascal , who stated i had bought a sub-tropical species and that if i wanted to breed it the tank would need to be chilled down to 20 deg , i had never even considered that breeding snakeheads was a possabiliy , but from that point i started to reasearch the whole group , and started asking questions seeking advice from not only the people who had real sucsess breeding snakeheads , i.e pascal ,uli and brucki to name a few . i had read some of there posts and and must say i was skeptical. upto this point i thought i had done real good mixing them and did not see any problems in doing so, however thinking back i had lost a fair number of fish , most of the time it was the snakeheads that where the culprit, however i lost a maruila to choking on a obviously to largre to eat convict , i lost two micros to predation from a rtc , a lost a gachua to another gachua , i lost a big arowana to a pleuro, and then lost that pleuro to ramming into the glass after being bit by a wolffish. and lost another micro after doing a overly large water change. and to top it off my auranti and my asiatica started doing mock spawnings together , and hybrids are something i belive have no place in the hobby - again this is another contriversial view and many will disagre - but that another subject for another forum
over a year ago i was told by my employer that a would most likly loose my job due to illness and at that point i thought if iam going to continue to keep fish ,they are going to have to support themselves , and the only way they can do that is by breeding again , i didnt want to get back into tropheus so decided to try breeding snakeheads , i read everything i could find out on them, and started to set up breeding groups of snakeheads , i started with aurantis as they where what i decided to house in my large tank , i set the tank up as advised by the guys who had done it before me , well structerd with plants and floaring cover , although at this stage i decided to use fake plants , i had never been into plants and always though they would be just as hard to look after a the reeftanks i used to keep , the first thing i noticed was that my aurantis acted totally diferant to what they had in the comm set-up , they where swimming about and hanging around in the water on show most of the time , this was the exact opposite to what i had observed in the com tanks , the next thing i noticed was how colourfull the fish where , they where with out doubt far more colourfull than in the tropical com , further watching of them i noticed , something strange , the fish seamed to comunicate to each other with movments and sounds ,clearly heard outside the tank. i was watching what i would whitness in the wild , and that for me is what fishkeeping is all about , thats one of the reasons i bred tropheus , wathing themsignal to each other and turn there colours on and off at will amazed me. my next group where my pulchra group again i researched there habitat inc water conditions ect and set the tank up , i was lucky enough to find a group of pulchra that a friend in a lfs sold to me at adult size , again i was amazed at the interaction between the fish and that theese fish that previously would of classed as bottom dwellers indeed swam at all levels of the tank , i sat and watched this group as a bonded pair formed and then sucsessful spawning ,i fed the newly hatched fish and watched them grow ,watched how the perents guarded the eggs and how they collected any stray eggs in there mouths then released them through there gills. each and every other group i have set up since then has proved to be just as positive , so i hope you can see i have tryed the things i advise against and iam not just repeating things others have said.
i know plenty of people have commed snakeheads , but 9 times out of ten it will go wrong somewhere along the lines it may work for a few weeks ,a few months even a few years , and i trully belive the fish are far better in a species set-up than any other , colours behavior and health all seam to be improved greatly with much more activity.
so i have told every one how i come to the conclusion that snakeheads belong how i described. so now i ask how many snakeheads have you tried in a species tank ? and what makes you belive they are not best kept the way that i describe .
this i why i left this thread open for comments , because i know a lot of people would have there own opinion , and i would like to listen to your side
cheers col
you are right to ask me why i feel qualified to write the article and what experiance i have. so i feel it is only right to tell people then they can make there own mind up
i kept my first snakehead , well over 15 years ago more like 20 , back then there was very little information and the type of species available was also very limited , since i got my first tank of my own at the age of 17 in fact i have allways had one type of snakehead or another , i started keeping them in groups in species tanks around a year ago.
to directly answer one of the questions the species i have tried to comm or put in a comunity tank are as follows
channa maruloides
channa marulia
channa pseudomarulia
channa micropelties
channa asiatica
channa micropeltes
channa gachua
channa behleri
channa sp assam
channa pleurophthalma
channa aurantimaculata
although my main pasion was for breeding tropheus for a good while ,i allway have kept a com tank with oddballs in.
iam not saying you can not com or mix a snakehead with other stuff , but what i am saying is that it is far better to class them as a species tank only type of fish ,
for the most part of keeping them i allways thought snakeheads belonged in two catagories , bottom dwellers and open water swimmers ,because of the way i kept them this is how they allways behaved ,still i had a interest in them ,there was allways something that drew me to snakeheads , when i stopped keeping tropheus i decided to try a large snakehead comm ,after all this was the only other species i was trully interested in. i shot some african cichlids in there that where left over from ofther breeding projects , and stocked the tank with 3 micros , pseudomaruila , marulia , aranti maculata and asiatica , as allways the micros , marulia and pseudomarulia swam about the top ,the asiatica and aurantimaculata sat on the bottom , to be perfectly honest , i had never seen autantimaculata or asiatica before ,theese where fairly new species that did not appear in lfs very ofter. after asking on here for an i.d for the auranti , i got a reply from pascal , who stated i had bought a sub-tropical species and that if i wanted to breed it the tank would need to be chilled down to 20 deg , i had never even considered that breeding snakeheads was a possabiliy , but from that point i started to reasearch the whole group , and started asking questions seeking advice from not only the people who had real sucsess breeding snakeheads , i.e pascal ,uli and brucki to name a few . i had read some of there posts and and must say i was skeptical. upto this point i thought i had done real good mixing them and did not see any problems in doing so, however thinking back i had lost a fair number of fish , most of the time it was the snakeheads that where the culprit, however i lost a maruila to choking on a obviously to largre to eat convict , i lost two micros to predation from a rtc , a lost a gachua to another gachua , i lost a big arowana to a pleuro, and then lost that pleuro to ramming into the glass after being bit by a wolffish. and lost another micro after doing a overly large water change. and to top it off my auranti and my asiatica started doing mock spawnings together , and hybrids are something i belive have no place in the hobby - again this is another contriversial view and many will disagre - but that another subject for another forum
over a year ago i was told by my employer that a would most likly loose my job due to illness and at that point i thought if iam going to continue to keep fish ,they are going to have to support themselves , and the only way they can do that is by breeding again , i didnt want to get back into tropheus so decided to try breeding snakeheads , i read everything i could find out on them, and started to set up breeding groups of snakeheads , i started with aurantis as they where what i decided to house in my large tank , i set the tank up as advised by the guys who had done it before me , well structerd with plants and floaring cover , although at this stage i decided to use fake plants , i had never been into plants and always though they would be just as hard to look after a the reeftanks i used to keep , the first thing i noticed was that my aurantis acted totally diferant to what they had in the comm set-up , they where swimming about and hanging around in the water on show most of the time , this was the exact opposite to what i had observed in the com tanks , the next thing i noticed was how colourfull the fish where , they where with out doubt far more colourfull than in the tropical com , further watching of them i noticed , something strange , the fish seamed to comunicate to each other with movments and sounds ,clearly heard outside the tank. i was watching what i would whitness in the wild , and that for me is what fishkeeping is all about , thats one of the reasons i bred tropheus , wathing themsignal to each other and turn there colours on and off at will amazed me. my next group where my pulchra group again i researched there habitat inc water conditions ect and set the tank up , i was lucky enough to find a group of pulchra that a friend in a lfs sold to me at adult size , again i was amazed at the interaction between the fish and that theese fish that previously would of classed as bottom dwellers indeed swam at all levels of the tank , i sat and watched this group as a bonded pair formed and then sucsessful spawning ,i fed the newly hatched fish and watched them grow ,watched how the perents guarded the eggs and how they collected any stray eggs in there mouths then released them through there gills. each and every other group i have set up since then has proved to be just as positive , so i hope you can see i have tryed the things i advise against and iam not just repeating things others have said.
i know plenty of people have commed snakeheads , but 9 times out of ten it will go wrong somewhere along the lines it may work for a few weeks ,a few months even a few years , and i trully belive the fish are far better in a species set-up than any other , colours behavior and health all seam to be improved greatly with much more activity.
so i have told every one how i come to the conclusion that snakeheads belong how i described. so now i ask how many snakeheads have you tried in a species tank ? and what makes you belive they are not best kept the way that i describe .
this i why i left this thread open for comments , because i know a lot of people would have there own opinion , and i would like to listen to your side
cheers col
tankmates of pair aurantis:
Giant Gourami - didn't working. Male of Auranti was trying to kill Gourami.
Polypterus Endlicheri (its for a while in that tank) - no problems, no attacks, peace (its for 2 months now), polypterus laying on the auranti, auranti laying on the p. really funny
ancistrus too fast for auranti
I need to take my clown and tiger loaches from another tank and I'am thinking about selling or to get it to tank with auranti....(the bigest has 15 cm).....I don't now.
Giant Gourami - didn't working. Male of Auranti was trying to kill Gourami.
Polypterus Endlicheri (its for a while in that tank) - no problems, no attacks, peace (its for 2 months now), polypterus laying on the auranti, auranti laying on the p. really funny
ancistrus too fast for auranti
I need to take my clown and tiger loaches from another tank and I'am thinking about selling or to get it to tank with auranti....(the bigest has 15 cm).....I don't now.
Hey guys i'm quite new here.
Can i mix these fish in the comm tank?
Channa Micropeltes(3")
2 Green Terrors(2.5" and 2")
The larger GT bullies the smaller one and sometimes chase the Micro.
If i can't
Can i mix my Micro with an established comm tank of
Pacu(full grown)
2 Oscars(full grwon)
Can i mix these fish in the comm tank?
Channa Micropeltes(3")
2 Green Terrors(2.5" and 2")
The larger GT bullies the smaller one and sometimes chase the Micro.
If i can't
Can i mix my Micro with an established comm tank of
Pacu(full grown)
2 Oscars(full grwon)
