stable apisto's

[Mystroe_TheMyst]

In the past i've had trouble with these guys, mostly aggassiz..they just ended up starving themselves by stress, even though i would see them eat they never gained weight. I tried to keep the water really clean with a very nice/high turnover rate for a filter, but no cigar. The water was heated, the pH was soft. What was I doing wrong, because i'm thinking about putting my 1.5ft tank to use.

prob gna go with the agassiz again, or some brevis shell dwellers. I want to look to breed them up, or at least have some healthy plump specimens.

[mooman]

Aggies tend to be slimmer bodied apistos when compared to some other species (cacatuoides, panduro, viejita). Some specimins don't take well to dry food either. I feed my picky panduros crushed cichlid pellets in the morning, and give them all day to pick at them. I feed a variety of frozen foods in the evening. I rotate through mysis shrimp, bloodworms, and Marine One brand frozen food. You should at least be able to maintain them on dry food. If yours actually wasted away and starved I would be looking at other causes. (water quality,parasitism etc.) If you want to try to breed them, then A. cacatuoides, and A. borellii are the ones to cut your teeth on. I've never kept borellii, but you'd be hard pressed to stop cacatuoides from spawning.

If you go the shellie route, try N. multifasciatus or N. similis for easy breeding. You literally just have to add water and flake food. No bbs or grow out tanks needed. The colonial lifestyle and substrate moving behavior is something to see. When you first hunker down in front of my tank you don't see any fish. If you throw in some flakes and hold still the tank is suddenly full of 20+ fish of every size.

PS clean water is important, but you don't need expensive filtration to achieve it. I run sponge filters on most of my tanks, and have fish spawning or fry growing up fast in all of them. The key is low bioload and frequent water changes.

[Mystroe_TheMyst]

well thanks for that info, i will look into those shellies. But a lot of my lfs don't get many of those varieties in, so I chose something that i definatly know are around. I will definately look into them. I'm running a trickle style hang-on filter so i maximise space in the small tank. I rotate the filter media regularly. its hard not to because flow rate decreases greatly when the media is really clog full of junk. Thanks for the info.