Oscar tankmates?

[SinaiTSi]

I've had an Oscar for a little over a year now, he has grown to about 10" so far. I would really like to put some other fish in the tank though. I probably should've put some other fish in with him in the beginning while he was smaller as he will probably try to eat any tankmates now. But, I'd like to know what I could put with him, I've considered the pleco, jaguar catfish, or pictus catfish. Also, I read that you could put tinfoil barbs with them. I have a few medium sized ones (3-4"). So, what would be a good choice OR what do you have with your Oscar?

[reptileguy2727]

it depends on your oscar. have you been feeding it live food at all? if so, it may be more aggressive than if you hadnt, and that wont help when trying to introduce fish that you want to live. what size tank is it? what type of filtration do you have exactly? if you try anything, make sure it has a place to go that is inaccessible to the oscar. like: if you get a pictus, a PVC pipe big enough for the pictus but too small for the oscar would be beneficial to the pictus. plecos are just going to add a lot of poop to the tank.

[SinaiTSi]

It's a 55 gallon tank with an Aqua-Tech 30-60 Power filter. I do feed him live fish/food on occasion too, which would cause him to be more aggressive. As far as the pleco goes, wouldn't they just clean the tank up? I know that some people use them as the only source of tank cleaning which isn't good, but I didn't think that they'd just dirty it up even more.

[reptileguy2727]

plecos are okay for algae until they are about 5-6", at which point they arent worth the mess they create. a 55 is minimum for a single oscar, and that filter is probably insufficient. live food can easily introduce parasites and diseases, so i highly suggest you stop using them completely. there are enough high quality foods out there to not need to risk their health by feeding live food. you dont really have room for anything else in there, especially something that will also get quite large, like the tinfoil barbs. i wouldnt risk anything in there with a large oscar that is used to eating moving fish. get another filter as well. i would go with a whisper 60 in addition to the filter you have. my foot long jaguar cichlid is in a 55 with 2 whisper 60s and that tank is doing great. whatever a filter says it can handle "up to", cut that in half and that is what it can handle. a penguin 350 may be a good choice as well. should only be about $10 more than the whisper 60, but has the bio-wheel and the extra media basket.

[RockabillyChick]

i disagree with reptile guy in that live foods make cichlids more agressive. they are agressive to begin with, and they get excited about food. all fish do. however i do agree that petstore-bought live foods can and do bring diseases and parasites into your tank. i reccomend you raise your own live foods and gut-load them before feeding. avoid goldfish and guppies, they are high in fat. stick with earth worms, meal worms, crickets, shrimp, crab, krill, brine shrimp, etc. in the wild, oscars eat insects and crustaceans, so try to stick to that kind of diet when feeding treats. however, the majority of your oscars diet should be high quality pellets.

also, if you had introduced tankmates to your oscar when he was small, you could have avoided a LOT of agression. oscars can be rather shy when small, as they are quite vulnerable to larger predators. if you introduce tank mates when they are small, they will get used to those particular fish and will USUALLY not pick on them later (assuming the other fish will not fit in the oscars mouth) however, because your oscar is already an adult, its very unlikely that you could sucessfully introduce any other fish.

not to mention that a 55g is BARELY adequate for a single oscar with no tank mates. introducing a new fish to an oscar in a cramped tank is just a recipe for disaster, not only with agression and territory disputes, but also for water changes and nitrate production.

the bigger the tank, the more likely you will be able to introduce other fish to your oscar, because the other fish will have room to get away and your oscar will not feel as crowded. overcrowding is a sure-fire way to end up with fighting fishies.

and you need to upgrade your filtration. oscars are VERY, VERY dirty fish and produce incredible amounts of waste. you need double filtration. so for a 55g tank, you'd need a filter rated for a 100g+ tank

also HOB's are quite innefective for oscar tanks. they make a good backup filter, but canisters and sumps are much more effective.

[reptileguy2727]

i disagree with 2 things:

1) HOBs are very effective for high waste producers like big cichlids, goldfish, and even turtles. whispers have always been more than enough for me with these things. i used a whisper 5 on a 40 gallon turtle tank with 3 4" turtles in it, then they got even bigger and i had to add a fluval 404 i had laying around (note layign around, because canisters arent that great) and it actually barely helped. if they still made the whisper 5 i would have gladly bought another, but i had to settle for the fluval 404. a canister is in my experience more appropriate for high quality water, like for more sensitive fish like discus, cardinal tetras, rays, and a lot of other things that arent that sensitive, but still not very hardy, and for very large tanks that you would need an army of HOBs for. maintenance will need to be relatively frequent on whatever filter you choose. and on my whispers, it takes me about 5-10 minutes to maintain the cartridges if i do it the longest way, and about 30 seconds if i do it the short way. at best you need to set aside about an hour to maintain a canister. and after all these benefits of HOBs, they are a lot cheaper.

2) live food making cichlids more aggressive is not just my opinion, i have seen it happen repeatedly. oscars and other big cichlids (as well as water turtles and many other animals in my experience) who are fed live food are more aggressive with other fish/animals. i had a 55 setup for a while with an oscar that got to be about 4" or so, a salvini cichlid, a couple jewel cichlids, probably a couple other cichlids (obviously they were all pretty small since they were in a 55) as well as danios, barbs, tetras, etc. because all they were ever fed was pellets, that is what they associated with food. they werent triggered to eat by the movement of fish. i highly discourage anyone from trying this combination by the way. if i had fed them live food there is no doubt those cichlids would have started to take down those danios and other fish very quickly. im not saying that if i didnt feed them for a week i could expect to find everyone alive and well, im just saying because i didnt feed them live, they werent as aggressive as they would have been if i did. that is my whole point. if you get an animal used to eating live moving animals, that is what it will associate for food and be triggered to eat by, live moving animals.

[SinaiTSi]

I do plan on getting another filter soon, most likely an Emperor 400. I do not feed the oscar goldfish. I actually don't even feed him live food that often, if I do it's an occasional worm or crustacean. I usually feed him cichlid sticks. I was just trying to think of a good fish to pair him up with, not too big to crowd the tank, but not too small that it will get eaten. Which is hard. I really like the Jaguar catfish, which have a max size of 8-10". Not too big, not too small. Before I make any impulse decision though, I just have to research about this fish and see if it makes a good tankmate first. Thanks for the help so far.

[earwick]

looks like a big debate :D

[TKOS]

Just to add again that plecos are huge waste producers and can easily attain sizes of 18 inches unless you spend money to buy a specialty pleco.

[Watcher74]

1) HOBs are very effective for high waste producers like big cichlids, goldfish, and even turtles. whispers have always been more than enough for me with these things. i used a whisper 5 on a 40 gallon turtle tank with 3 4" turtles in it, then they got even bigger and i had to add a fluval 404 i had laying around (note layign around, because canisters arent that great) and it actually barely helped.

Wow. I would say the exact same thing that you said about comparing these two different kinds of equipment. But I would have exchanged which two filters I was mentioning on each point. In my experience canister filters are far superior than HOBs. I've alway felt toward them as kind of pathetic compared to canisters.

Would you mind mentioning the specific areas that you think HOBs are better at than canisters? I'd be interested to compare our observations.

[TKOS]

Perhaps best left for another thread though, so as not to hijack this one.

[RockabillyChick]

reptile guy, i just don't understand why agressiveness in a cichlid is a BAD thing? one of the biggest reasons i want an oscar and two fire eels is because i want to feed them live foods and watch them hunt.

i plan to have a 180-200g tank that contains only 1 oscar, 2 fire eels, and a trinidad pleco. and i intend to feed them live foods several times a week, live foods that i raise myself for quality control. its actually quite common for spiney eels to reject all pelleted food. i want my fish to desplay their natural hunting instincts and behaviors. i think its fun to watch.

[reptileguy2727]

actually, what your plan is would be great. you would still have the risk of parasites and disease, so quaranting feeders for at least a week or raising them yourself would be a good idea. the problem with aggression is it can complicate compatibility. aggression in and of itself isnt bad. i like my jaguar cichlid because he is SOO aggressive. the problem with aggression is that it can increase the likelihood of aggression among tankmates, which leads to stress, and then disease, and then death. in nature the inferior fish could simply swim away, not possible in a tank. i dont know how well oscars and fire eels go together, but i hope it works out for you. fire eels should be able to take frozen pretty easily though. all the fire eels i know of were fed frozen or prepared. (im not trying to talk you into not using live, im just saying.) most people are wanting to put certain fish together that will be more likely to work out together if they arent fed live.

[jason2894]

well back to the filter deal HOB filters are fine as long as u buy a quality filter like and emporer 400 or an aqua clear 110 would be a nice addition to your aqua tech filter. by the way if u buy a new filter dont remove ur old filter for i would say about 3-4 months give your new filter a chance to become established if u remove it at all . you can never have to much filtration when it comes to big messy cichlids like oscars. if u want to add a tank mate with the oscar i would also suggest buying a bigger tank like a 90 gallon at the least. remeber as stated earlier a 55 gallon would be the barest of bare minimums for 1 one oscar and i am gonna venture to say that a 55 gallon tank probably wont let that lonely O reach its full potential so u may want to invest in larger living quarters for your fishy friend. just my 2 cents take it for what its worth.

[reptileguy2727]

Watcher, i forgot to reply to your question. for each type of fitler i am mainly talking about whispers (and a little about emperor/penguin) and fluvals because these are the ones i have a lot of experience with.

canisters are better because:
-much more media (more filtration at the same gph)
-may be quieter (although i have bever had problems with my whispers, i sleep within about 5 feet of 4 whisper 60s, and when i was sleeping within feet of my fluval, i heard it and not the whispers).
-higher quality water, for things like sensitive species, or species with very specific water parameters.

HOBs are better because:
-easier to maintain (30 seconds as opposed to an hour or more)
-no more expensive than a canister to maintain if you buy cartridges in the 12 packs
-better water flow, it just seems that there are more low current spots in a tank with a canister than one with a HOB
-biological filtration probably not any worse than a canister's at worst. the bio media in a canister is in the airtight canister, so only oxygen dissolced in the water will get to the good bacteria. in a HOB, the water is going threough turbulence at the surface before it gets to the good bacteria, but the bio media is smaller on the HOB
-they are much cheaper. why spend many times what you need to on filtration that isnt needed in the first place
-most notably mechanical filtration. i have now had water turtles for about 8 years. i have found whispers to be the best filter for these messy animals. on reptile forums i frequently see people recommending canisters for water turtles. these same people are recommending very frequent water changes and tank cleanings. i had a whisper 5 (it took 2 XL biobag, they dont make it anymore) and used that for my 40 breeder. that tank had 4 4-5" goldfish, and 3 turtles averaging 5" each (one being a snapper, so he actually produces more waste than a basking species of the same length) before that filter could not handle the tank by itself. if a whisper can keep that tank crystal clear, with better results and less needed water maintenance than a canister, it is more than enough for even the messiest of fish. water turtles are many times dirtier than a cichlid. i have used whispers for all my 10 years of dealing with fish. they have always been more than enough. as said, unless you have very sensitive fish that need the massive customizable filtration media found in a canister, you really just need a whisper.

[SinaiTSi]

The only problem I've had with the whisper was that my oscar broke the pipe that extends down in the water in half a while ago. Probably not the whisper's fault though...............