Vote For The Best Small Tank

Which is your favorite small tank????

  • Entry #1

    Votes: 46 52.9%
  • Entry #2

    Votes: 10 11.5%
  • Entry #3

    Votes: 31 35.6%

  • Total voters
    87
  • Poll closed .
Wow... I can't believe that.
So what if the water quality is "good"? is there really comfortable swimming room for 14 fish???
I could probably dig up SO MANY threads about people overstocking and getting chewed out for it.
 
Now that the survey is finishing I would like to express myself. In their natural habitat (Rio-Negro, Amazonas) cardinals live in big shoal of fish and they always swim in the place in which they are born, do not migrate and they swim only the necessary to move away from its predators, after what they always return to the born place, when they are juveniles to protect their self from predators they form a very compact spherical shoal of fish which the villagers call "bolhiña". Sorry but if few cardinals are placed in a tank they always live stressed because they feel insecure.

After three and a half years they are full grown, well developed, very happy and of course they shown very vivid colors ( all signs of no stress )

Even more, the cardinals live in the inferior or medium layer of the tank while the hatchet fishes live in the superior layer , with regards to the otocinclus he spend most of the time sucking small diatoms from the driftwood.
 
Juan, loved your tank. I also don't think your tank is over-stocked.

There are so many variables to consider when it comes to "over-stocking" a tank. I've spent years having sucessful "reef-tanks" and I'm not talking about easy to keep soft corrals either. My tanks have been SPS corrals, clams, and fish, all living in harmony. With that being said, in these tanks water quality is of the utmost importence (not to say it's not important in a freshwater tank. it is, but not nearly as critical). In some of my research in reefing, I read an artical that said the typical water flow on a reef daily is the equivalent of having a 2" fish in an olymipic size pool, and changing the water in the pool every day!

So with that being said, let's consider how much water runs "through" a school of cardinals or neons or what ever every hour. Can we really reproduce that? No! So if we really want to be a purest, then we shouldn't keep fish, or at least most fish, excluding the few that live in the wild in stagnated pools and ditches.

I'm not saying that it's ok to have 500 fish in a 55 gallon tank, common sense goes a long ways. But what I am saying is that we keep fish as a hobby because it makes us happy and that's ok, it's good. What is over-stocked to me my not be over-stocked to you and visa-versa.

We just need to enjoy the hobby we all love and stop hatin' on everyone who doesn't meet our "standards".

Make recomendations and respect each other for the place they are at in the hobby.

Abraham
 
No matter what kind of fish you have in a 3 gallon, 14 of them is too many. It is way overstocked. I vote for #3. It is beautiful. Although #1 is also a beautiful tank, I can't, in good conscience, vote for a tank so severly overstocked.
 
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