P. bin­tan ‘Sen­tang’ — setup

Hi,
in sev­eral days I am to become the owner of 8 P. bin­tan ‘Sen­tang’. Since I am new to the Parosphromenus side of the hobby I wanted an opin­ion on the setup I’m plan­ing.

20 x Boraras mac­u­la­tus
8 x P. bin­tan ‘Sen­tang’
unknown num­ber of Melanoides tuber­cu­lata, and Anen­tome helena.

Fil­tra­tion con­sists of one Aquael Ver­samax FZN-​1 cas­cade fil­ter with spec­i­fi­ca­tion availi­ble here
– first cham­ber is filled with peat moss gran­ules
– sec­ond cham­ber is with ceram­ics and sponge

Tem­per­a­ture is set to 25 +/​-​0.5 degress Cel­cius.

Light­ing con­sists of two Aquael Eco­l­ight 11W Mod­ules work­ing in a set 24h cycle
– firt mod­ule 9 – 16
– sec­ond mod­ule 12 – 20

I used nor­mal sand I got from a river.

Plants used are:
–Val­lis­ne­ria spi­ralis
–Cryp­to­co­ryne wendtii
–Cer­atopteris thal­ic­troides
and some that were brought in to the aquar­ium with Cer­topteris:
–Lemna minor
–Ric­cia flui­tans






it’s 70 litres tank mea­sur­ing 50×40×35 cm.

About water para­me­ters: I’m not sure of them, but it comes from RO fil­ter with a peat cham­ber, so it is soft and acidic, of that I am sure.

This is how the lights work:

Svert­ing wrote: 20 x Boraras mac­u­la­tus
8 x P. bin­tan ‘Sen­tang’
unknown num­ber of Melanoides tuber­cu­lata, and Anen­tome helena.

Answer: If you intend merely to keep the licorice gouramis, then this is a per­fect com­mu­nity. But if you itend to breed them, you will prob­a­bly be not suc­cess­full. The tank is too big and there sould be only one pair, at most two of the gouramis. A small cave is the most impor­tant req­ui­site.

Fil­tra­tion con­sists of one Aquael Ver­samax FZN-​1 cas­cade fil­ter with spec­i­fi­ca­tion availi­ble here
– first cham­ber is filled with peat moss gran­ules
– sec­ond cham­ber is with ceram­ics and sponge

Answer: Fil­tra­tion is of sec­ondary impor­tance. All cham­bers should be filled with peat. The stream­ing should be very soft.

Tem­per­a­ture is set to 25 +/​-​0.5 degress Cel­cius.

Answer: OK, but it could be 23 degrees or 26 degrees, it does not mat­ter much.

Light­ing con­sists of two Aquael Eco­l­ight 11W Mod­ules work­ing in a set 24h cycle
– firt mod­ule 9 – 16
– sec­ond mod­ule 12 – 20

Answer: Light­ing is of impor­tance only for you and your plants. The licorice love sub­dued light.

I used nor­mal sand I got from a river.

Answer: The gravel is for the licorice gouramis of minor impor­tance. You need it for the plants (see below) But there is no “nor­mal sand”. You must test it whether it con­tains cal­cium. Then it is use­less. The most impor­tant thing is not men­tioned by you: Leaves of beech or oak, soaked shortly in boil­ing water. A layer of that is rec­om­mended for all licorice tanks.

Plants used are:
–Val­lis­ne­ria spi­ralis
–Cryp­to­co­ryne wendtii
–Cer­atopteris thal­ic­troides
.…

Answer: Mind,that you must use nearly des­tilled water with very low pH! You will be unable to grow Val­lis­ne­ria ranks of Lud­wigia, and the Ceylon-​Crypts (C. wendtii and oth­ers) in it! The only use­ful plant you men­tion is Cer­atopteris. You should use Java­moss and per­haps Javafern, too. Some ranks of Lud­wigia, that’s all. Very few plants grow in extremly soft and acid black­wa­ters!

it’s 70 litres tank mea­sur­ing 50×40×35 cm.

Answer: As I said before, a nice tank, but not use­ful for breed­ing Paros. Too big, you will be unable to find the young and to feed them. Maybe, a few will grow up feed­ing on what­ever, but not in com­pany with the nice Boraras.

About water para­me­ters: I’m not sure of them, but it comes from RO fil­ter with a peat cham­ber, so it is soft and acidic, of that I am sure.

Answer: The water para­me­ters are the most impor­tant thing. They need not to be at a very spe­cial value, but def­i­nitely with­out cal­cium, the con­duc­tiv­ity well below 100 microsiemens/​cm, bet­ter below 50, the ph well below 7.0, bet­ter 5.0 to 6.0, sta­ble. Paper stripes are use­less, too inex­act. Take at least a mea­surng kit with flu­ids. Elec­tronid equip­ment is best, but expen­sive and must be cal­i­brated rightly, oth­er­wise the val­ues are often wrong.

Sum­mary: I t will be a nice tank for keep­ing a small south-​east Asian com­mu­nity, but some plants are improper and breed­ing will hardly be pos­si­ble. You must real­ize that a black­wa­ter aqau­rium is some­thing dif­fer­ent than a nor­mal planted tank. In such a planted tank the bio­chem­i­cal activ­ity of the plants con­stantly feed on the con­tents of the water and actively change them. You can­not copy this for the black­wa­ter organ­isms. There­fore you must omit plants alto­gether or use only those which adapt to the very spe­cial con­di­tions of the peat swamps.

The first ver­sion of the post was deleted due to acci­den­tal “back­space” and thus leav­ing the site. I’ll try to keep it short this time.

1_​As to the plants and neg­li­gi­ble min­eral con­tent:

Me and my friends in Poland are able to grow these plants in RO water with­out any real prob­lems. They do not grow in an aston­ish­ing rate, but sur­vive and insure, that all the neg­li­gi­ble min­eral con­tent will be replaced into plant mat­ter, remov­ing them from water. Here’s my friends Betta aquar­ium on pure RO water. No prob­lems with plants so far:



2_​As to the Boraras as unwanted neighoburs:

I strongly believe in the sur­vival of the fittest and becouse of that I choose not to breed inten­sively as I think, that it might pol­lute the gene pool with treats that would nor­mally be “deleted” by the nature. I strongly believe, that years of inten­sive breed­ing with­out any nat­ural (or stim­u­lated) selec­tion might only result in pre­serv­ing the form of the Paros but the behav­iour. As observed with cich­lids in the first cap­tiv­ity bred gen­er­a­tions, the breed­ing mech­a­nisms aare weak­en­ing with each gen­er­a­tion in cap­tiv­ity.
In my opin­ion this might lead to crip­pling next gen­er­a­tions of Paros mak­ing them unus­able if ever were to be rein­tro­duced to wilder­ness.

3_​As to feed­ing the fry.

If fish are fed with grindal worm, then the fry also shoul be able to eat smaller ones, that were not cought by any other fish becouse of their small size. In the layer of peat they are rel­a­tively safe, and when the leafes will be intro­duced it should become the Paros strong­hold. If any of the fry were to wan­der too far from safety — look up 2_​


This post is about four times shorter then the first ver­sion, but I think my point is taken. I’d rather have 1 – 3 Paros fry at a time. that are suited for sur­vival, than lazy cap­tive fish.

Hello every­body,

first of all: really nice tank, Svert­ing. Both, the dimen­sions and the setup with the peat moss and the thin roots, look very impres­sive.

But I agree with Peter when it comes to breed­ing. I made the expe­ri­ence, that paros need some quiet­ness dur­ing mat­ing and espe­cially while car­ing for the eggs and fry. If the males are stressed too much, it some­times leads to dis­ap­pear­ing clutches etc..

What I observed with 2 pairs of P. phoeni­cu­rus in a 45l-​tank was, that the 2 females spawned alter­nately with one dom­i­nant male (this male occu­pied the whole tank, although I had struc­tured it into 2 ter­ri­to­ries. The other one was pale and stand­ing in the cor­ner). Dur­ing every spawn the eggs/​fry of the pre­vi­ous spawn were com­pletely eaten (per­haps by the female?). So I watched sev­eral spawns but no fry devel­op­ing. After sep­a­rat­ing one pair I finally got the first fry.

I think the prob­lem is, that con­di­tions in our tanks (even the “big­ger” ones e.g. 30-​50l) are much more con­fined than in nature.

So, from my expe­ri­ence, I would say that the size of the tank doesn’t mat­ter too much, but that there’s only one pair for them­selves seems to be essen­tial for the devel­op­ment of fry.

Of course, this doesn’t mean, that you couldn’t be suc­cess­ful at any rate and shouldn’t try it.
If you should expe­ri­ence the same as I did, you can still catch out a nice cou­ple and give them a quiet 20l-​tank with a small cave, peat, beech/​oak-​leaves and Cer­atopteris for their own.

To the plants:
I was exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent (almost all) species of crypts that are avail­able in the aquar­ium trade. Most of them come from lime­stone areas in Sri Lanka and are there­for hardwater-​species. I knew that, but still wanted to do the exper­i­ment and planted them in my show-​tanks with iron-​fertilizer-​substrate cov­ered with sand (some also in pots with pure sand). The result was that all of them melted within hours (pH: 5.0−5.5). So, I draw the con­clu­sion, that they are sim­ply not suit­able.

Selec­tion:
Do you really think you can sim­u­late nat­ural selec­tion in a small 70l-​tank with some Boraras? I believe, that aquarium-​strains are always a lit­tle “dif­fer­ent” from the wild type (at least after some gen­er­a­tions). With paros, I’ve never expe­ri­enced some­thing like lazi­ness.

If I were you, I’d pick out the best-​looking cou­ple and give them a seper­ate tank as Peter sug­gests and put the oth­ers in your beau­ti­ful community-​tank. This way, you could have both: watch the mat­ing and spawn­ing behav­iour of your cou­ple and some ter­ri­to­r­ial behav­iour of the group in a nice community-​setup. Apart from that you would enjoy “breeding-​success”, because of course paros are way too pre­cious to be only “kept” and on the long run wasted in a com­mu­nity tank.

Greet­ings
Martin

Try your setup, but I have a dif­fer­ent opin­ion:

1. If you think of healthy and strong fish that’s good, but why then don’t you think of healthy and strong plants? RO water is not the ade­quate water for Val­lis­ne­ria and Ceylon-​crypts. They may sur­vive but they are not ade­quate to a black­wa­ter envi­ron­ment.

2. Cer­tainly, being accom­pa­g­nied by Boraras is in prin­ci­ple a good idea for Paros. But it’s always a mat­ter of what you want to achieve. The “sur­vival of the fittest” in such a tank will result in slowly all young being eaten. Mind, that in the case of the Paros you are deal­ing with fish that are doomed to extinc­tion. In my view this means at the first hand try­ing to prop­a­gate them, not to buy enough wild-​caught to arrange a nice com­mu­nity tank. But maybe this is a some­what extrem opin­ion. If you think that to an end con­se­quently you should add Lucio­cephalus and even Channa to your com­mu­nity. An aquar­ium always has a struc­ture which omits sev­eral impor­tant fea­tures of a nat­ural com­mu­nity.

3. No young Paro will feed for about four to six weeks on Grindal worms. You will need Rota­to­riae at best, or Para­me­cium as sec­ond best, maybe you are lucky with the small­est Artemia nau­pliae, the Cal­i­for­nia type. Most Artemia are too big in the begin­ning.

4. Paros in small breed­ing tanks are no “lazy cap­tive fish”. They have been givven the chance to prop­a­gate; a chance which is very small in your set-​up.

But do it like you want; I wish you suc­cess. You wanted to hear my opinion.

I did, and still do appre­ci­ate the com­ments, and in days to come if first few spawns fail I will get them their own 20 liters cube, or two if my father will be will­ing to par­tic­i­pate in project.

These Paros are not wild ones. They are aquar­ium bred and I would never risk such a setup with F0 fish. I want to breed them, but I also want to see for myself how this com­mu­nity works. If, and only if, it is suc­ces­full, than I will be over­whelemed with joy. If it fails — not a big prob­lem, becose I will be able to match them and find the best pair suited for breed­ing. I could prob­a­bly even try to cre­ate a rota­tion breed­ery, where I could breed a pair inte­sively for some time, than allow them to take a ‘longer vaca­tion’ in a com­mu­nity tank.

I believe that this big­ger tank is a good place to let them grow, learn their share of sur­vival and then allow fish with proper behav­iour to breed and — even­tu­ally — sell/​give them to peo­ple will­ing, and able. Male who had to endure harsher con­di­tions in a com­mu­nity tank should be bet­ter at bring­ing more fry up.
Wouldn’t a male able to raise off­spring in such an aquar­ium be far more pre­cious to the com­mu­nity as whole than those who aren’t?

It will be also use­full for study­ing them, and their behav­iour.

I believe, that what­ever hap­pens it is a win-​win situation.