[Peter Finke]

I should like to say my opinion on that; it’s quite rigorous.
Of course, you can “keep” licorice gouramis in a 500- or even a thousand liters tank; their home rivers are much bigger. But you should not, I think:
1. The home-range of a pair is not larger than 10 to 50 liters. And the home range of a group of four or five pairs is not larger than an average structured aquarium of about 100 or 150 liters.
2. To maintain a blackwater tank with a stable milieu is much easier if it is small than if it is that big. It’s a task for a professional museum.
3. Simply “keeping” these fish in a decorative tank is in my view doing the wrong thing with rare, heavily endangered species. They are not “pet fish” like others always at hand in the shops. Trying to keep them in such a way that they could breed successfully, must have priority.
4. Think of the fact that most Parosphromenus offered in pet shops are wild catches. When you have bred the fish yourself, you might think of displaying a small group of them in a bigger tank and look what happens.
5. I do not think that if you do this you will observe substantially “more” in you big tank than you would in a small. On the contrary: you will surely observe less.
6. Without doubt, you can observe some interesting antagonistic and pairing (etc.) behaviour if working with small groups instead of pairs, and therefore tanks bigger than 20 liters up to 150 liters. But raising the young will be very difficult indeed. However, there some specialists (K. Koomans!) have been successful with this in small numbers.
I do not repeat the general problems of feeding.