Quote:
Originally Posted by KevanGuy
Yeah, I wouldn't mix Cichlids with other fish, you are asking for trouble there. But if you want Cichlids , I'd recommend a male and female cribensis. They make cool borrows in the tank and have live babies. They are good parents though and will defend their young, so, not really a community type fish.
Most types of tetras are also good starter fish. They are relatively easy to keep and don't really fight with other fish. Neon or cardinal tetras are cool, kids will like the colours. Oh, and danios are cool, extremely easy to keep, super cheap and very active. I always have danios in my tanks.
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I'm gonna have to agree on this, if you are going to get Cichlids you can't really have any other types of fish in there (save for catfish, which are surprisingly godlike in their inability to be massacred).
I know from my experiences with Lake Malawi cichlids that just having cichlids isn't necessarily a bad thing, they come in massive variety of colours and they usually have fun habits that you can see. If you do go with Cichlids try to go all male, if there's no females their aggression is actually really low, if you decide to have females and males, I'd go with 3 females to every male, otherwise the male will chase and harass the female constantly. Also, you want to crowd cichlid tanks in most cases (save for if you are only going with one species), they're still aggressive but it's spread out amongst all of them.
As for schooling fish, which I totally forgot to really mention in my last post, I'd do some research on the Amazon River Basin fish, they include good schooling fish in cardinal and neon tetras which are those glowy little fish you often see in freshwater tanks in pet stores, other tetras are also really good, and relatively colourful. Unfortunately some of the cooler fish in the Amazon are much harder to keep, things like Discus, Piranhas, Stingrays, very cool, very hard to keep unfortunately.
The problem with fish keeping though is that it gets really addictive, a friend of mine started with fighting fish, and now he lives in Australia and has a 20, 000 gallon tank (it's ridiculous), with crazy fish like Piraracu in it.