Apistogramma for planted tanks?

[soulfinder78]

these fishes looks great.

are they suitable for planted tank? are they harmful to shrimps?

[illumnae]

check out the cichlid subforum, lots of apisto discussion there

in short, to answer your questions, yes apistos do very well in planted tanks...as for shrimp, they usually end up as apisto food.

[Shadow]

yeah apisto kill shrimp, even yamato I didn't see them eat the shrimp but they do gang up and attaked it.

This is where the dilema start, I need shrimps to help cleaning up the debries on the moss, but apisto will kill them. Without shrimps my moss is covered by debries and look ugly. In the end, I move the apisto into smaller tank. SAme happen o my rams. I guess cichlids and shrimps are bad combination

[wasabi8888]

Try to get big shrimps..i get mine from NA..

[illumnae]

my apistos kill even jumbo sized yamatos. they just don't stop trying, so one fine day after your shrimp moult, BAM, apisto food

[doppelbanddwarf]

Well i managed to keep some green cherry shrimps in my agassizii tank. It was unintentional as i only put tiny shrimps in as food for the agassizii.
They hid among the leave litter, grew to adult size and were a dark brown colour. However after the agassizii spawned i was worrying that they might attack the eggs and fries. Not advisable.

[Shadow]

Does it mean smaller fish have better chance to survive? Maybe be cause it is small, so it is easy to hide.

[illumnae]

i think the main difference is that chongyu had leaf litter in his tank, so there were more hiding places for his shrimp. i did notice that leaf litter is a much better hiding area generally than caves/plants as line of sight is totally cut off.

[doppelbanddwarf]

Yup. Its the leave litter. The other day i remove most of the leaves and coconut shells from my tank so that i could remove all the shrimps. Worried that they might attack the fries. Amazingly the female was not disturbed at all.

[wks]

Get malayan shrimps and lots of them(100 for 2ft tank). Then you can afford lose them.

[illumnae]

you might end up with alot of dead bodies and fouled water instead. apistos don't just eat the shrimp they kill...sometimes they just rip the shrimp into half and leave the body there....imagine waking up one morning to 50 shrimp corpses, and possibly 20-30 more hidden in places you can't see... bacteria bloom!

[wks]

I'm keeping some malayan shrimps with my famale A. macmasteri in a 1 foot tank. Except for one which jumped out on day one, the rest are still around. The key is to keep the fish well fed so it will leave the shrimps alone.

[doppelbanddwarf]

I think 100 for a 2ft tank would be too much. Plus if the Apistogrammas spawn they might attack the shrimps, and the shrimps might attack the fries.