How Many Fishes?

[sanjaypills55]

How many discus can you keep in a 3 ft tank..

I have 5 medium size discus in my 3ft (50Gal) planted tank.

Other fishes are small...

Do you think its too many?

Whats the ideal no.
DSC00174x.jpg

[Fingerling]

Hi Sanjay,

I think you might need a bigger tank if you'd want to keep discus in a planted enviroment. Because of their size in height, keeping them in a 3ft planted tank would definitely stunt their growth and also they rely very much on good water quality to thrive. Hope you've already done your homework on keeping discus in planted tanks and have already made plans for a bigger tank soon. Good luck

[sanjaypills55]

Hi Figerling,
You are right, there isn't enough space for 5 discus in a 3 ft tank.

Will try & reduce the no. of Discus.. as it is not possible to increase the tanks size at the moment.

[Rummy Nose]

Wow! very nice tank you have there!

There are 2 guidelines you can use to calculate the number of fishes you can keep: (note: just guidelines only)

1) By volume: 2.5cm of fishes per 2.25 litres of water
(e.g. if volume = 90 x 45 x 45 = 180 litres,
number of cm of fish = 2.5 x 180 / 2.25 = 200cm
Thus, if adult size of fish is 20cm, you can keep 200/20 = 10 fishes)

OR

2) By surface area: 2.5cm of fishes per 75 sq cm of water surface area.
(e.g. if surface area = 90 x 45 = 4050 sq cm,
number of cm of fish = 2.5 x 4050 / 75 = 135cm
Thus, if adult size of fish is 20cm, you can keep 135/20 = 7 fishes)

Not sure which guideline is better, but I always "try very hard" to use the more conservative of the both.

Hope this helps!