How many apistos in a 86 gallon?

[Kjaer]

Hi everyone!
This is my first tread at this forum

I´m going to start up a 86 gallon/325 litre tank with apistos, corydoras and a school of tetras.
The bottom area of the tank is 130 cm x 50 cm/ 51" x 20".
My water parameters are:
pH: 6.8
KH: about 2
DH: 4.8

My questions is: How many species, which species and how many of each species should I have? The tank will be decorated with a lot of driftwood, some plants and leaves.



The behavior is most important to me, but I also like fishes with some nice colours (I´m only interested in the natural colour forms...).

 

[Mike Wise]

You ask a very difficult question. Much depends on how you aquascape the aquarium, which species you use, and even the personalities of the individual specimens. It also depends on if you want to breed the fish or simply keep the aquarium as a community.

Here are a few rough (very rough) rules:

Each female needs a brood territory of about 12"/30 cm in diameter, centered on the breeding cave. The male will need an area outside of the brood territories of his harem females.

Polygamous males will control as much territory as they possibly can. A single macmasteri-group male was known to claim an entire 2 meter long tank! This is very unusual.

The territories of polygamous males can be reduced by breaking up the "line of sight" with visual boundaries. Visual boundaries are also recommended to separate female brood territories.

Non-polygamous or oportunistic-polgamous species (smaller species of the regani-, the steindachneri-, pertensis-, iniridae- & nijsseni-groups) will accept smaller territories & can be housed more densely. Females still need the a brood territory of the same size.

Males of polygamous species that look very different are more likely to accept each other near their territories than when the species are similar in appearance.

Territorial fighting between females - both intraspecific & interspecific - is more likely to be lethal than between males.

Larger species will bully smaller species. Species that form bonded pairs (like A. panduro) will bully any other, even larger, species. Such attacks can be lethal.

 

[Kjaer]

Thank you for the answer. I´ll remember those rules.