Clouded Archerfish care and information

[Narwhal]

I have the opportunity to get one of these guys from someone who kept it with African cichlids, big mixed tank, you know the works, tanganika, Malawi, denston barb target/deithers. I am very interested in the fish, and was wondering if it would do ok with my small Victorian cichlids, it is 4 inches long, my largest vic is just under 4 inches, I also have some large feather fin squeakers in with them. I do have a smaller more peaceful tank with my yoyos, which was where I had the vics until I upgraded, and the loaches did fine with the vics. The tank could temporarily house it, but eventually I would like to give it a little more room, which is why I would want to have it with my vics. I have done successful mixes with bottom dwellers, but have not had the same success with surface fish; before I got a bigger tank and more vics I had 3 and my obliqudens got really nasty, beat up my kyoga red, so I added 2 giant danios, that where sharing a tank with cichlids at Petco, they didn't really take to my water and 1 got nailed by the obliquides and died, the other died shortly after from I think nitrates, because the tank crashed after that.
other questions, how long are they expected to live? Is their any information or luck breeding them?

 

[Shaun the Vic guy]

I have the opportunity to get one of these guys from someone who kept it with African cichlids, big mixed tank, you know the works, tanganika, Malawi, denston barb target/deithers. I am very interested in the fish, and was wondering if it would do ok with my small Victorian cichlids, it is 4 inches long, my largest vic is just under 4 inches, I also have some large feather fin squeakers in with them. I do have a smaller more peaceful tank with my yoyos, which was where I had the vics until I upgraded, and the loaches did fine with the vics. The tank could temporarily house it, but eventually I would like to give it a little more room, which is why I would want to have it with my vics. I have done successful mixes with bottom dwellers, but have not had the same success with surface fish; before I got a bigger tank and more vics I had 3 and my obliqudens got really nasty, beat up my kyoga red, so I added 2 giant danios, that where sharing a tank with cichlids at Petco, they didn't really take to my water and 1 got nailed by the obliquides and died, the other died shortly after from I think nitrates, because the tank crashed after that.
other questions, how long are they expected to live? Is their any information or luck breeding them?

I'll start by saying my everyday disclaimor. With cichlids, you never know for sure what will happen until you try it, because each fish has it's own personality.

That being said "thickskin" AKA "obliquidens" is particularly aggressive among victorians. If you have a 4 inch male, you probably won't have much luck keeping anything it can catch unless you add a large number at a time. I'm sure you could add 6 more "obliquidens" females without too much trouble. If you want to add more victorian males, I would highly recommend a very minimum of 6 at once. Perhaps two or three times that could be necessary, depending on how aggressive you male is. Rare is the obliquidens that will tolerate you adding one or two more victorian males to the tank. Even obliquidens females are best added 6 or more at a time.

Once a male obliquidens has been without other males around, he will usually be very intolerant of any other male victorians, or anything else he can catch and kill, for that matter. That tank is his territory now. Your best bet is adding so many victorians or (less agressive)mbuna at once that he has trouble targetting any one at a time. If you have a dozen or more other victorian males for him to target, he may or may not ignore the addition of an archerfish. Even if he does, there's still a good chance one of the subdominant fish, or all the subdominant fish may kill it. I've seen well fed vics attack a newly introduced aulonocara like they were a school of starving pirahna, and the peacock was by far the biggest fish in the tank. You could try to add a school of robust barbs or rainbowfish perhaps, but I suspect he'd still target an archer with those in the tank. It more resembles a cichlid then do most schooling fish, and it's not nearly fast enough to stay away, even in a large tank.

Overall, it's a bad idea to even try, but I've done stranger things and had them work, so I can't really judge. If you do decide to try, have a back-up tank ready to put the archer in, and do it at a time you can observe the fish for a prolonged period. Even if things seem to go ok, the archer might get killed when the lights go out or first thing in the morning. For the sake of the fish, I would ask you not to do this.

 

[Lugal]

Archer fish is best kept with their own kind non- aggressive ones. They are relatively weak at defending themselves, will make a leap from your tank and at least 160g of their own space.

With your setup, sorry, I think those poor fishes won't make it.