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Multiple Oscars in Large Tank

ken31cay said:
Sounds like you did a good job with them. But for me it's also about providing a decent quality of life.

I will compare it with making a man live in an 10' x 10' cell and taking good care of all his needs. He'll live and hopefully be healthy. Put a woman in there and I'm sure she'll get pregnant. But quality of life is far from good.

I realize we could never provide the space that fish have in nature but I sure prefer to at least try to give fish a little space to move around.
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You are right about never providing the space they have in the wild. And maybe also about the 10 by 10 foot cell. But by implication, you are saying a 15 by 20 foot cell with a 12 foot high instead of 8 foot ceiling is ideal for a human. Or pretty great. Or satisfactory. But not a 10 by 10, obviously!!!

So, Ken, EXACTLY where is the line separating too small from ok?? And what data do you base that on? Because I would not be happy in a 50 by 50 foot room, but maybe I’m unreasonable…
 
yea, but people are by nature adventurous and seek diversity.
I was trying to think, how big is my ideal space. But it has to include city, rural, mountains, beach, etc, etc. Where the fish we keep tend to have a very specific criteria they look for, and their ideal is to have a single territory and to dominate it. So I think comparing it to human preference is misleading.

That said, I think it's a great starting point to consider what the fish would seek out as ideal in nature. I doubt very many of us will ever provide that to our fish, but it's good to be conscious of what that would be and to be aware of how far from that we've forced our fish to compromise.

I've heard/seen Duanes say he wittnessed a Jack Dempsey (pair?) occupying an approx 250 gallon space in nature. I would have assumed their "ideal" would be a bit bigger than that, but I'm happy to use that.

We're discussing Oscars here though. And they are more open water swimmers. So I'd suspect their "ideal" would be a lot bigger of an open swimming area, with a smaller out of the way spawning site. I've seen Oscars in massive tanks and they do seem to utilize all the open area.
 
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Gershom said:
So, Ken, EXACTLY where is the line separating too small from ok?? And what data do you base that on? Because I would not be happy in a 50 by 50 foot room, but maybe I’m unreasonable…
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The answer is subjective of course. I actually ended up moving the two 12" Oscars mentioned in my previous post when they got bigger to my 450gal because I believed the tank grew too small for them. I can say without hesitation that your tank was too small for even one full grown adult Oscar. What would be ok then? In the case of a full grown Oscar I would say a six foot tank. But this is all my personal preference.

The comparison of fish to humans does not translate well so we'll stick to fish.

When I was in college in the mid 90's I had a 125gal tank with an undergravel filter where I raised six piranhas from small. They all lived and grew to be big 6"-7" fish. Beautiful red bellies. But I never changed the water in that tank even once, and they were there for over 4 years living 'happily'. This story might sound just as cruel or careless as the account of the your Oscars but that was many years ago and things are different now. These days I know better, and I assume you also do things differently now.
 
...darn puppy kicker....
 
Gershom said:
I’m getting into this thread late, but can’t resist a comment. Many years ago, like 35, I had 2 breeding pairs of oscars (a pair of reds and a pair of tigers) in a 70 gallon tank, with a glass divider. Yes, 4 adult oscars in 70 gallons!

Lots of good food, especially beef heart, and frequent water changes, and they were happy enough that they spawned at the same time.

(I might also mention that I had only an undergravel filter and pea-gravel.
And that I moved cross-country, so I didn’t have that setup more than a year, I think. But the fish didn’t fight, and didn’t die, or get HITH).

Ok, I know that is asking for a new @$$hole, so go ahead, tell me how terrible I am.
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Not terrible, just ignorant. Happens every day in this hobby, the end result eventually leading to stressed, sick, and ultimately dead fish.
Lots of scenarios can be considered a success story, in the short timeframe that your experiment lasted. This was already mentioned previously, with Joey's internet success story. It wasn't.
 
ken31cay said:
The answer is subjective of course. I actually ended up moving the two 12" Oscars mentioned in my previous post when they got bigger to my 450gal because I believed the tank grew too small for them. I can say without hesitation that your tank was too small for even one full grown adult Oscar. What would be ok then? In the case of a full grown Oscar I would say a six foot tank. But this is all my personal preference.

The comparison of fish to humans does not translate well so we'll stick to fish.

When I was in college in the mid 90's I had a 125gal tank with an undergravel filter where I raised six piranhas from small. They all lived and grew to be big 6"-7" fish. Beautiful red bellies. But I never changed the water in that tank even once, and they were there for over 4 years living 'happily'. This story might sound just as cruel or careless as the account of the your Oscars but that was many years ago and things are different now. These days I know better, and I assume you also do things differently now.
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Ken, you are right that human comparison is not accurate. If you ever read The Life of Pi, he gave an interesting, and I think valuable perspective on what animals need/want. And it was NOT lots of space! (Tigers roam over hundreds of square miles, but not because they want to—they are seeking certain things.) They want food, water, a chance to reproduce, and most of all—safety/security. If they can get those things in a cage, (he said) they will be happy. But still, we can’t know what they are really thinking, and the temptation to personify them is probably a mistake.

My (main) point is that since you don’t know, your opinions are nearly irrelevant—stick to facts. The statement that your piranhas grew and were beautiful is worth sharing, but the assumption that your care was poor seems unjustified.
 
This guy makes a lotta sense... for a puppy kicker...

I make this point to represent a few factors... Excluding the human influence, nature is in relative balance. Thus, on average, every breeding pair of Cichlids produce no more (and no less) than 2 offspring that grow up to become breeding adults themselves. Again, on average. Many of these pairs produce 200-500 fry per brood, 4-6 broods per year, for around 10 years. That means, in nature, 2 of 17,500 survive. Meanwhile 17,498 of 17,500 meet their demise one way or another. Even the worst of us have better odds than that. (This also shows that, per evolution, the majority of the fish born were not meant to survive, yet we keep as many as possible alive. Which is a big part of why we see declines in tank bred population and we regard Wild Caught as superior).

Two life lessons that come to mind on this topic is 1. Set ourselves up for success, & 2. The solution is in the balance.
1. I believe in creating my aquatic set ups to be near ideal when I'm on top of maintenance, but are still acceptable when I slack off. Because life happens.
2. An over populated tank is hard to maintain and can be a burden to the fish. Yet an under populated tank is boring and won't hold my interest.

When I was younger and had more time & energy for the hobby I didn't have the money for big tanks. Now that I've been in my career a while and can justify some splurges, who am I to judge the people who are doing what I did when I was in their shoes. Is it ideal? No. Are any of our tanks ideal? No. And honestly, 17,498 of 17,500 fish born in the wild wouldn't consider nature "ideal" either.

We should all do the best we can... and accept if we cut too many corners we won't enjoy the hobby as much.
 
And I don’t want to be a Jack Dempsey. I want to be a live-bearer, preferably a male Swordtail in a small tank with a bunch of females…
 
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