Compatibility List

P S would shrimps do as good a job as Cory's ?

What job are you expecting the shrimps/cories to do? Cories aren't part of a clean-up crew.

No living creature should be regarded as clean up crew. Keeping the tank clean is your job 

However, people usually try to have fish that occupy all regions of the tank. With only bottom dwellers the upper regions would look empty. The reverse isn't necessarily true as if you have a lot of decor/plants, you'd not see much of the bottom dwellers as the decor etc would block your view to some extent. But I find that just because a fish is a mid level swimmer doesn't mean it won't eat off the bottom. I have apistogrammas, supposed bottom feeders. When I fed my fish this evening, both females were feeding from the water surface. One of my chain loaches sometimes does the same. My ember tetras, green neon tetras and endlers were all feeding off the bottom. You don't necessarily need a fish that lives on the bottom to eat the food that reaches the bottom of the tank.

But cories are nice fish. They add to the aesthetics of a tank. If you like cories, get some. But don't be misled by the fact they are catfish - they are not vegetarians and they do need some 'meat' in their diet. Even shrimps don't feed exclusively on algae. They make short work of a dead fish.

Rummies - some shops sell true rummies (Hemigrammus rhodostomus) others sell false rummies (Petitella georgiae) as true rummies. Both need tanks 38cm wide according to Seriously Fish. They'd be fine in your tank. Penguins need the same sized tank but as you say are fin nippers if there aren't enough of them. Personally I'd go for the rummies just because they have more colour 

Nippy fish are usually less so in a big shoal. The most notorious fin nippers, tiger barbs, are recommended in a shoal of at least 10 for this reason; some people reckon on at least 20. Fish like tiger barbs maintain their shoal hierarchy by chasing and nipping each other. In the wild, there are hundreds of fish in the shoal. In a tank, when there aren't enough of them they include all the other fish in there as part of the shoal and chase and nip them too. It's just instinctive, nothing malicious. The same applies to other shoaling fish in various degrees, tiger barbs are just at the worst end of the spectrum. This is why having more than the usual minimum number is better with fish that have a tendency to nip.
If you got 8 to 10 penguins you should be OK. Your list doesn't have any fish with long flowing fins (stick to standard platies rather than hi-fins  ) Though they might have a go at shrimps. If you have lots of decor/plants for shrimps to hide in and went for one of the larger species like amanos or ghost/glass shrimps, they'd cope better than smaller shrimps like cherries.

Zebra danios actually need a tank at least 3ft long. They may be small but they are incredibly fast swimmers. Think of Usain Bolt trying to race in a back garden 

Sorry, shooting down your ideas here 

I think Sue has the Gold-ring Danio, Brachydanio tinwini

I had some tinwinis, they all died  They started swimming funny then died. Never found out why. But as the shop tank was completely empty of them a week later, either there was something wrong with them or they just sold out pretty quickly.

Continued from your other thread with this info

Your hardness at 16 german deg is 112mg/l Ca and 280mg/l CaCO3 - just different units for the same hardness. My water company's website has a pretty coloured chart labelled in mg/l Ca which is why I needed to convert it. Hard goes from 80 to 120, so 112 (yours) is near the very hard end of hard.

Looking at the fish we've talked about so far:
Platies - 14 to 30 dH = fine in your water (16dH)
Panda cories - 1 to 12 dH = your water is too hard
Harlequins - 18 to 125 mg/l CaCO₃, or ppm = your water is too hard (280ppm)
Pengiun tetra - up to 15 dH = you could get away with these
False rummy noses - 1 to 12 dH = too hard
True rummies - 2 to 15 dH = these would be OK, though you'd need to make sure which ones the shop was selling
Zebra danios (if you tank was longer!) - 90 to 357 ppm (yours is 280) so they'd be fine if you had a longer tank
Tinwini danios - 18 to 90 ppm (mg/l caCO₃) = your water is way too hard

All figures taken from Seriously Fish. And sorry about the mixed units, that site does use different ones.

So I'm afraid you do need a rethink.

Of the top of my head, fish that would be OK in your water are
Platies guppies and endlers. Not swordtails or mollies because of the tank length.
Forktail blue eyes
X-ray tetras
Lemon tetras
False penguin tetras and perhaps penguin tetras. The profiles on here have penguin tetras, but those are the fish that SF calls false penguins. The ones with the stripe down the body as well as the tail are OK, the ones with the stripe in just the tail might be OK.
Emerald green rasboras These were called Danio erythromicron last time I looked, they've changed the latin name again.

Of course there are a lot more fish that suit hard water. The problem is that a lot of them need big tanks eg central American cichlids. Even small rainbowfish need longer than 62cm.


Anyone else think of more smallish hard water fish?

Seriously Fish's maximum hardness falls a bit short of Aquamaid's for checkered barbs - 36 to 215ppm with AM's hardness being 280ppm - but I agree they are a possibility.

Good link, Colin. And since it is written by Neale Monks it will be accurate.

I'd forgotten rice fish, simply because when I researched them they were suitable for my softish water. Looking again at Daisy's rice fish, Oryzias woworae, I see than can go as hard as 268ppm, virtually the same as Aquamaid's water. These are becoming more common in shops, and despite looking a bit bland in the shop tank, they do colour up nicely. I've had mine a week or so, the males have a lot of red on them and their bodies have developed a nice blue sheen. The females are less colourful as you would expect. But I wasn't prepared for those blue eye rings, gorgeous.

AM - if you read Colin's link, check the tank size the fish need with Seriously Fish 

They are not as blue as the rainbowfish - I gave away my dwarf rainbowfish and replaced them 3 days later with the rice fish so it's an easy comparison. The females don't seem to have the blue and the male's blue is a darker steel bluey tone. Rainbowfish have an obvious blue colour, the rice fish have a blue sheen when the light catches them.
But they have those gorgeous bright blue eye rings, the same as those fish with 'blue eye' in the common name.

One of my two Maidenhead Aquatics usually has rice fish though I'm not sure which species - they run to more than a page on Seriously Fish. I got mine from an independent LFS.