Hello every,
I am new to the community and relatively new to the hobby (3-4 years). I spend hours watching fish videos/streams, reading posts on forums, and online articles. So I am knowledgeable but lack a bunch of practical knowledge from others on forums that have been doing this for decades. Anyway I have MTS as many people do.
I am in the process of setting up my man cave / fish room and I have a 5 foot 125 gallon tank sitting in my garage waiting for the room. I have gone through about 80 revisions of how I want to set this tank up.
Here is the recent crazy idea that I was wondering if it would work.
I want to do a planted tank with primarily epified plants such as java fern with maybe a few crypts tucked into rocks.
I have this idea to build it so that the light is bright with big shadows. I think I can accomplish this with large drift wood and using a single LED spot light hung over the top of the tank. I would have a section of the top covered in floating plants. To also add to the dramatic shadows.
The stocking is maybe the crazy part. I want to go back to the first fish I loved and that is the honey gourami. I had a pair of wild type honeys that I loved watching. Some of you might think I am crazy but I want to do like 20+ honey gouramis in place of a tetra or barb. I have read that they are very social fish and I can't see why they wouldn't work in a large group. The next crazy part is I would love to have them with a group of 5 electric blue acara. I feel like the honeys would be big enough to not be food for the EBA. They also preferred to hang out under my floating plants when I had them so I predict they stay away from the EBA. I would probably want to put my 6 panda Garra in there as well as my king tiger pleco forgot the L number sorry.
Any problems you all can see coming up with a set up like this?
Also would a bamboo shrimp get destroyed by the EBA?