laritheloud

Xtreme Krill, Fluval Bug Bites Spirulina Flakes, and Omega One flakes are in my regular rotation. I have trouble with pellet foods sometimes, I feel like my thicklip is more prone to some constipation bloat after pellets -- but I'm not sure if it's because of the pellet itself, or if it's because she's eating too many of them and not sharing the wealth.

I'll give it a shot! Honeys are just so, so hard to sex, sometimes. The most dependable sexing tell is the fin color. Ladies will have mostly ORANGE fins, boys will have yellow mohawks. Now. Caveat. I'm still not totally convinced by my so-called "sunset" honey gourami. I'm reasonably sure she's a female, but she seems to be a wild type... sort of. She has more color than most wild type females I've seen. She has the stripe 90% of the time, she has a lemon yellow top fin that's pretty faded, she has a black-to-blue spot on her anal fin that will turn black and tint her throat a darker color without crossing all the way into male breeding dress. She drives me insane. She behaves like a female and has the body shape of a female, but has a lot of the male "tells." I found only one other photographer who captured a photo of a fish that looks exactly like my female: If you have gold honeys, then the female will be yellow in the body (but a paler shade). This is my (still young) gold female: and this is my wild-type (?) female:

Oh, amazing!!! Beautiful pair of rainbows! I'm going to guess they're millenium rainbows (tami river rainbows, glossolepis pseudoincisus) or red rainbows. Leaning more towards milleniums. I hope you can identify them more precisely, they're awesome!

I put only a handful of floaters into this tank... THANK YOU. All of the original leaves melted away and what you see is all brand new growth. I love it so much, no regrets with buying it. Plants that grow explosively are my favorites.

A little bit of Lady Marmalade, my thicklip. As a treat. And Mario, my male honey.

You're spot on @Anomalocaris -- you do have three males and a female. Protective Dad is definitely the alpha. Whatever you choose to do, I hope it works out for you. I love gouramis so much, but that protecting-the-nest behavior is something else.

But they're just so cute!!! 😆 It's best to stick with single gourami species per tank, though. Sexing is the biggest challenge and really important for peace of the tank!

Adding a tag to @Hobbit per her request! 😁 This one is a great picture of two wild-types and one gold-type. The fish on the far left is a male wild-type honey gourami in the middle of changing into breeding dress. The fish in the middle is a female, and how literally all wild honey gouramis will look in a store tank. The fish on the right is a plump female gold honey gourami.

Congrats, they're definitely tetra fry!

They look like a type of hornshell snail to me. Maybe related to pleurocera canaliculatum? Not exactly the same but the shell shape is similar. Yours do not look like Malaysian Trumpets to me.

On most days I'll have yogurt, skyr, or quark with some sliced fruit and granola. And a good, strong coffee. Can't skip the coffee. When I really crave a treat I go for French Toast. Thick-cut, brioche-based french toast, with a little bit of honey and orange zest. When I want something protein-rich, nothing beats a good and cheesy omelet with bacon and onions!

So after a fun little side-discussion in another user's thread about his honey gouramis, I thought since there's so much confusion both in stores and among hobbyists about which gouramis are true honey gouramis and which are actually a different species, I'd help define the distinction. True Honey Gouramis have the scientific name Trichogaster Chuna (formerly Colisa Chuna). They can be sold as Honey Gouramis, Honey Dwarf Gouramis, Sunset Honey Gouramis, or Gold Honey Gouramis. This is the classic selectively-bred gold colorway for honey gouramis: The top is a male, and the bottom is a female. Now, things start to get really confusing when we look at wild-type honey gouramis or "sunset" honey gouramis. Sometimes Sunset honey gouramis are a different name for a vivid strain of gold honeys, and sometimes they're just another name for wild-type honey gouramis. They can look like this pair: Or they can look like this: In-store, the latter pair are wild type honey gouramis, and to make things really insanely difficult males and females will both look drab and silver when you look at them at your LFS. They can both have a stripe down their sides and their colors can change in a flash. If you ever decide to go for wild-type honeys, keep it in mind that it's extremely difficult to sex accurately in store and you may not know what you get until you take them home. Everythings gets to be a bigger jumbled mess when we account for the mislabeling of other species. The most common confusion is with Trichogaster Labiosa or the "Sunset" colorway of the Thick-Lipped Gourami (note: i actually love the wild coloration but it's impossible to find in the US!). Sometimes, you'll see labels like Red Honey Gouramis or Sunset Gouramis in the store. Sometimes they will be explicitly called honey gouramis. The only way you can tell the difference between Thick-Lips and Honeys is by taking a good look at them. Honeys will always be diminutive and oval-shaped. Honeys will always have color in their caudal fins. Thick-lips have a deeper body, more prominent lips, and clear to mottled caudal fins. Like so: The above image is a male sunset honey gourami. When fully colored and grown, they can range from a deep orange to a ruddy red-brown. They could get speckled with black, too. This image is of a female: Females tend to be a little lighter in color, and their dorsal fins are much more rounded. Dorsal fins in males extend to a long point. So if you look at a 'sunset' gourami or a 'red honey' gourami and see that clear-to-white caudal fin, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a thicklip gourami variation. Knowing which species you have can help guide hobbyists to purchasing the correct species as mates for a tank. It can also help with gauging stocking levels and how many can fit in a space. Honeys can happily live their lives in a 10 gallon tank, because they only grow to two inches, and the are quite calm and peaceful fish. Thicklips, while very peaceful, can grow to reach a beefy 3.5 to 4 inches, and need at least 15 gallons of space or they will get cranky. Thicklips tend to be less shy and more outgoing, and as they grow, they are more likely to exhibit minor aggression. Hope this helps with identifying true honeys!

Would it be useful to start a new topic on dwarf and honey gourami distinction so I don't take this topic further off the rails? 😅

That is a Flame Dwarf Gourami and not a thicklip. It gets really, really confusing with all the different fancy phrases vendors use to label their stock.

Adorable! I really want to get a male and a few more females. They are such lively and friendly little fish. It's actually really confusing to learn the difference, though, and I got real deep in the weeds about it. The only reason I learned to hammer it out was because I was sold a thicklip gourami as a honey gourami by mistake. I spent weeks questioning it until I finally compared pictures from seriously fish and figured it out. Basically, true honey gouramis are always a colorway of trichogaster chuna, which only grow to a max of 2 inches. A "Sunset Gourami" is sometimes a sunset thicklip gourami. A "Sunset Honey Gourami" could actually be a honey gourami, but sometimes the shop is mislabeling a thick-lipped. A "red robin honey gourami" or a "red honey gourami" is hypothesized to be a thicklip and honey hybrid, but they look an awful lot like straight-up darker-colored thick lips. I also believe they grow a bit larger. In any case, my thicklip female is approaching twice the size of my honeys at this point -- thick lips can reach 3.5 to 4 inches. Honeys are quite small in person!

@Fish Folk Your 'honey gourami' male is actually a thicklipped gourami! They're often sold as Sunset Gouramis, or even "red robin" gouramis -- but they always end up the size of a thick lipped. Both species are peaceful, thicklips are just a little more outgoing and can sometimes get a little bossier. I absolutely love my thicklip female.

Lol @Hobbit when I got over getting scared half to death about gouramis going to rest/sleep on the substrate, I felt so much better. Now I think it's just adorable when they rest near the top or the bottom at night, usually in a group. Though... In my tank, currently, it's the lady gouramis in one corner and male gourami all by himself in the opposite corner... (That's a different story. Don't keep two species of gouramis in one tank, friends. It might work at first but there's no guarantee long term!)

I have heard that increasing a group of honey gourami to 6 (more females) will help your situation, but you'd have to probably rethink your overall stocking if you went this route. It's unfortunate that you ended up with 1 female out of the entire group. If you're still not sure about your smallest honey, if they're a gold-type honey gourami, females have orange 'rims' on their anal and dorsal fins, while males have a yellow "mohawk." Some pictures can help us verify sex if you'd like! In any case, sadly, I don't think your alpha male will calm down long term. If breeding and bubble nesting keeps happening, the nesting aggression will continue cyclically. So your options are, as follows: Give the pair their own tank. Remove two of the males and let the pair nest in the 29 gallon. Remove the female and pray the three males make their own territories. Remove two of the males and find two verified females to replace them. As far as fin tears, is there any greater damage to Male 2 aside from a bit of torn fin? It COULD be reasonably normal (in terms of figuring out an heirarchy/pecking order) if you're willing to stand for it, because honeys are mostly docile and aren't likely to do serious damage to one another beyond the fin tears. However this would require some close monitoring to ensure that the situation doesn't escalate further. @Hobbit might have more to add since she keeps a breeding pair of gouramis and just added some of their babies to her group.

Aponogeton Ulvaceus. First time trying an Aponogeton plant. I know it'll be a monster in a jiffy.

The growth is insane in this tank. My aponogeton is flowering. Still have diatoms, but they're slowly reducing. I changed my plans from pearl gouramis to a group of thicklips to make my Lady Marmalade happier. She'll be coming home to this tank after I give the rainbows a clean bill of health. Don't mind the floating banana plant... I gave up trying to anchor it to something, the rabbit snails keep dislodging the heck out of it. When it starts sending out roots I'll figure it out.

Agreed with what everyone's been saying above. I'm in a similar boat as @Hobbit with high pH water straight out of the tap. I run my tanks high-tech with CO2 with exceptional results, but if you're sticking to low-tech, pick plants that will work in your water. Crypts do wonderfully for me -- all kinds of crypts. But they are moderate to slow growers and they will take time and patience to look spectacular. You can see my crypt tropicas (two of them in the middle) in the picture below, six months settled in the tank: Stem plants are hit-or-miss for me. Hygrophilas do really well for me. Pogostemon Stellatus Octopus (the ridiculous jungle of stems in my 29 gallon) grow out of control. Bulb plants do amazing, as do floaters. I suggest you try a bulb plant like a tiger lotus, dwarf red aquarium lily, or aponogeton ulvaceus. They're all super fast-growing plants and look stunning in a flash.

Judging by the size I'd wait another 3 to 4 weeks for it to gain some size. We've been through many rounds of Diamond Tetra accidental fry, I'm so familiar with the growth trajectory now! lol! CONGRATS on the one little dude (or dudette)!

I'll get 'er done one way or another. The last time I was able to net her out of there she was constipated and a bit bloated, and I was thinking she had a worse disease than she did. Just kidding, all she needed was to stop eating for a bit and poop. NOW I don't REALLY want to let her bloat up again, but maybe I can manage a sneak-attack at night if I can herd her out of that dang corner. Night is great for a transfer, anyway, with all the lights out giving her time to settle.

Actually, this is brilliant. Lady Marmalade rests in the same spot near the surface every night. The only issue is I have an acrylic 29 gallon tank, and the angle that I'd have to snatch her is really, really tough beneath the overhanging 'lid' pieces of the acrylic tank. Needless to say, despite the awesome clarity, it's my only acrylic tank. Maintenance and fish catching are 10 times harder because of that overhang!!!

Everyone else already covered what I was going to say, but I'm going to add I have a Blue Dream Neocaridina Shrimp colony going strong in my 10 gallon tank with male endlers. I've heard it's best to have shrimp colonies without fish, but to be frank, there's still so many shrimp all over the place that it doesn't feel like it's making a measurable difference in behavior or population size. I started with 10 from my LFS, two died early on. I decided to purchase 12 more from AquaBid, absolutely no losses and breeding exploded about a week or two after that addition. There's no way a tank divider will work. I put prefilter sponges on my gentle HOB and still find babies swimming around with the filter media every week. I make sure to rescue then and put them back in the tank before wringing it all out! I also don't shy away from small weekly water changes and, again, haven't noticed a dent in the population. My tank has a ton of floating plants, a few rooted plants, and plenty of green hair algae. I don't bother to battle the green hair algae, it's mostly plaguing the floaters and making a huge green clump in the center that isn't all that terrible to look at. Besides, all the babies like to hang out in the algae, super good for hiding when there's endlers around. It's really fun and rewarding to see your shrimp colony explode, so just make sure the tank is good and seasoned and enjoy.