Community Fish Friends for Neon Tetras

[siniardem]

Hi! I haven't been around in a while. I want to build a community for my established 45 gallon freshwater tank. I have a small neon tetra school with two clown plecos. Need some more friends in there to make it colorful. Too much algae, so anything that will help with that is great. Need some color! I have experience with mollies, endlers, and guppies, as well as shrimp and snails. Need a nice pretty community this time. Any help?

[vividheckel]

You could always add more neon tetras. They always look nice in large schools: look up some videos!

With algae, it's never recommended to rely on fish to clean your tank; you may be feeding too much to your fish, or have too many nutrients, etc. Adding more fish as a 'clean-up crew' are not always the best option. With that said, you may want to introduce a colony of some kind of inverts that may enjoy your excess algae. Additionally, the different kinds of algae will require different kinds of solutions to fix: there are lots of great videos online that may help you with your issue.

[siniardem]

Thanks so much! With getting married and a move, just keeping the tanks going has been hard. Now it has been here a year in the new location with new water and doing great. It's actually a lot of green algae that looks like a moss ball but spread out.  I know moss balls are algae but it is making the whole tank a slight shade of green that i prefer not to have.

[Lennie]

On 5/14/2023 at 9:44 PM, siniardem said:

Hi! I haven't been around in a while. I want to build a community for my established 45 gallon freshwater tank. I have a small neon tetra school with two clown plecos. Need some more friends in there to make it colorful. Too much algae, so anything that will help with that is great. Need some color! I have experience with mollies, endlers, and guppies, as well as shrimp and snails. Need a nice pretty community this time. Any help?

Combination of different algae eaters def help with the issue. But also, you gotta try to find the main reason why you are having algae. So play around stuff like fertilizers, water changes, lighting hours, etc and give the changes  some time to observe the effects on the algae problem.

I usually like having a combination of snails, shrimp, otos, borneo suck/hillsteam loaches, siamese algae eater in that tank size. If you want mollies, they will also help with hairy type of algae. 

As you already know, keeping fish to clean or eat something means also they will increase bioload and well, as a result of eating something, they poop. So that is def something to consider.

For community fish, As long as the mouth isnt too big, it can generally work great around neon tetras. Like adult angelfish pose a risk for neon tetras for example and they may end up being eaten.

Aiming to keep fish that enjoy similar parameters, tank design and temperature is important. So is fish not having a big mouth that a neon tetra may end up eatenç

 

On 5/15/2023 at 7:11 PM, siniardem said:

green algae

can you post a pic please? do you mean hair algae or green spot, or?