I am convinced white cloud mountain minnows are invincible

[Clockwork-crow]

Kind of a funny story.

A while ago I had a 10 week old WCMM swimming around in my tank, I'm assuming my WCMM's bred before I rehomed them, and I was doing some mulm vacuuming, doing this required me temporarily removing some plants, which I put into a small 5 gallon box full of water I was intending to use as a shrimp breeder, so I pull the plants out, put them in the box, then put them back in the tank.

Two days later, I'm preparing to cycle it, so I go ahead and check the ammonia levels, and in the middle of the test I notice something moving in the tank, and it turns out, it's the baby white cloud! Presumably the morass of stem plants I have acted like a net as I was pulling it out, a couple of minutes later I look back at the ammonia test and it was 4ppm. So this 10 week old fish lasted two days, utterly neglected, in 4ppm of ammonia.

If you're a new hobbyist, get a school of white clouds, maybe 8/10 in a 20 gallon long, they will likely shrug off most beginner mistakes.

[lefty o]

they are a fairly hardy fish.

[Fonske]

White clouds are nice beginner fish for cold water tanks. Not so much for tropical temperatures.

[Clockwork-crow]

6 hours ago, Fonske said:

White clouds are nice beginner fish for cold water tanks. Not so much for tropical temperatures.

Fair, I kept mine at 22 celsius (71 F) with dwarf corydoras and everyone seemed to do fine. I eventually rehomed them because they were just a tad too aggressive for the kind of community tank I wanted.

[Colu]

Nice beginner fish a long with zebra danios very hardy fish

[MoeKitties]

I just got twelve 24k mountain minnows to help cycle my tank and I love them ❤️ sadly I had to take one out and put it in a separate tank because it just kind of floats near the top and twitches every couple seconds. Not sure what's wrong with that one. 

[Colu]

I would not recommend a fish in cycle I just add small amounts off fish food to my tank for a couple of weeks till i get nitrite and ammonia reading then it goes back to zero and my nitrates stay between 10-20 then gradually add fish over the course of a couple of weeks @MoeKitties

Edited April 5, 2021 by Colu

[MoeKitties]

I was doing that with this particular tank, feeding it every couple of days checking the water but after 2 weeks I still had a ton of ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates. I'm probably just impatient but I really wanted to get this up and running. I do water tests every day so if I notice anything going terribly wrong I'm prepared to take them all back to the fish store. The minnow I pulled out last night is... Interesting. It stayed in one spot in the container I put him in for over an hour, then suddenly started swimming around like normal. So I held a flashlight up to him to see if I could notice anything that looked strange inside him, and the fish started doing it again. Floating in one spot and just twitching every few seconds. Put the light away and wait a few minutes, he's fine back to normal. He's a strange one.