Hi,

I am currently stationed in Afghanistan and just became a member today. I had a question about warmouth care 1. How many can I put in a 75 gallon aquarium and 2. what other sunfish species can I keep with them. I tried looking on the internet but could not get any good answers. I was also wondering if also If I got green sunfish how many should I get because I heard they were aggressive

Thanks for your help

For warmouth and sunfish species I think the general consensus is that dominant fish pick on others a lot so having only a few allows for too much aggression on too few fish. I have a 55 gallon tank that contains 2 Longears, a hybrid green/redear and a bluegill. The dominant longear keeps the non-dominant longear on one corner behind a log and the bluegill at the other end behind some piping. The Hybrid has slowly gained stature and stands firm against the dominant longear and has received 90% equality. I need another 2 or three in the tank to spread out his aggression but so far have not had time to collect. If there were more fish in the tank the dominant might have reduce aggression among more fish. Tank dynamics varies so you have to experiment . Some samples might be way too aggressive while others might be more sociable.

The above is just general guidelines. Trial and error is needed till you get a good community and even that can change over time. All part of the fun of keeping natives.

Usil

Edited by Usil, 30 November 2011 - 12:12 PM.

I feel the rate of keeping 1 sunfish (or other rather large fish) for every 10 gallons works very well.

from http://forum.nanfa.o...4311#entry94311

Try sending smbass (Brian Zimmerman) a private message. He's an expert on stocking sunfish.

Edited by EricaWieser, 30 November 2011 - 12:48 PM.

1 per 10 gallons is a good guide to go by. You can keep any other sunfish in with the warmouth. The key is having all of them similar in size. As for green sunfish, they can get a little territorial. Because it's a 75gal tank, I'd just leave them out.

Out of the 7 Lepomis sp. I have kept, warmouth were the most docile sunfish out of all of them. They were never actively aggressive towards other, but they did stand their ground when more aggressive sunfish (I've kept them with redbreast, dollar, greens) approached them or tried to bully them. However, I think the key here is that the warmouth were usually slightly bigger than the others. So their size alone generally made the more aggressive fish back off.

In a 75, I think 6 full grown warmouth would be fine. They are also very interesting fish to watch (they can rapidly shift coloration depending on if they are lurking, feeding, defending, etc.). So, if you are wanting other more colorful sunfish in there, I'd suggest starting with some warmouth, let them get some size to them, and them you can see what adding other species will do.

Here are 3 warmouth that I kept with 5 western dollars for about 3.5 years. They were together in a 46 gallon bowfront for the first 1.5 years, then in a 75 once they all got too big for the smaller tank. The warmouth were the least of the problem.