Hi everyone. I am a forty year old disabled man, who has returned to fish keeping after a five year break. I used to keep Oscars and missed them very badly. So now I have bought four more, two red and two tigers in the hope of getting a pair (not necessarily for breeding but for keeping together as peacefully as two Oscars can be). At the moment these babies are being housed in a thirty gallon tank with stats at Ammonia 0.0, NitrIte 0.0 NitrAte 0.5 and a PH of 7.5. In August I will be getting a 5 x 2 x 2 for them and a plec.

This looks like a great place and after reading all of the information on the site, its great to see all the info in one place for beginners and experienced people alike and that Oscars have a special place in lots of aquarist's lives.

Steve.

welcome steve

Welcome to the site.

welcome to oscarfishlover Steve, nice to have you here

Welcome Steve, i have learned a lot from OFL; u will love it here too.

Thank you for the warm welcomes. I can tell this is a great place already. I do however have a sad change to tell you about since my first post, two of the small Oscars died with no clues before hand or after as to why. All water parameters checked out. Then if that wasn't bad enough my slightly bigger red O was battering the smaller one all over the tank. So I decided that as it was almost constant and there were wounds appearing on the fish, I did the decent thing and rehomed the smaller one in a friends tank that had only a little firemouth in residence. I have kept the bully but I had already fallen in love with the little sod before he kicked off. Not the right place for this question, but could the other two have died of stress if he was doing the same to them? Only in all honesty I never saw him going at them like he did this last poor fella.

It could have been the result of bullying or it could have been the stress of being put into a new tank.

Sometimes you just get a bad batch. i bought 4 albinos once and put them in a little tank to grow them on. The tank was cycled and i tested the water daily. Slowly one by one they started to die. When i had one left (5 days after buying them) i phoned the shop from work in despair. They said bring the last oscar and a water sample. By the time i got home the last one was dead. When i got to the shop they had 2 left from about (i guess) 30 with a sign saying they were not for sale. The shop had had exactly the same problem as me- they were a bad batch or something had gone wrong somewhere to cause them to die. It made me feel better that i hadnt done anything wrong but i felt bad for all those oscars