Suggestions for 55g glass catfish tank

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Lycosid
Posts: 191
Joined: 20 Aug 2016, 21:18
My cats species list: 7 (i:0, k:2)
Spotted: 4
Location 1: United States
Location 2: North Carolina

Suggestions for 55g glass catfish tank

Post by Lycosid »

Hey everyone,
I've finally got myself a properly sized tank at home and I'm looking to stock it with catfish. So I have some compatibility questions to work out before I finish up the tank set-up.

The tank is a 55 gallons long (48" x 13" x 20") and the plan is to filter it using a large Mattenfilter at one end, a DIY canister filter, and a pump that pushes water back to the other end of the tank for a unidirection flow. (I have some crazy ideas about trying to also create a refugium for Daphnia at the input end that would "burp" live food from time to time but I'm testing that on one of the tanks at work first.) The tank will be planted, reasonably heavily, and I'll add at least one piece of driftwood (probably one that has a nice sticky-up bit, to use the technical terminology) to make sure we have faster and slower current areas of the tank. Originally I had been thinking of making this a species-only tank with but one can never have enough catfish diversity and so I've been thinking about adding some compatible catfish tankmates.

Here are the caveats (besides "must play nice with K. vitreolus"). I don't want anything that would eat any eggs/fry that anyone else produces. I may also play around with the temperature and oxygenation ranges for whoever lives there a bit to try and induce spawning so anyone who can't take a fake monsoon dropping the temperature from the high end to the low end in short order is out, too.

Here are my initial thoughts:
looks egg-safe and seems to have the same temperature range. As a bonus, it's very unlike K. vitreolus and since the diversity of catfishes is what I like about them that's fun.
Ancistrus seem to have similar temperature ranges but I don't think they are egg-safe. Same with the corys.
seems decidedly vegetarian but they seem to have a higher temperature range and some of what I'm seeing suggests that they do not want anyone changing any water parameters on them fast. Pity, since they're awesomely weird morphologically.

I'm having trouble coming up with other options but I would think they would have to be either loricariids or mid-water feeders with really small mouths. Any thoughts? Any reasons I shouldn't use Otos or any reason I shouldn't disregard BNs or Farlowella?
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