Whats the best way to build up large school?

[fishymommy]

There you go. What is the best way to build up a large school of cardinal tetras? Do I buy them in chunks of 5? 10? All at once? All I have for a quaranteen tank is a lil 5g..

[Lady Hobbs]

You can get a lot of them in a 5 gallon. You should easily be able to get even 20 at once if you wanted.

[William]

the big schools I have had has been bought at once, 200 fish but they have been the first fish introduced.

[Oscar_freak12321]

Neons aren't aggressive enough to exclude new fish from their school, so adding them at different intervals will be fine if you have to. But if you can add them all at once, that would be good for the fish.

[Dave66]

I use a pair of 40-gallon breeder tanks for quarantine, because I have large tanks that hold large numbers of tetras and other schooling fish. That said, I put no more than 12 fish per QT tank, and quarantine for a month. Yes, you could put more than a dozen, or twenty as stated in your quarantine 5 gallon, but dropping that many at once in smaller tanks is taking a chance of an ammonia surge you don't want to experience. I know the patience is tough, but if you built your neon tetra school by six at a time, quarantining each six at least two weeks before introduction, you'll safely build your school of healthy neon tetras.

Dave

[korith]

Just do more frequent water changes if you are gonna qt them in a small tank. You probably don't want to add too many of them to your big tank at once anyhow. Need to give time for the bacteria in the media time to adjust to the new fish load. Maybe buy 10 every week or two for a while till you got your school up to the size you like.

[DrNic]

If the tank is properly cycled you can probably add all the fish at once. That said tetras are notoriously susceptible to ammonia, nitrate and nitrite spikes which will naturally occur when adding a lot of fish to a tank, even if it is cycled.

I have a 29G that I'm building a neon tetra school in at the moment. I've been adding 12 fish every 3 weeks and thus far my school is at 25 fish and I haven't had any dead fish, which is awesome. I'll probably do one more batch and call it finished.

Adding them slowly will reduce the spikes in the aquarium, but increases the possibility of adding disease, unless you run quarantines every time, which could be a handful.

[mac]

When I get the fish, I get a large bunch all at once.

But that me. Problem is the cost, depending were you are, and the amount you getting.

Good luck,
mac

[fishymommy]

Thanks for the suggestions. The reason I wanted to quaranteen is because the 90g is already stocked with quite a bit of fish plus my prized pleco and I wouldn't want anything to come through and wipe them all out (which I've almost had before.. managed to stop it in time phew!!). Also, I have two full grown female swordtails and I wouldn't want them to see a baby cardinal (which is all my lfs offers) and think its a snack. They do fine with the random platy babies swimming around but I'm not sure if I want to take the risk...

plus, I could let the filter for the 5g soak by the 90g filters for a while and use 90g water to set up the 5g to already beat the cycle ahead of time... Its always worked so far.

With that in mind, is 12-20 a good batch number to buy them in?