Biorb Fish Tank

Question
Are you familiar with the Biorb Fish Tank?  We are considering purchasing one for our little girl's room.  We're debating between a 4 gallon and an 8 gallon tank.  We're interested in tetras, "fancy" guppies, and betas, but our #1 interest is the African dwarf frog.  Could you help us by suggesting a suitable number and mix for each of these sizes of tanks?  We're mainly wondering how many other fish would be suitable if we had 1 or 2 dwarf frogs (we've read they like to live with other frogs, so we're assuming we need to buy at least two dwarf frogs).

Answer
Hi there!

I am familiar with the Biorb fish tank but I regret to say that Ive never had the opportunity to maintain one myself. I know they should be setup and maintained just any other average tank. The most important thing to be aware of is when you first setup your tank it will not be able to support a big group of fish due to the 'biofilter' not yet being established in the tank. The biofilter is two types of special good bacteria that establish in your gravel bed and filter -- their job is to get rid of toxic ammonia that the fish produce. It takes a while for these bacteria to get established, at least 4-6 weeks. So until then, be very gradual with your tank stocking. Only a couple fish per week or so. You can easily test for ammonia with a simple test kit from your petstore or bring a sample in the petstore.

In a 4 gallon, you are limited with the number of aquatic animals you can keep. Perhaps a single male or female betta and a couple of frogs could live in there. OR 3 tetras or fancy male guppies.

You might want to go with the larger setup-- the 8gal. Where you could keep a small group of about 4-5 tetras or fancy male guppies with a pair of dwarf frogs easy. You could very likely keep a single male or female betta in the tank too as long as you were careful with feeding and made sure to keep up with weekly or perhaps twice weekly water changes.

You will have to pay extra attention to make sure the frogs are getting their fair share of food since fish will often deprive them greatly.

I do hope this helps and best of luck!
Karen~

Here's an article on dwarf frogs you might want to check out! ;-)
http://frogworld.net/african-dwarf-frog/