What can live with oscars?

Question
Can Oscars live with discus? What else can oscars live with?

Answer
Good evening Milli,

While oscars and discus are both South American cichlids, they are highly unsuitable to life in the same tank. There are many reasons for this, I'll try to explain briefly.

First off, oscars grow very large (over a foot in length) and are extremely messy. A single adult needs a minimum of a 55 gallon tank to stay healthy and active. Filtration needs to be vigorous, providing at least 8 times turnover, so if this were a 55 gallon tank the filter or filters would need to be moving 440 gph, or gallons per hour.

This isn't what a discus likes. Delicate, nervous fishes, they are intolerant of water quality going south and prefer gentle filtration. Plants are beneficial to discus because they purify the water and provide hiding places. Discus will leave them alone, while oscars will dig them up and make a mess of them. Discus appreciate daily water changes, and do well with a shoal of dither fish (such as cardinal tetras) in the tank to bring them out of their shell. An oscar would terrorize the discus and pollute the water. Your expensive discus wouldn't thrive and would likely die under these conditions, so I do not recommend this duo at all.

Take a look at this article from the website below:
http://www.oscarfishlover.com/content/view/19/33/

It's written in plain terms, and I agree with everything it had to say as far as tankmates go. Silver dollars would be my choice with oscars, if you have the space. As the article emphasized, avoid pacus and large plecostomus (dwarf kinds such as Bristlenose and clown plecos would be fine) as these grow far too large for the average tank, and will contribute significantly to the deterioration of water quality.

A site I have found very helpful for doing research on fish is mongabay.com. If I need more information on a species, often times I can type the common name (such as oscar) into google.com followed by mongabay and get results from that website. I hope that helps, take care!

Nicole