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The story
A post on 5ch’s Newsspeed VIP board described how, three days after putting one medaka (a small Japanese rice fish) and one white cloud mountain minnow (a small hardy minnow, called akahire in Japanese) into a tiny 3-liter tank, the water started to smell. The tank doubled as a plastic case normally used for keeping insects, with no filter or aeration installed. White cloud mountain minnows naturally prefer to swim in groups of three or more and are generally said to need at least 10–12 liters even in a small setup, so the thread argued over how much water was actually needed, how much waste the tank could handle, and whether a filter was necessary. In the end, the poster decided to move the fish into a 24-liter tank.
What people said
Something reeeeeks!!
But it'll be fine, right!
Probably just used tap water straight, huh
Planning on racking up more victims?
It's gotta be some ultra high-performance goldfish bowl lmaooo
I offered to buy her a small tank with a filter but she says she doesn't need one
I bet she's gonna kill these ones too
Even with a filter she'd probably kill them anyway, so it's the same either way
Waste of money
(harsh lol)
Rough guide to numbers
Minimum: 3 or more is best to prevent fighting and stress and satisfy their schooling instinct.
For a nice display of schooling: 5 or more, ideally around 10, gives you an impressive school to watch.
Guide by tank size: for a small tank (roughly 10–12L of water), around 3–5 fish is a manageable number.
Well, of course that's only if you've got a filter, live plants,
and a proper substrate set up too
I wish you'd have spelled all that out lmaooo
'One fish per liter,' give me a break
That's only allowed under seriously good conditions
Oh, by the way, this ID is Re: #1
The waste tolerance is way too low
It's basically like making them live in a toilet
They're pretty much the same actually
It's just that white cloud minnows really want to school and need swimming space
And not knowing that, I put mine in… a 3-liter toilet…
Dammit!!
Yeah, they're gonna die
Yeah, that's true
Especially at 3L
That's basically an unwinnable game
For real
I'm already planning to move them to a 24L tank right now lmaooo
I've got filtration and aeration, but I just top it off with straight tap water and they're tough as nails
That's probably just the filter and aeration making up for it
It's just a bare-minimum hang-on-back filter though
Wait, no plants either?
Then that's seriously tough
Yeah, I do think freshwater shrimp are hardier than medaka
I only started with the bare minimum of plants, but they grew like crazy and turned into a jungle
I'm trimming and tossing them out about once every two weeks, that's how much they grow
So you do have plants after all
Live plants grow at a ridiculous rate lmaooo
I get the impression mine turn into a jungle by day two already
Mine's anacharis though
Anacharis grows well, but it doesn't do much for water quality…
Hornwort (matsumo) is better for improving water quality, I'd recommend that
Hornwort, huh
That's going in the 24L tank too then
I'll pick some up next time lmaooo
Just get a Suisaku or Rocaboy filter or something, doesn't matter which
Also throwing in some hornwort will change things a lot
Nah, well, I'm graduating from this toilet tank anyway so it doesn't matter anymore
Think about why rivers stay clear while puddles get cloudy
Nah, this cloudiness is just dust from the substrate
It really does clear up if you wait
No way there is
You think forty 500ml plastic bottles' worth of water fits in that thing?
It does lmaooo
It's enough that two 8L buckets still don't fill it up
Guess it's hard to tell from the photo
Just buy an actual tank
It doubles as both a bug case and a fish tank
Well, buying a glass tank would be best,
but it can't be helped
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
In fishkeeping, it’s often said that survival depends less on the raw volume of water than on whether filtration (bacteria breaking down harmful substances) is in place. In this case, the 3-liter tank had neither aeration nor a filter, so without any way to break down waste, water quality can deteriorate rapidly within just a few days. The thread was also split over how much water the tank actually held — the poster claimed it held close to 20 liters, but other commenters raised doubts by converting that to plastic-bottle equivalents. It was also pointed out that white cloud mountain minnows naturally swim in groups rather than alone, making it an easy misconception to assume that keeping “just one” of each fish would be fine simply because the fish count was low.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Newsspeed VIP) thread “Results of Putting One Medaka and One White Cloud Mountain Minnow into a Tiny 3-Liter Tank lmaooo“.
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