I kept bettas for a while. From my knowlege you can keep a betta, male I assume as the have the elaborate finnage, in a community tank. However, its not a good idea to keep other fish with elaborate finnage in with them, such as a male guppy. The betta can confuse the guppy as another male betta and the fight is on! Gotta love the siamese fighting fish!

 

If you have any fish that are reputed to be fin-nippers I would advise against adding a male betta. With the honey gourami I wouldn't add him at all. Gourami and bettas are closely related so the territorial tendencies that males have will carry over to similar species like the gourami. If you want to add another gourami I would add one or two female honey gourami.

 

I also noticed that my betta went after my black molly. My black molly wanted nothing to do with him. So, that's another thing to consider.

 

Makes sense that the gourami and betta wouldn't work together. I want to add some more gourami, just having trouble finding young females. I have heard that as long as there are equal male and female count you can add more than one male gourami to a tank, well peaceful gourami such as honey sunset and dwarf.

 

I put my Betta in with Glo-Light tetras, which are known to be extremely peaceful.
They tore his fins to bits.
They went' back to the LFS and now the Betta lives quite happily with some very mellow Corys.

 

I personally would never add a male Betta to a community tank. As others in this thread have noted, even peaceful fish can become nasty when faced with the tempting fins of a sedate Betta. And sometimes the Betta can be the nasty one. No two fish are the same in either case, but the probability is that it won't work, so I recommend not tempting fate. This fish deserves its own space.

As for the gourami question, the Honey Gourami is the only one of all the common gourami that can be kept in a small group in smaller tanks (= anything under a 50g). Most of the species are in our profiles so you can read more there.


Byron.

 

IN RETORT:Tank 2 Big - 15 gallon Freshwater fish tank

I have a 24" x 12" x 12" 15(US) gal.

I have wonderful finnage on my sedate but rumbustious Betta.
Tank Mates include a shoal of 8 Harlequin Rasbora, a shoal of 8 Neon Tetra, 2 Corydoras trilineatus

Everyone has lived peacefully for a long time and fins have never been better. The tank is fairly heavily planted with lots of hiding spaces.

I've done a lot of research before putting my community together and I has my Betta for 6 months before creating a community around him.