If you own a community aquarium and are looking for a middle dweller species with striking blue colors, then the Neon Blue Dwarf Gourami should be the perfect choice. Unlike normal gouramis, which originally appears as pale silver shades, this type of fish species will exhibit extremely bright colors especially when they are ready to spawn. The fish can grow up to 3 inches in length and this is one of the main factors you should consider if you have intention to setup a single species tank or will just let them to thrive in your community aquarium. Being a generally peaceful and non-aggressive tank mates, gouramis including their cousins of honey and gold variation should find themselves easily adapt to the natural environment provided that there is large enough living space (minimum 55 gallon tank) with dense vegetation covered by live plants.Other reasons why this fish make suitable community tank mates is because they will never compete for oxygen with other species. Similar like betta fish, blue dwarf gouramis possess a labyrinth organ, which allows them to breathe oxygen directly from the air and thus no competition for this precious resource with your other fish. In fact, they will thrive successfully in coexistence especially with presence of swordtails, silver dollars, catfish and angelfish. However, based on my own experience, I would avoid leaving them together with neon tetra and barbs because for some unspecified reasons, my gourami seems to like to pick on this tiny fish and even injuring some of them. In fact for even smaller fish fry, they will even make a good meal out of it. Certain people decided to keep gourami in community tank full of guppy for the purpose of preventing over-population.
Another important consideration that you might want to take note is that gouramis can become territorial during spawning and the male female pair should be best removed into another separate tank away from the community aquarium for this to take place. This is to avoid unnecessary situation whereby the male gourami will attack other fish species even including female gouramis as well which invade their breeding territory. Therefore, once you notice the fish start courting each other, the pair must be removed. It is not advisable to get two male gouramis and put them together in your community tank because they will fight with each other and injure themselves. The best combination is to get one male with two females and remove the pair to a separate tank for the purpose of spawning.
