How to Select a Fish

Selecting Fish and Corals

Now I am going to talk about fish selection. Probably the first key of having good healthy tank of fish is to start with good healthy fish. When you go to the aquarium, look through the tanks carefully, and make sure the fish are healthy. The worst thing you can do is start off with fish that are already sick. Make sure that the fins are clear, the eyes are clear, the fish is well proportioned, and it seems to be swimming properly, and comfortable in the water column. Particularly, if you are a beginner, I'd really encourage keeping a wish list.

Now what a wish list is, is when you start the aquarium off, write down all the fish that you would like to keep into the aquarium, and narrow down realistically which one you are going to be able to have in this tank. Then you can get advise from other people, preferably more experienced about which ones are the best selection of that wish list, because you quite often create a wish list of 20 fish and find that only 4 or 5 that wish list are really appropriate for your circumstance.

Now what are want to understand is that there is number one, number two, and number three fish. So you really want your aquarium advisor familiar with these terms, and when you go to buy your fish, or your corals, or your invertebrates for that matter, you want to ask the people, is this easy to keep? Is this the number one? Can most people keep it? Is this a number two; some people can keep and other people can't keep it? Or this is a number three? Is this not normally going to work under most circumstances?

So it's important to be aware of how hard the fish I have to keep before you try to keep the fish and then you if you do want to keep the fish which are number twos or threes, maybe you have some sort of understanding of what its requirements are. Therefore making that fish more likely to work under your circumstance.

The next consideration is when to put the fish in. In general, putting the scavenging fish in, at the start is a good idea to help keep down your algae and make sure the aquarium is relatively clean and knowing that if you put angels in, it's best to put any angels you want in your aquarium in at one time. So the angels go in at one time. So they have equal chance to establish territories. Any tanks you want in at one time, so they have equal time to establish territories also with clowns, also with damsels, also with any other group of fish.

Generally, the various families are better off introduced in one day. So for an aquarium, you might say okay, we will start with the clown fish. We will put the clown fish in. They will then establish themselves in the aquarium. Then a month later in goes the rasses. We put any rasses we want. Then in go the angels. So you generally have less problems introducing the fish, if you introduce the families in groups. So a tank now and then a tank later, tends to cause more problems, more friction, more fighting than the same tanks at the same time.

There is also a bit of size of a mouth through. Regardless of how aggressive or peaceful these fish are, if the fish's mouth is big enough to eat the smallest fish, you can usually bet that regardless of what the species of the big fish, it will normally eat the little fish, because the fish are after all opportunist and if the big one has an opportunity to eat the small one, that will normally happen. So make sure that your smallest fish are well and surely too big to be eaten by your bigger fish.

You will find, so it's quite important to understand who the boss of your aquarium is. The boss's job is pretty much to control the other fish and make sure that there is not too much fighting in the aquarium. If your boss is very aggressive and is attacking the other fishes in the aquarium, you are going to really need to vote that boss out of parliament. So whether that means removing that fish or even putting something bigger in which might dominate that fish and then suppress its aggression. So watching the aggression of the fish, you've got in the aquarium is really important, and remembering that if you get one that's a rogue, you really better off sending it back to aquarium shop as oppose to keeping it in your aquarium where you are likely to get ongoing problems.

A lot of people suffer from a situation that I call the damsel trap. Well, the damsel trap is, is that a lot of people start with hottie, cheap fish like damsels which really are a good choice to start with, because they are so easy to keep and they do tend to give the novices a good experience in the hobby, because the fish is just so hottie. But also a lot of these hottie, cheap fish are also quite aggressive. So don't fall into the damsel trap. What the damsel trap is, it's basically if you start off with some hottie fish like damsels, they get very territorial in the aquarium. Then you try and introduce other species later on and find that they don't last for very long. And that's because they are getting bullied, harassed, or even purely killed by the damsels.

So if you can imagine a new fish trying to get established into the aquarium, it's already got some very aggressive territorial damsels in there, and the new fish becomes almost like a ping-pong ball. It goes in, this damsel says, get out of my house. It goes over here, this damsel says get out of my house. So then, the new fish end up ping-ponging around the tank. It can't actually establish a territory in the aquarium. It soon becomes stressed. It soon gets white spot or some other sort of problem and the fish soon dies. Then you try another fish and then you end up being under the impression that the only fish that work in the aquarium are the one you had in the first place.

So one option is either to take the fish back to the aquarium shop and actually trade them in, or sometimes just rearranging the rocks and disturbing the current territory is enough to allow the new fish to come into the aquarium, because the old fish are just disorientated.

When you get home from the aquarium shop, your fish will typically be in bags like these. It's best to demand that only one fish goes per bag, because it's quite common for the fish on the way home to be quite stressed and actually beat each other up. If you are going to go for any length of time, over an hour or two hours before you get home, also insist that the aquarium shop put some oxygen in with the air which is in the bag. So what you are aiming for is about a third oxygen and the rest to cope air. You don't need anywhere near as much water as you do air in the bag, because the fish don't run out of water, but they do run out of oxygen.

Now the next thing you are going to need to do is acclimatize the fish from the water in the bag to water in the tank. The way that you to do that.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services