Types of Fish for Salt Water Aquariums

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name's David Pearson. I'm going to talk about different types of fish for a salt water aquarium. The salt water aquarium you're looking at now is a reef tank, a 30 gallon reef tank, and only certain types of fish can go in a reef tank. Angel fish cannot go in a reef tank because they will nibble at the soft corals and damage them, and irritate them to a point where they won't thrive and grow. You're looking at some percula clown fish in the background, everyone's familiar with "Finding Nemo?" Well, there's a couple Nemos and now they're tank-raised so it's reef safe for the environment, and also you can see where they genetically change them, and I've got a pair of black and white perculas in the tank behind me as well. You also see the yellow tang in there. Tangs are great for a salt water reef tank because they will eat the algae and it will help the tank clean. There's other tanks are predator tanks where you can set them up with groupers and lion fish. A lot of fish don't get along with each other, so you've gotta really be careful what types of fish you put into a salt water aquarium. You can even see a few of the bites taken out of my yellow tang's tail, I had to replace some mean damsels that were picking on 'em. There's trigger fish, there's surgeon fish, there's also there's eels, I had an eel in the tank for a while but it got too big too fast and it really did a lot of damage, and irritated the tank. The tank, the smaller the tank, the harder it is to get as harmonious as you can, less is more, I only got six fish in this 30 gallon tank and that seems to be the right amount of fish in the tank. As well as the fish that are great for salt water tank, there's also a lot of invertebrates that are very helpful for the tank as well, and also colorful and add a lot a character to the tank. You'll notice my coral, my banded coral shrimp I have in the tank, it's like a skinny lobster and it kind of picks up the waste that hits the bottom. Also, in the tank I have some small shrimp, I have a cleaner shrimp, and I have some camel shrimp. The cleaner shrimp will actually clean the parasites off the tang fish. I also have tons of small blue-legged reef crabs and red-legged reef crabs. They also are cleaners, they clean the algae and they pick up the debris. I also have a starfish that's buried in the sand, it's called the sand sifter, and it actually sifts the live sand and eats debris inside of the sand, and that's a little bit on fish and invertebrates for your salt water aquarium."