How to Choose Fish for a Freshwater Aquarium

Video Transcript

"I really enjoy watching my aquarium and watching my fish. But we have to make sure we choose the right fish for our tank. When you're first setting up a tank, your first month your water can go through a lot of changes, so you might want to do your fish very slowly. We have to decide whether we want a community tank, a semi-aggressive tank or an aggressive tank and we need to buy fish accordingly. If we get aggressive fish and community fish, the aggressive fish are going to stress out your community fish. The other thing that we have is there is fish that have there's different levels, we have bottom dwellers, mid-level and top-level so you want to take that into consideration when you're picking out your fish as well and your local pet store is a great resource for helping you choose that fish. What we have here is a community fish and I've got some Danios. I've chosen these because I like them, they create a lot of movement in the tank so it keeps my tank busy. My Serpes here. These are Serpe Tetras with the red in the top fins. These are nice community fish as well. And they are more of a mid-level and then I also have some of these lighter fish down here are called a Blind Cave Tetra and they spend a lot of time at the bottom. I also have a snail in here which is going to help maintain some of the algae and there's various bottom feeders that you can do as well that are going to help keep the bottom clean. So when we're picking up fish for an aquarium, we need to make sure that they're compatible, we want to have community fish together. If you're going to have a semi-aggressive fish tank, you need semi-aggressive fish and if you're going to have aggressive, then that's what you're going to do is pick your aggressive fish. Aggressive fish and semi-aggressive and community do not mix well together. It's going to create problems. So enjoy picking out your fish, my name is Michael and enjoy your aquarium."