The Skeptical Aquarist

Alternately, begin with a specific environment. The other way to organize your community is as an "ecotope," in which you recreate a very specific environment and populate it with two or three compatible species that characterize that environment.

Why do I want to call these "ecotopes" rather than "biotopes"?

How you treat new fish in their first hours can make a difference in their survival rate.

The most important advice I can give here: Don't add the traveling water to your home aquarium. After you've acclimated new fish to your water by whatever method, gently net them out and discard the travelling water, along with its load of ammonia and perhaps pathogens.

Though e-commerce has hit a glitch or two at the turn of the century, it's a brand-new world, one that is going to give a new twist to the current competition between your traditional LFS and the discount chain pet outlet in the strip mall. As e-commerce revolutionizes every part of economic life, many small local fish stores are going to disappear, no matter how many canister filters you faithfully purchase at full "recommended retail" price. Whether this will be a good thing, a bad thing or neutral, is a moot point.

"A knowledgable salesperson will be glad to help you with your fish purchases," reads an introductory aquarium book I have here at home. "Yikes! ...and equally so will an ignorant salesperson, especially a confidant know-it-all salesperson with an authoritative manner," adds the Skeptical Aquarist. (Sounds like me, come to think of it, so maintain your skeptical reserve!) Caveat emptor! Let the buyer beware!

Here are a few tips about buying fishes:

The Labyrinth fishes that we were accustomed to call "Anabantids" actually fall into four family groups. It's not really that confusing. The gouramis are all in the family Belontiidae, except for their kissing cousins, the Helostomatidae (Kissing Gouramis). But the original "Goramy," the edible Giant Gourami that is sometimes mistakenly bought for aquaria, is one of the Osphronemidae, along with Spike-Tailed Paradisefish. The fourth family of Anabantoids are the Anabantidae themselves, like Anabas, the Climbing Perch, which is actually another food fish, only rarely kept in aquaria.

Killifishes, which are in the family Cyprinodontidae ("tooth-carps"), and the familiar livebearers, in the Poeciliidae, are both members of the order Atheriniformes, a group that also includes marine flying fishes and silversides. The order is circumtropical in distribution, in all the world's warm seas, and in freshwaters of Africa, India, Australia/New Guinea and in the Americas.

Since I'm confining myself to fishes I have some personal experience with, I can only offer you a disappointingly narrow range of cichlids. To placate you, let me begin with some major Cichlid links, since there are more Cichlid-oriented sites than for any other fish family:

Loach links. One of the best websites devoted to a group of fishes, as good as the best of the cichlid sites, is Jeff Shafer's "Loaches On-Line."

There's lots more about loaches at Jeff and Cassi Dietsch's site, at its new location, including many links. A good introduction to Botias was written by Patty Marshik for the Minnesota Aquarium Society Aquazine back in 1989. Mike Ophir is a name you know if you're interested in loaches: his web page is devoted to loaches.

Rasboras and Danios are Cyprinids that are so closely related that you'd be hard pressed to describe the difference between them: danios generally sport barbels but rasboras never do. Maurice Kottelat and his co-workers are beginning to see the genus Rasbora as a kind of catch-all casserole, out of which they have been pulling separate genera, like the anagrammatic Boraras micros-- its minute relative B. maculata appears in some of Takashi Amano's aquaria and turns up on the market sometimes-- and a couple of Microrasbora species. Even the colorful R.

The Cyprinids (named after Cyprinus, the European Carp) are an enormously successful family of strictly freshwater fish, with over 340 genera and some 2000 species, found on every continent except South America, Australia and Antarctica. The relationships of groups of families within two huge Cyprinid subfamilies (Cyprininae and Leuciscinae) are being discussed by ichthyologists, now using conservative mitochondrial DNA sequences.

It's convenient to think of them in groups: besides these Barbs, the Danios and Rasboras on the following page are also Cyprinids.