The Skeptical Aquarist

The prime positive criteria in setting up a genuine community aquarium all tend to resolve into questions of ecological niches. Appropriate tankmates won't be in direct competition. Good planning before you even begin to lay gravel into a new tank can increase the number of territorial niches made available in it, and they will increase your opportunities for keeping more species of fishes healthy and content enough to be displaying at least some aspects of their natural behavior. Besides the territory they inhabit, some other niches help define a fishes' relation to its ecosystem.

Our usual mixed community aquarium isn't really much more than a menagerie, a random assemblage of fishes. The first signs that you're moving beyond the "box of fishes on dialysis" phase of "fish-only" fishkeeping are some new questions that start to occur about keeping one species of fish with another, about special requirements fish may have, beyond their temperature ranges and pH preferences. Soon you begin to feel that concerns like "Will my angels eat my neons?" (answer: "Not this week") are resulting in a menagerie rather than a community.

Catfishes (Siluridae).

Catfish links. Catfish inspire devotion from their keepers second only to Cichlids.Consequently there are several websites that concentrate on catfish:

In the alphabetical index just below are fishes I have kept myself, at one time or another. I've included some stuff about their general behavior, their diet, and their breeding requirements, because if your fish don't spawn, you always feel that you aren't doing something right. At the end of each entry, I've tried to include links to the best material about these fishes at other sites.

When we talk about "Characins" we're using an old-fashioned term to describe tetras and their kin. If we were being consistent, we'd call them "Characids." In the Tree of Life Web Project, the Characiform fishes are described, and the relationships among their 14 or 16 families (still under hot debate) are laid out in the kind of genealogical chart called "cladistics".