Tanichthys albonubes, the White Cloud Mountain Minnow

Tanichthys albonubes (White Cloud Mountain Minnow) was found before 1932 (when it was scientifically reported), not by a boy scout as you often hear, but by scouting leader Tan Kan Fei (Tanichthys is "Tan's fish"), in cool fast-running streams on the lower slopes of Pai-yun Shan (which translates as White Cloud Mountain), a traditionally revered mountain near Guangzhou (Canton). The specific name albonubes just re-translates "White Cloud." The original habitat was very circumscribed, in clear mountain brooks with dense vegetation.
 
Much has happened in Guangdong province since 1932: years of rigorous Japanese occupation followed by civil war, then population and industrial pressures. Though T. albonubes had not been seen in the wild since 1980, it received belated Chinese protection in 1988; Stanley Weitzman and Hans-Georg Evers reported in the summer of 1999 that the species was now extinct at this original location, but a small population was rediscovered at a spring-fed stream in September 2003.
 
This is the fish to recommend if someone asks you which egglayer they should begin with. White Clouds are hardy, lively, and almost as colorful as Neon Tetras. The population with red at the base of the dorsal fin were imported into the US in late 1935 from aquarium stock kept in  Guangzhou (Canton) and rated a color illustration on the cover of The Aquarium, May 1938. At the same time the Germans were calling the fish the Arbeiterneon, the "Proletarian Neon," when Neon Tetras were still exotic imports for rich aquarists only. Dutch aquarists call them "Chinese Danios."
 
Different populations have varying color patterns. The original find have steely-blue bodies, and red fins with white edges. An even more southerly race found near Hong Kong has olive bodies, with red-edged yellow fins. Even farther south, a new and similar species, Tanichthys micagemmae, was identified in 2001, from a wide, shallow, swift-moving stream in the Ben Hai River drainage of central Vietnam.
 
Tanichthys was counted among the Danionins until recently, but the genus is distinct enough to be classed now in its own family among Cypriniformes, Tanichthyidae. 
 
Longfin variants dubbed "Meteor Minnows" have been coming and going in the trade since 1956, but the normally crisp colors of this species usually become washed out —and you know how I feel about mutants. Mike Yamamoto, of Hawaii, wrote the detailed story of these long-fin variants in Aquarium Fish, April 1998.
 
Guangdong is the hilly southernmost province of China, tropical in climate, but sub-tropical at higher elevations. White Clouds thrive best at slightly cooler temperatures, in the mid-60s, right down to the low 40s without stress. In an American household, they really don't need a heater at all.
 
Breeding. White Clouds breed like Barbs, but they don't have the same voracious appetite for their own eggs, if you keep them well fed with brine shrimp during spawning. More of the sticky spherical eggs, about 1mm across, will survive if there's some loose well-boiled peat or Java Moss on the tank's bottom. The fish aren't finicky about the softness of the water. I've read about breeding them in "sterile" tanks free of gravel, furnished with that green cellophane grass that fills some Easter baskets. Still, I'd stick to skeins of Java Moss floating from cork bark chunks; the protozoans that cover the surfaces of the moss will provide the best first meals for the fry. Spawning extends over several days, so you could replace the Java Moss every evening and remove it, along with its eggs, to a fry tank with identical water and a mature sponge filter. The eggs hatch and fry appear within 24 hours; better look close: Mike Yamamoto describes them as "tiny black splinters."
 
Links.White Clouds head Mark Owen's page of cool-water "tropical" fishes .
 
Robyn Rhudy devotes a full page to breeding and fry care of rosy red minnows, quite relevant to White Cloud breeding, with  links to further information.
 
There's a good brief 1997 article written by Dave Sanford for the Greater Seattle Aquarium Society magazine, "White Cloud Mountain Minnows". 
 
Ron Finlayson reported to the Boston Aquarium Society 's Daphnian, May 1999,  on his success leaving White Clouds outdoors in summer to breed in a Massacusetts garden.
 
Tanichthys albonubes at Wikipedia. Tanichthys albonubes at FishBase.