Peqaboo series
Angelfish are graceful cichlids that need a tall tank, warm stable water and carefully chosen tank mates , they will eat small fish and can turn territorial when paired. This hub covers tank shape, water, pairing behaviour, the tank mate traps to avoid and everyday health checks.
Corydoras are peaceful, social bottom-dwellers that need soft sand, a real group of their own kind and food that actually reaches the floor. This hub covers substrate, group size, feeding, water and the barbel and behaviour checks that tell you your cories are thriving.
Guppies are hardy, colourful livebearers that make a great first fish, but they still need cycled water, a heater and steady parameters. This hub walks you through tank size, water quality, feeding, breeding surprises and the everyday signs that tell you a guppy is thriving.
Tetras are peaceful, colourful schooling fish that shine in planted community tanks , but only when kept in real groups and given soft, stable water. This hub covers schooling numbers, water needs, the best and worst tank mates, feeding and the signs of a healthy shoal.
A reef tank is one of the most rewarding but demanding aquariums you can keep. Success comes from stable water chemistry, the right gear and patience, not luck. This honest beginner guide covers the equipment, costs, timeline and habits that decide whether your first reef thrives or crashes.
Always condition new tap water before changes and top-ups. Chlorine and chloramine burn gills and can crash your biofilter.
Overstocking is the most common beginner mistake and the fastest route to disease and death. This guide explains why the old inch-per-gallon rule fails, how to think about bioload, swimming space and adult size, and how to stock a tank gradually so your filter can keep up.
Live plants make a healthier, better-looking tank, but the setup order matters. This beginner guide walks through choosing substrate, matching light, and picking forgiving starter plants, so your first planted aquarium takes root and thrives instead of melting away.
The single biggest mistake new fishkeepers make is adding fish to a fresh tank. This guide walks you through setting up the aquarium and completing the nitrogen cycle first, so your water can safely process fish waste from day one and your first fish survive.
Think betta fish can thrive in a tiny bowl? Think again. Discover why a 5-gallon heated and filtered tank is the true minimum for a healthy, happy betta, and learn how to set up the perfect modern habitat.
Deciding between a saltwater and freshwater aquarium? Read our honest comparison of costs, maintenance, equipment, and difficulty to choose your next setup.
Almost any fish will eat baby shrimp, and many will hunt adults too. If you want a shrimp colony to thrive alongside fish, the choice of tank mates is everything. This comparison covers the safest species, the ones to avoid, and how heavy planting changes the odds.
There is no spay or neuter procedure for pet fish, so population control in livebearers is done through stocking decisions. This guide covers why females keep producing broods after one mating, how overstocking becomes a water quality failure, and the practical ways to keep numbers under control.
Fish are silent, but aquarium equipment is not. Learn which part of the tank is making the noise, how to decouple vibration from furniture and floors, and why turning the filter off at night is never the answer.
A practical companion-care guide for aquarium fish that treats the tank as a living ecosystem: it shows how water chemistry, the nitrogen cycle, weekly maintenance, quarantine, and simple daily observation all work together to prevent disease and keep your fish thriving for years.
Fish cannot warm or cool themselves, so their whole biology runs at whatever temperature you give them. This guide covers the right ranges, the gear that keeps them stable, safe water-change technique, and how to handle a heater failure without losing your fish.
A practical guide to breeding aquarium fish, covering livebearers versus egg-layers, conditioning your pair, setting up a safe breeding tank, protecting eggs and fry, and knowing when a swollen or fungused clutch means it is time to call an aquatic vet.
Shrimp are arthropods and snails are molluscs, and both are killed by substances fish tolerate easily. Copper is the classic case: it disrupts invertebrate gill ion regulation, and it binds to substrate and silicone and leaches back for months, so a treated tank may never be safe again. This covers the products that ca
Fish do not greet, they have learned that a shape at the glass predicts food. This explains the conditioning behind the rush, the differentials that look identical to it including gasping and flaring at reflections, and the three things visitors reliably do to an aquarium: overfeed it, tap it and unplug it.
Fish do not vocalise for company, but keeping a shoaling species alone or in too small a group causes visible chronic stress. This guide explains why shoaling is a survival mechanism, what a settled group looks like, how group size distributes aggression, and which species must be kept alone instead.
Fish have no socialisation window. Their social needs are set by species. Learn which fish need a group, why aggression usually appears at maturity, and how to quarantine and introduce new tankmates without importing disease.
Fish escape upward, not outward. Covering the whole water surface including equipment cut-outs prevents most deaths, while repeat jumping points to a water quality or oxygen problem.
Zoning for fish happens inside a single tank, where every occupant shares the same water and territory. This guide covers compatibility by temperament, adult size and water needs, breaking sight lines, shoal sizes, and spotting chronic harassment before it kills.
A pH crash is a buffer failure, not a pH problem. Carbonate hardness is consumed daily by biological filtration and decomposition, and when it runs out the pH slides, the filter stalls and ammonia accumulates as ammonium. This explains how to read the warning in your KH trend, how to tell a crash from a CO2 swing or an
Position decides more about fish health than equipment does. Sun through glass creates a daily temperature swing, warm water holds less oxygen, and a filled tank is a heavy point load on a small footprint. Covers the sunlight and heat problem, floor structure and levelness, electrical safety, and what changes on a balc
Aquarium salt does three things: it protects against nitrite at the gill, it reduces the osmotic work a damaged fish does, and it kills the free-swimming stages of some external parasites. It does not treat internal infection, internal parasites, dropsy or buoyancy problems. Two facts decide whether it helps or harms:
Pale pits on the face and a pale eroded line down the flank are head and lateral line erosion, called hole-in-the-head in cichlids. The lesions trace the sensory canal system, and the causes are multiple: nitrate accumulation, an incomplete diet, chronic stress and, in cichlids, intestinal flagellates. Covers the look-
Fish rest at night without closing their eyes, and they need a predictable dark period to do it. This guide explains photoperiod, normal resting postures by species group, the early morning oxygen dip, and how to set a lighting routine that stops night-time panic swimming.
More aquarium fish are killed by treatment than by the disease that prompted it. This guide covers measuring the tank's true water volume rather than its printed capacity, removing carbon so the dose is not stripped out, raising aeration because most treatments lower dissolved oxygen, and the species and systems that n
Pet fish are not vaccinated, so quarantine is the preventive milestone that replaces it. This guide covers how to set up a quarantine tank, what normal arrival stress looks like, what to watch for week by week, and why blanket medicating a healthy new fish is the wrong default.
Fish detect a storm through their whole body, and some species hear far better than others, but the noise is rarely what harms them. Oxygen, temperature, rain chemistry and power failure are the real risks, and jumping is the main injury. This guide covers the mechanisms and a practical plan for a noisy night or an out
A fish cannot be dehydrated and cannot be encouraged to drink. What it does manage constantly is the flow of water and salts across its gills. This guide explains hardness, buffering, and why choosing species that suit your tap water beats chemical adjustment.
Dwarf shrimplets hatch as miniature adults and graze biofilm from every surface, which is why they survive in mature tanks and vanish in clean new ones. This guide covers building grazing surface, feeding the tank rather than the shrimp, failed moults, and the copper products that kill invertebrates outright.
GH builds shells, KH holds pH steady, and TDS is a summary reading that cannot tell you what changed. This guide separates the three, explains why Neocaridina and Caridina need different water, and shows why a fast correction kills more shrimp than the wrong reading did.
Most aquarium fish that die at home were already in trouble when they were bought, or were the wrong species for the tank before it was filled. This covers why the shop's shared plumbing matters more than the individual fish, the head-to-tail check you can do through the glass, the feeding test that beats every other t
A dead fish is a load on a closed system as well as a loss: decomposition consumes oxygen and releases ammonia into the water the survivors are breathing. Learn the order of the first hour, which findings on the body are real and which happen to every fish after death, how the pattern of deaths separates an oxygen cras
Fish have no nails and nothing that needs trimming. The handling task that really causes bleeding is catching and moving a fish. This guide covers container capture, soft nets, protecting the slime coat, and the infections that show up days after a rough transfer.
A sponge filter is chosen for a shrimp tank because it has no impeller and grows biofilm shrimp can graze. The filter is the bacteria inside the foam, not the plastic: it has to be cycled before shrimp arrive, squeezed out in tank water rather than rinsed under the tap, and never replaced with a fresh sponge. Any other
