Aquariums are an excellent way to bring a piece of nature into your home or office. Tropical fish, with their bright colors and lively personalities, make for great additions to small aquariums. However, not all fish are well-suited for small aquariums

Caring for these small cichlids in the home aquarium is not to demanding. To get the best colour, behaviour and breeding it is best to try and replicate their natural environment. Using readily available aquarium sand, you can create a similar setup to the amazon basin. With the addition of some driftwood and branches along with some smooth river stones and aquatic plants your fish will be very happy.

Very quickly it was apparent to me that I needed to keep these animals in an appropriate sized aquarium due to their nature and overall size they got and luckily enough for me I scored my first "big" aquarium not long after I started looking.

From there I thought to myself it wasn't fair to have these Kribs in with a natural predator regardless if he was interested in them or not. Soon to TradeMe I went and I bought my self a second hand Aqua one 620t which had super sweet blue lights. So in the tank (uncycled, rookie mistake) went my Kribs.  And this was the making of my first aquarium.

Probably the most important part of keeping an aquarium is learning about the cycle. They joy with cycling is you can make it as complicated or basic as you wish, and for the sake of this we will make it as basic as possible for you.

The simplest way of explaining the cycle is that is makes your aquarium safe for your fish. It does that via good bacteria within your filter breaking down nasty stuff and turning it into something that is less nasty for your wet pets. This process goes from ammonia (very nasty) to nitrite (also very nasty) on to nitrate (only nasty at high levels). The idea is to not put fish into an aquarium with ammonia or nitrite but to wait until this process has gone through to nitrate. Depending on the method you use to cycle your aquarium this could take anywhere from 3 days up to 6 weeks.

Bottled bacteria is a good way of speeding up a cycle for a new aquarium (please see cycling section) using these products can shorten a cycle down from upwards of 6 weeks to as little as 3-7 days. If using a bottled bacteria to cycle a fresh aquarium, please note although your aquarium is cycled and ready for wet pets, it is still a very immature system, so slowly adding fish is still the best option.

 

Plant selection is also very important, all too often pet shops sell non-aquatic plants as aquatic plants, this is a recipe for disaster as they will not last long submersed underwater in your aquarium. We at the fish room do not carry not aquatic plants, to give you the best possible chance of having your plants survive.

These fish can be kept in a community aquarium but it has been noted they can pester other sedentary or long-fined fish. It is best to keep them in groups of 6-10 due to their complex hierarchy but also because they will become withdrawn or even aggressive if kept singularly and have been known to pull eye balls from corydora if group numbers are to low.

Without a word of a lie, these tropical fish are amazing.  I have had a couple of groups in the past and I have never found them overly aggressive which is nice for a Malawi Cichlid

Unlike most barbs that can be nippy and aggressive, cherry barbs are the opposite, being very peaceful and suitable for most community aquarium set ups.