When you decide that you want to set up a tropical fish tank, one of the most important things to consider is fish compatibility.
Fish can be compared to people.
There are lots of them out there with different sizes and personalities, and putting the wrong two together can be disastrous.
With fish, it can even be a little more dramatic, because fish eat one another.
When checking out compatibility, just do a little research like you are now.
The first consideration is what kind of environment you wish to create in your aquarium.
Some people want a happy environment where all of the fish get along and everything is peaceful.
This kind of scene can be relaxing to watch and can even relieve your stress.
If you want peaceful fish, your goal will be to set up a community tank, where fish live in different levels of water and all of the fish get along with one another.
You will want to have some surface feeders at the top level.
These are fun to watch when they eat.
The middle level of fish should be some type of schooling fish, which means fish who are accustomed to living together in groups.
You will also want bottom dwellers, who stay down on the gravel and eat all of the food particles that drift down when the other fish are feeding.
If you want a community tank, here are some fish to choose from who will all get along well together and be exciting to watch: neon tetra, corydoras catfish, rosy tetra, hatchet fish, cardinal tetra, Australian rainbow fish, Swordtail, rosy barb and Plecostomus.
Some people aren't terribly interested in peaceful fish.
They would rather have some larger and more aggressive fish in their tank.
Some fish are aggressive to all other fish while some are only aggressive to those of their own species.
Aggressive fish are larger and require a bigger tank.
Lots of times when people buy aggressive fish they devote an entire tank to one species.
Here you might choose various types of catfish, piranhas, sharks, or cichlids.
You might decide that you want nothing in your aquarium besides live-bearing fish.
These could include guppies, platys, black mollies and swordtails.
You would have no problems here with compatibility.
You could have an entire tank with nothing else but 35 colorful neon tetras.
Or a whole tank full of fish from one region, such as South America or Southeast Asia.
There really are no limits on the types or number of fish that you can keep other than the size of your tank and whether you have established fish compatibility or not.
If you haven't, you will most likely have some very unhappy fish.