Find a fish · Livestock tool

Find aquarium fish that fit your tank

Set what you actually have. The tool answers live, with no button to press. It shows the species that fit, and then it shows you every species it took away and the exact constraint that took it, because the constraint is the thing worth learning.

The heater filter is the one that matters, and it opens this page rather than closing it. It splits the whole catalog in two. Set it to no and you are looking at the subtropical list, which in a heated Yerevan flat means an unheated tank sitting at 19 to 23 degrees. That is a keeping temperature, not a compromise: 17 of the 110 species catalogued here need no heater at all, and seven of the seventeen ask for 60 liters or less110. A heater, and the power to run it all winter, comes off the list before anything is bought. Then look at the last column on those cards. Not one of the standard unheated-tank species is stocked in Armenia. Not the white cloud minnow, not the gold barb, not the peppered cory, not the zebra danio, not the paradise fish, not the weather loach. The country's specialist trade is built entirely for heated tropical tanks, in a place where a heated tropical tank is the harder project. That is a description of the shelves, not of what is obtainable: private sales of tanks, equipment and fish move through the 7,900 member Armenian aquarists group far more than through any shop13, and the section on where to buy says how to ask there.

The tank you have

Liters decides the bioload. Base length decides whether the fish can swim. They are two different questions and the tool asks both.

Every minimum volume on this page is the figure for the species kept in the group it has to be kept in.34 So a shoaling fish drops out of a small tank quietly, and you never learn that the reason was the group and not the animal. Tick that box and those species come back, each one saying how many it needs and how much water that takes.

Adult size

Maximum published adult length, not the size in the shop tank.1

Equipment you have

Saying you own a wavemaker or an air pump never removes a species. It only lets the current-dwelling fish through. Saying you do not own one removes them, which is the honest direction.

Your water

Published hardness and pH ranges.1 A species stays in if its range overlaps yours at all.

Where it lives in the tank
Group behavior

An obligate school is not a preference. It is how the species regulates stress, and welfare fails without the numbers. A facultative shoaler tightens up when alarmed and disperses otherwise. A shoal is a social aggregation without coordinated swimming.

What was taken away, and by what

Shown on purpose, not filtered out

The 21 species in this catalog that are routinely mis-sold.910

Check the adult size before you buy. The shop will offer them anyway, at 5 cm, in a tank of their own kind, priced like everything else. The only defence is knowing the adult size before you walk in.

How the tool decides

The rules, and one of them is the reason this is not just a filtered list.

An unknown is never a no. Where a figure is not published, the species stays in the results and the tool says how many species it could not judge. FishBase leaves the hardness field empty for a great many fish,1 and a tool that treated an empty field as a failure would quietly delete half the catalog and look confident doing it.

Nothing is deleted silently. Every species removed is kept, grouped by the first constraint that removed it, and readable in one click. If your 30 liter tank takes out nine species, you should be able to see which nine and read the sentence that explains each one. That is the part that teaches.

The group is the unit, not the fish. Every minimum volume on this page assumes the species is kept in its minimum group, and the difficulty score reads the same records the other way round. One cardinal tetra would live in a 20 liter tank. One cardinal tetra is not a thing you are allowed to keep, so the number that matters is the one for ten of them.

And the heater rule is derived, so here it is in the open. A species is marked as needing a heater when the low end of its published temperature range is above 18 degrees.110 That line comes from the room, not from the fish: an unheated tank in a heated Yerevan flat sits at 19 to 23 degrees through the winter. The line reproduces the standard unheated species list exactly, which is the check that it is the right line.

What the catalog holds78129105

110
species records, each with its source
21
flagged as routinely mis-sold, never hidden
17
keepable with no heater in a Yerevan flat
3
of those unheated species stocked in Armenia, and every one of the three is on the mis-sold list
2.9-10.9
dGH, measured Yerevan tap, by district
Choose for the room, the tap water, and the fish at adult size. An empty field means the published source gives no figure. Open the full species list to see every field and sort the complete record.
A shoal of cardinal tetras spreads over a stone ridge carpeted in moss and hairgrass, tall ribbon leaves to the left and red stem plants in the foreground.
Photo: chuttersnap · Unsplash

A note on the numbers this hub will not pretend about. Minimum tank sizes and minimum shoal sizes are almost never measured facts. They are trade guidance, care sheet convention, or an argument from adult size and behavior. Where a figure comes from the UK trade body OATA, or from Seriously Fish, the record says so.34 Where it was argued here it says that too. Treat every minimum on this page as the smallest number this hub is willing to publish, not as a threshold somebody tested.

Where can I buy one

One verified specialist shop, one shop with no web presence, and a Facebook group where the actual trade happens.

Armenia's aquarium trade runs through specialist shops, general pet stores, classifieds, and keeper-to-keeper exchange. Check the current listing before traveling, because live stock changes quickly.

The specialist

Gazanik, Գազանիկ. The only verified specialist aquarium shop in the country, and better stocked than expected: rimless low-iron tanks from 9 to 540 liters, WRGB lighting, CO2, substrate and about 39 fish species.6

Arshakunyats 54/49, Yerevan. +374 55 555 735.6 gazanik.am

The other shop

Aquaman, Ակվաման. A real fish shop in the national business directory, with no website and no captures in the Internet Archive at all.12 What it stocks is unknown, because no source we could reach says.

Surb Grigor Lusavorchi 12/10, Kentron, Yerevan.12 Somebody needs to walk in and look.

Where the trade actually happens

The Facebook group. Private sales, tanks, equipment and fish move through the 7,900 member Armenian aquarists group far more than through any shop.13 If a species on this page is not on a shelf, that is where to ask for it.

The community page lists every group, shop and maker we could verify, with what we checked and what we did not.

One correction worth carrying. Aquavita is not an aquarium shop. It is a natural sparkling mineral water bottled at Jermuk and sold by the Kilikia group.14 It comes up in conversation because the name sounds right, and it is the wrong door.

  1. Froese, R. and Pauly, D. (eds.) (2026). FishBase, version 2025-2. Maximum length, temperature, pH, hardness and native distribution for every species in the catalogue. fishbase.se
  2. IUCN (2025). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, version 2025-2. Every conservation category shown on a card. iucnredlist.org
  3. Ornamental Aquatic Trade Association (OATA). Species care sheets. The published trade minimum volumes and group sizes, and the working temperature ranges marked as trade guidance. ornamentalfish.org
  4. Seriously Fish. Species profiles. Base dimensions rather than volumes, which is the more useful figure and the reason this tool asks for a footprint. seriouslyfish.com
  5. Shahinyan, H. V. (2005). On the hydrogeochemical characteristics of some drinking waters supplying the city of Yerevan. Proceedings of NAS RA, Earth Sciences LVIII(1), 41 to 45. Sampling 2002 to 2004, four Yerevan districts and the source springs. The GH 2.9 to 10.9 and pH 6.0 to 7.3 behind the Yerevan tap preset. arar.sci.am PDF
  6. Gazanik livestock category feeds. The shop's own WooCommerce category listing, paged to exhaustion, 9 September 2026. The 39 fish species, 5 crustaceans and 3 molluscs behind every "in Armenia" line in the catalogue. gazanik.am
  7. list.am classifieds, Pets and Animals. Searched 9 September 2026 in Armenian, Russian and English for every unheated candidate species. Goldfish and koi are abundant. White cloud minnow, weather loach, paradise fish, medaka and shrimp all return zero.
  8. Kottelat, M. Catalogue of the inland fishes of Southeast Asia. The authority behind most Southeast Asian distributions in the catalogue.
  9. FishBase and Seriously Fish. Species size, temperature, water range, group size, and minimum-tank references used by the finder.
  10. Fish care and local availability reference. The temperature tolerance table, the adult size and group size table, and what is and is not stocked in Armenia.
  11. Shahinyan, H. V. (2005), Yerevan drinking-water chemistry. District-level hardness and pH figures used to match fish to local tap water.
  12. Spyur business directory. Record for «ԱԿՎԱՄԱՆ» ակվարիումի ձկների խանութ, Aquaman Aquarium Fish Shop. spyur.am company 45675, and the directory search for aquarium at spyur.am. The only source for the Aquaman address; the shop has no website and no Internet Archive captures.
  13. Ակվարիումիստների Ակումբ Հայաստանում / Клуб Аквариумистов Армении, Facebook group. facebook.com/groups/AquariumistClubArmenia. Member count read from the group page, about 7,900, checked 8 September 2026. A platform-reported figure, not an audited one.
  14. Aquavita. aquavita.am. The natural sparkling mineral water bottled at Jermuk and sold by the Kilikia group. Checked so the name could be ruled out as an aquarium business.

Continue

Where to go next.

The whole fish table

The same records with every field showing, sortable, nothing filtered out.

Bring aquarium fish home safely

Plan the journey home and settle new fish into appropriate water.

Livestock

What an unheated tank can actually hold, and why nobody keeps a cold tank.

Materials and water

The three numbers the finder filters on, and where a Yerevan tap sits against them.

Choosing a group size

Choose a social group from the species and the behavior you want to see.