The species list · Livestock

Aquarium fish species: compare size and care needs

The finder is for deciding. This is for reading. Every species the hub holds, with every field it holds, sortable on any column. Nothing is ever removed from this page, including the species that should not be sold, because you cannot judge a catalog you cannot see.

Read the empty cells. Where a figure says not published, that is the honest state of the record and not a gap we forgot to fill. FishBase leaves hardness and pH blank for a large share of ornamental species, and several common shop fish have no published temperature range at all. A page that filled those in with a plausible number would look more complete and be worth less. Under each row is the reason the heater column says what it says, and the sources behind that row.

Every field

Click any heading to sort. Click it again to reverse it, and once more to go back to the order the file was written in.

Species with no published figure for the column you sorted on always sink to the bottom, in both directions, because a missing figure is not a small figure. The table scrolls sideways and the species name stays legible. On a phone this is a wide table and it is meant to be: the alternative is hiding columns, and hiding columns is what this page exists not to do.
Three fish share a sand bottom scattered with dead brown leaves: a striped barb above, a dark spotted bristlenose pleco resting on a leaf, and a pale albino corydoras in the foreground.
Photo: Ilias Triantos · Unsplash

What SL and TL mean, because the difference is why quoted sizes disagree. SL is standard length, measured from the nose to the base of the tail. TL is total length, nose to the tip of the tail. On a fish with a long forked tail those are very different numbers, and databases mix them freely. Every size in this table carries its measurement type. If two sources give you different adult sizes for the same fish, this is usually the reason before anything else is.

How to read it

Four columns carry more weight than the rest.

Heater

Derived, not read. A species is marked yes when the low end of its published temperature range is above 18 degrees.18 The line comes from the room: an unheated tank in a heated Yerevan flat sits at 19 to 23 degrees through the winter. Sort on this column and the catalog splits into tropical and unheated, which is the single most consequential split in the whole hobby for your aquarium in Armenia.

Min liters and min base

Both assume the species is kept in its minimum group. One fish of a shoaling species fitting a tank is not a permission to keep one. Base length is the more useful of the two figures for anything that swims laps, and it is the figure Seriously Fish publishes where it publishes anything.43

Group behavior

Obligate school means coordinated schooling is how the species regulates stress, and welfare fails without the numbers.8 Facultative means it tightens up when alarmed and disperses otherwise. Shoal means a social aggregation with no coordinated swimming. Solitary means one fish, or one pair, and more is a fight.

In Armenia

Gazanik means the shop listed it in its own catalog on 9 September 2026.6 list.am means it appears in the classifieds.9 Not stocked means neither, and it is the most common value in the table by a wide margin.

The pattern in the mis-sold rows

Sort by adult size, descending, and read the top of the table.

Almost everything at the top is flagged. That is the whole mechanism: a fish is sold at 5 or 8 centimeters, priced like the fish beside it, and nothing on the shelf says it reaches a meter. Adult size is the single lookup that prevents most of this, and it is free.

The pattern in the heater column

Sort by heater and then read the In Armenia column.

The unheated block is nearly empty on the right hand side. The standard unheated species, the white cloud minnow, the gold barb, the peppered cory, the zebra danio, the paradise fish and the weather loach, are none of them stocked in the country.69 The trade here is built for heated tropical tanks, in a place where a heated tropical tank is the harder project.

The pattern in the hardness column

Neon tetra is published at 1 to 2 dGH.1 Yerevan tap runs 2.9 to 10.9.5

Those do not overlap at the soft end, and no amount of good intent changes that. Sorting by dGH is the fastest way to see which species your tap water suits and which one would need reverse osmosis water bought or made every week for the life of the fish.

Where can I buy one

Most of this table is not for sale in Armenia, and the honest answer is a Facebook group before it is a shop.

Local stock changes quickly. Open the current shop or classified listing before traveling.

The specialist

Gazanik, Գազանիկ. The only verified specialist aquarium shop in Armenia. About 39 fish species, plus tanks, lighting, CO2 and substrate.6

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

The other shop

Aquaman, Ակվաման. A registered fish shop with no website and no Internet Archive record at all.10 Its stock is genuinely unknown to us.

Surb Grigor Lusavorchi 12/10, Kentron, Yerevan.10

Private sales

The Facebook groups. Where fish, plants, tanks and equipment actually change hands in Armenia. If a species in this table is not on a shelf, this is where to ask.

The community page has every group and maker we could verify.

Aquavita is not an aquarium shop. It is a sparkling mineral water bottled at Jermuk and sold by the Kilikia group.11 The name comes up because it sounds right, and it is the wrong door.

  1. Froese, R. and Pauly, D. (eds.) (2026). FishBase, version 2025-2. Maximum length and measurement type, temperature, pH, hardness and native distribution. fishbase.se
  2. IUCN (2025). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, version 2025-2. Every category in the IUCN column. iucnredlist.org
  3. Ornamental Aquatic Trade Association (OATA). Species care sheets. Published trade minimum volumes and group sizes. ornamentalfish.org
  4. Seriously Fish. Species profiles. Base dimensions rather than volumes. 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. arar.sci.am PDF
  6. Gazanik livestock category feeds. The shop's own product listing, read 9 September 2026. gazanik.am
  7. Oldfield, R. and Murphy, K. Space and environmental enrichment trial in Betta splendens. The rare case of an aquarium husbandry question with a controlled study behind it.
  8. FishBase, Seriously Fish, Armenian shop listings, and Yerevan tap-water records. The combined reference behind the species measurements, local availability, and water-fit fields in this table.
  9. list.am classifieds, Pets and Animals. list.am. Searched 9 September 2026 in Armenian, Russian and English for every species in the table. The only evidence behind any "list.am" value in the In Armenia column.
  10. Spyur business directory. Record for «ԱԿՎԱՄԱՆ» ակվարիումի ձկների խանութ, Aquaman Aquarium Fish Shop. spyur.am company 45675. The only source for the Aquaman address; the shop has no website and no Internet Archive captures.
  11. Aquavita. aquavita.am. The 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.

Find a fish

The finder, if you would rather filter than sort.

Forgiving to demanding

The same records scored for how forgiving each one is, with the method printed.

Livestock

The unheated subset, and the difference between surviving cold and being kept cold.

The whole plant table

The same treatment for plants: every field showing, nothing filtered out.

Shoaling and schooling

What the group column means, why sixty one of these rows say convention, and what happened when we went looking for the source of the minimum of six.