One of the great things about the aquarium hobby is that there is always something new to explore and keep your interest. Most people start out in the hobby with a community tank, perhaps keeping livebearers or tetras. For many, the joy of keeping a peaceful community tank is enough and they never do anything more.
Some find that they want another challenge or perhaps some other aspect of the hobby appeals to them and they expand their fish keeping. Those people find that there are many ways to go: they can keep many other species; they can create planted showpieces; they can attempt to breed a particular species; they can try different water conditions such as salt water or brackish water. The choices are endless.
One of the things often overlooked in the aquarium hobby is the diversity of animals we have to choose from. The average aquarist has thousands of species to choose from for their tanks and this doesn’t include the possibility of adding invertebrates or plants into the mix.
All the choices we have and the various combinations encountered are somewhat equivalent to someone who is interested in mammals raising dogs, cats, sheep, cattle, cheetahs, gazelle and llamas with an elephant thrown in because they look neat! No one would deny that those animals are all different and have different requirements, but to the average person, fish are fish and all of them seem the same. Any experienced or well educated aquarist knows this is not the case and knows that they need to do their research before trying to put something new in their tanks.
This has gotten off the topic a bit but the point is important – before you start keeping something else, you need to know about it because you don’t want to do the equivalent of adding a lion cub in with your flock of sheep.
So are you a community tank lover or are you looking for something else? Are you thinking about or have you already branched out into a new aspect of the hobby? Where are you in your fish keeping? Please leave me a comment below.