Small Rainbow Fish: Colorful Species for your Freshwater Aquarium Tank!

Well, here we are for another episode of the fish files. And thank you so much for subscribing. We already have 15,000 plus subscribers and some of the views have had several hundred thousand people, particularly algae eaters. So if you haven't seen it yet, algae eaters is a big hit. So a small catfish for the aquarium. I got employees on the other side of the wall here chuckling over some aquarium plants for some some reason. So please ignore the audio if you hear that. But today we are going to explore the world of rainbow fish. Milano tenaday. That's the overall classification for rainbow fish. And if you need to know classically what a rainbow fish is, it has, if I can say this right, a distal overgrowth in the maxillary teeth. I think I said that right. Anyways, and and different portions of anal fins and and dorsal fins. But that's what identifies classically a rainbow fish. When we see rainbow fish in the aquarium store, we know exactly what we're looking at because they have generally flat bodies, oval in shape and a rainbow color pattern going along the body. So we're going to be exploring some of those different hues of the rainbow fish. And in general, I just want to talk about a few all encompassing points about the rainbow fish, with the exception of one. They're all great community fish, terrific community fish. Let me tell you the one. So you don't I don't want to hold you in suspense. Regular Australian rainbow fish. Most common name you can apply to a rainbow fish, Australian rainbow fish. That's their common name. It's also the cheapest rainbow fish. Somewhat pretty, but I think it's also the ugliest rainbow fish. And it's the meanest. These guys act like piranhas to small fish and shrimp in the fish tank. So I don't advise Australian rainbow fish, even if they're free. Don't get them. All the rest of these guys, they come from Australia, quite a few of them, but they're not common names, not Australian rainbow fish. Rainbow fish is about 112 species. A couple dozen are common to the aquarium trade. I know we always carry about a dozen here in the warehouse. And in fact, I have like 10 different ones to show you on this episode. So we'll move through it pretty quick. When you go to the pet store and you look for rainbow fish, there's two basic groups of them. One is the Milano Tania. Those ones get about four inches maximum size. Generally in the fish tank, you'll see them three inches. The males are really strikingly beautiful. And the females usually have a few rainbowish colors hues to them, but not generally colorful, generally a silver fish. You really want males and females in the aquarium stores. And we as a wholesaler insist everyone purchase 50-50 males and females, because if you don't, if you just got the males, what are you going to do with all these silver females? Help the aquarium trade. And when you buy your rainbow fish, get even males and females for us. The other half I was going to say, which is the Pseudomogyl. Pseudomogyl are smaller rainbow fish, pork tails, all those smaller rainbow fish that we'll also look at after we look at the Milano Tania are also terrific community fish. But let's start with the big ones. OK, so this first one we want to talk about is the turquoise rainbow. That's the Milano Tania. It gets about this big. One thing nice about the turquoise rainbow is the males and the females both have a nice turquoise blue appearance. The only other rainbow fish I'm aware of that has this like overall blue appearance is the Kamaka rainbow. But the Kamaka rainbow is a little bit more expensive, probably about twice the price. And I prefer the turquoise. I find them a little hardier than the Kamaka rainbows. All the rainbows we're going to be showing live in a habitat of around 80 degrees and a pH of around seven. So you don't want to have anything 72 degrees or below for your rainbow fish or 7.5 and above on pH. If you want to keep them happy. I've had them tolerate up to eight, but then you're talking about individual species and and and how hardy those were. And I just look at that parameter. It's around 7.5 and 78 degrees. You got a happy rainbow. And that's also a good parameter for general community fish. So these guys will get along with any other fish in the fish tank. Don't put them in with obviously predator fish or aggressive African cichlids, but you can put them in with medium sized, smaller South American cichlids, tetras. This is a since these guys tolerate higher temperatures. These are also good discus tank mates. So these are good for a discus tank, too. They they they do tend to school together, but they are on the expensive side. So if you want to get six of these guys in the aquarium store, you're talking probably about 100 bucks. But they're worth it. They're beautiful and they do. They do last several years and they eat flake food. You don't have any do any special preparation for them. Beautiful implanted tanks. These guys originate in New Guinea. They're now grown in Florida. And Florida has beautiful breeders of Melanotania rainbow fish. So this is the turquoise rainbow. So I want to move on to the most popular rainbow fish in the aquarium trade, which is the Bozomani rainbow. These ones in particular came from a breeder in Florida. They are in the wild, often caught in New Guinea. They're not as not as regulated the trade in New Guinea as it is in South America. For instance, I'd avoid getting wild fish from from the New Guinea area. Australia, great regulators. But these guys originated in the Indonesia region. If you want to keep keep this species safe in the wild, get them from Florida. We get all our Bozomani rainbows from Florida. They have beautiful color and the females even have a lot of yellow. This is a male and a female. In here, the males are a little stressed because I moved them around to get them from the warehouse to get them in for the show. The males have blue and oranges. The females feature just a little bit of yellow on their body. They all have a bit of a band that goes down the middle. In fact, all rainbow fish do. Their family name, Melano tenidae. Melano means black in Latin. Tenidae means banded. So it just means it has a black band down the down the center of the fish. Tons of fish in our trade that has it. These guys just happen to get the scientific name for it. And even when you get small ones, you'll see that little band. Another striking thing about the color patterns on all these rainbow fish, even though they're different, they have a that rainbow kind of commonality to them. The reason for that is they're in streams. And if you picture, you know, the the Darwin evolution of these guys, they're in the sun shining down. You see all those color patterns in the stream. They don't want to get eaten by predators. So the ones that survive and don't get eaten by predators are the ones that get the best camouflage development, depending on where they are in the streams and lagoons and so forth in Australia and in the Indonesia areas and Madagascar for the Madagascar rainbow. You get a little different color pattern on the fish that looks like the reflection of the sunlight going through the stream. So that's kind of neat. Little evolutionary feature of that you get to witness. You get to you see several hundred years of revolution in your living room. This is the Bosmani rainbow. This is a nice, colorful little rainbow fish. It's again, I don't know if the lighting and the color, it's not showing its color pattern as well, but it's got reds, browns and blacks. And it's called the Trifasciatus rainbow fish. It comes from Australia, just like the Australian rainbow fish, which you don't want. You know, this is an Australian rainbow fish. It's called the Trifasciatus, which you do want. If you want to see a whole big pack of these guys, they have these on display for in Steinhardt Aquarium or the California Academy of Sciences Aquarium up in the San Francisco area. So that's a nice, nice place to see rainbow fish. And these guys grow to about three and a half inches maximum size. The females have that three bar pattern, but don't get as much reds and rusty colors on their body. Otherwise, they're both two very pretty fish. Trifasciatus rainbow fish are usually about twelve bucks in the pet store, $11.99 typically. All right. This is this is a good example of what rainbow Milano Tenio species of rainbows look like when they're in the juvenile state. We have a male and a female, and they both look basically like colorless female fish in here as they grow older. If you look up the earring or producer, we'd be able to show a picture of an adult area in red rainbow. Thanks. They get a deep, beautiful, solid red pattern. Females stay a rusty brownish color, but still very nice. Both both have the same body conformation, kind of a little snout with a big round body. But at the juvenile stage, if you're going to find them in a pet store, they're going to look like this, just colorless. But that's because they need to stay colorless so they don't get eaten by larger predators as they get older. And they need to breed. They need to show what they got and they get their big colors. They are dimorphic. Obviously, we already talked about that, but the males are colorful. Females, not so much. Now, these are called Irian red rainbows, or just when you see red rainbow fish, it usually refers to this one, the Irian red rainbow. It's not Iranian. There's not a drop of Persian blood in these guys. It's Irian is the second largest island in the New Guinea archipelago. So it's named after that island in Indonesia. It has nothing to do with Iran, Irian, not Iranian. And so these guys are bred now, captive bred in Singapore. And so we got these actually from Singapore. The ones you get from Florida are called Millennium. Millennium red rainbows, I think, are just as outstanding. But because it's only one breeder with one pond, he often runs out of stock in the season. These guys are always available. That's why they're more common. Price points about the same for both of them. When it's a juvenile stage and they're colorless, though, you shouldn't be paying more than what do I sell them for? You should be paying more than twelve, fourteen dollars in the store. But you'll be paying double that for one that's sized up and has good color. All right. Next, we move on to the yellow rainbow fish. Yellow rainbow fish come from New Guinea, now bred in Florida. These are a beautiful example of Florida bred yellow rainbow fish. This would be a medium, large size. The male shows a lot of yellow. The female, again, not so much. And as they get older, all rainbow fish start showing deeper, richer colors. In this case, these would retail in a pet store. They're a little a little more expensive. These and one immense this or emerald rainbow fish. Very similar rainbow fish. Both retail for around twenty four or twenty five dollars in the aquarium store. Not that cheap, but really, really, really pretty. These were discovered by Herbert Axelrod. He didn't just go down to South America. He went all over the world looking for new species, just like his companion, Heiko Blair. In fact, I just sold out of the hair eyes. Those are another really pretty rainbow fish from the same region. In fact, they discovered rainbow fish together when they were in Papua New Guinea. He he found this yellow one. Heiko Blair found something look like tri fascia with a little more color. And that's the hair. If you ever see blue hair, I rainbow fish. These guys are both discovered together on the same little camping trip. So these are melatonin, melatonin, axelrod or yellow. This is actually working out well. I asked Griselda out in the warehouse to grab some samples of our rainbow fish. And this is in the way it just turned out. We just went through the melatonin, melatonin, a larger rainbow fish. And now we're going to move over to the pseudomobile, which is a smaller rainbow fish. And right in between them, we have the neon dwarf praecox rainbow. You'll see it called neon dwarf rainbow fish, praecox rainbow fish. So just to be safe, I always say the full common name. Neon dwarf praecox. When maybe I shouldn't say that anymore. Neon dwarf praecox rainbow. So these guys get about only two inches in size. Round body, really a very, very cool rainbow effect on their body, but not any solid deep colors like the red rainbow or emerald or yellow rainbow. But on the bright side, they're cheaper and they are great schooling fish. Beautiful for planted aquariums, aquariums where you have a lot of dark background and you want some nice flashing fish running through there. Neon dwarf praecox rainbow fish are fantastic species for this application. And the males have a little more color than females, but the females also have a nice little rainbow pattern on their body. And they are these guys happen to be the smallest species of Melitania. So that's why it's really neat the way Griselda caught these fish, because this is going to be leading us in from the smallest Melitania to the small Pseudomogyl rainbow fish. OK, now we're going to go into the Pseudomogyl smaller rainbow fish species. I say smaller, but for instance, we're starting with the threadfin rainbow. These guys get two inches and the males get very long flowy fins, which you can see even at this juvenile stage. The males have these really long ventral fins and the females don't. They just look like a normal size fish with the dorsal anal fins. And but not the males. The males have these really long. They're called feather fin or threadfin rainbows for the males. Long, feathery, thready fins. So these guys come from Indonesia. They are bred in Indonesia for the aquarium trade. So you're safe if you buy these guys because they're generally not wild caught. I bring larger species in from Florida. Problem with with the smaller rainbow fish is they go up exponentially in price as you go in size. So I generally I sell to the pet trade. This is juvenile size for these guys. If I have to go to the Florida size, then I'm charging probably triple the price to the stores and they have to double the price to you. And so this thing goes from like eight dollars to 20 bucks, 24 bucks for the same threadfin rainbow. So I suggest you get the juvenile form and just grow it out. Very, very pretty fish. All the rainbow fish I'm showing on this whole episode have already been acclimated to the aquarium trade. They they eat flake food. You don't need any special preparation. You don't need any special water. Just keep a nice temperature for them. They won't tolerate room temperature. You do need a heater with rainbow fish. And you do need to make sure you're not in a region where tap water is like towards eight or you have to treat it. Make sure the tap water that tap that tap water is converted to like a seven four ish pH. When you go to college, if you go to college, study hard. Otherwise, like here, I went as a metallurgical engineer and I didn't study hard enough. And now I'm in the pet trade. You know, one thing I just want to emphasize on these rainbow fish. They are the best community fish. When I when I went to work for Tetra a couple of decades ago and here we are, the number one seller of fish food and fish products in the in the world, I didn't even know what a rainbow fish was. I mean, I knew what angelfish were. Tetra is barbs. Rainbow fish were a new class of fish to me. I now cannot think of having a community aquarium without having rainbow fish as one of the additions to that fish tank. They come in all shapes and sizes up to four inches. All kinds of pretty color patterns. They eat flake food. They don't bother the other fish. They like to stay together. They really are. And they move a lot. They're not just passive. They really are a pretty addition to two aquariums. Saying that this is one more boring ones. It's called the signifer rainbow, but it's not very expensive. Typically, you can buy these for about four or five dollars in the aquarium trade and maybe up to eight dollars, depending on the size in a nano tank where you have good lighting. They really do spark a very nice color pattern. Since they're small and I'm not that interested in them, that's about all I'm going to say about them. When you see pictures of these fish on Google, signifer rainbows look significantly more colorful than what I've ever seen them in person. Just expect a slightly colored, small community fish. That's that's what you pay for. They're they're a five dollar fish. They're not called signifer because they're significantly cheaper. Or I'm not sure why they're called. I'll have to look it up in the next episode. Signifer rainbows. Why are they called signifers? It's a cool word. Not that cool a rainbow fish. Apologize in advance for this one. The forktail rainbow is super, super popular in the aquarium trade. We go through them quickly and so do the breeders. And unfortunately, sometimes during the year, all you can get are dinky, dinky forktail rainbow fish. They're called forktails because the tails have a big fork on them. They have a nice, pretty colorful body. They get only an inch in size. Great for small aquariums, larger aquariums with community fish that are super peaceful. You can put them with anything else that's not going to eat them. But this example I have today, because they're so popular, I had to show you. But this is not a good example. Hopefully, producer, you can make a close up and picture these fish on Google. They are a good facsimile of what you're really going to get eventually in your aquarium when you grow these guys out. And unfortunately, the breeder in Florida was out, too. So this is all they had this month. Normally, I sell these about twice the size. Forktail rainbows have beautiful, bright eyes. Like I said, cool, distinctive forktail and a nice little colorful pattern on their body. Last and my favorite of the small species of rainbowfish, Pseudomogyls are the pasqueye rainbowfish. They're also called the neon blue-eyed luminatus. But these guys grow to basically this size. They get slightly bigger, quarter of an inch bigger than this. These are a terrific import this week. They are a great size already for display in the aquarium. These are not juveniles. These are close to breeding size. So it's it's the picture of these are going to look just like the pictures you see in Google, which is always a nice thing to to have when you're wholesaling fish. It's a good example of males, how the males look compared to the females. In fact, I'm not even going to tell you which one's the male and which one's the female, because at this stage, if I'm doing my job, talk about rainbowfish, you should be able to just spot them. And I have three females and two males in here. These guys will probably sell for around 12 bucks in the aquarium store. There's a similar species called Norman's Lampeye Killie. That one sells for less than half the price. So if you want to get a tight schooling, small rainbowfish and don't want to spend a lot of money, I go with the Norman's Lampeye Killie fish. It's Thursday. We're filming here. And I ran out of stock, so I didn't have any Norman's Lampeye to show you. They look similar to this, except they have a long dorsal fin along their body. Little slimmer body belt. Don't get quite as large as these guys. Very colorful species. These ones, like I said, will will will be around 12 bucks retail. They are beautiful schools of fish. So you get six of these, maybe three males, three females. You'll have a nice, nice addition to your small aquarium. If you have a big aquarium, get 20 of them to have to have a big pocketbook, too. So that concludes my little show on these amazing fish. I hope you liked it. And if you did even slightly enjoy it, please subscribe to my show. And even if you don't subscribe, most importantly, if you like these fish, get an aquarium.