Talk:List of freshwater aquarium fish species

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[edit] Older topics

I started adding some structure to the listing, mainly grouping by family. Expansion with more species would imho be better to place in articles on the respective families. -- OlofE

Maybe the list should be just a hiearchy down to the level of families and sub-families/logical groups? For instance, instead of a dozen cichlid species, maybe just say something like this for the cichlid node of the tree:

• Cichlidae
  • African Cichlids
  • American Cichlids

One downside with this is the list is supposed to be targeted towards aquarists but a family page won't be. -- [[User::Zhyla|Zhyla]]

actually, splitting cichlids between american and african might really help aquarists because it is easier to keep african cichlids with african cichlads and americans with americans, they are less likely to beat on each other. and then the african cichlids could even be split up by native lake.. i'm still learning about cichlids but that is what we keep. ours aren't even listed yet, but if/when i find out what they are i will take pictures and add them. we only have african ones.Loosgroov 23:37, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

In my experience, a list grouped by family is most useful, because even if a specific fish is not on a list or in a reference book, similar fishes will be easier to find. Listing by region is less helpful, and an alphabetical listing (whether by scientific name or, worse, common name) is useless -- and yes, I do have a book arranged that way. On another note, maybe instead of just a list there could be section headings for each family, which would generate a table of contents. Ginkgo100 23:59, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Using the table

I'm converting the list to the table format just like the one used for List of marine aquarium fish species. Also I'm adding a picture of each fish if it's available in wikipedia. This is a lot of editing works but at the end it should help readers. Sorry for the inconvenience if you find this format harder to edit.--Melanochromis 07:34, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I like these changes. The plain list was close to meaningless. --Ginkgo100 ^talk 15:23, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Excellent job, Melanochromis. I know you are putting painstaking hours into fixing this. This list is easy to read and user-friendly. And I'm working on that rosy-red minnow pic. --Terrapin83 24:00, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] the pleco situation

This is supposed to be a list of species. But when it comes to the suckermouth catfish, species list is simply not possible and not practical as their taxonomy is not well-structured and many fish share the same common names. So I mostly list the genera instead of species unless it's a well known species. And I doubt an average fish keeper would need to know more than the genus level anyway. --Melanochromis 08:57, 5 December 2006 (UTC)