A PocketExpert Guide Tropical Fishes

Description

This is the long-awaited Freshwater counterpart to the bestselling A PocketExpert Guide to Marine Fishes, coming in 2009.

A PocketExpert Guide to Tropical Fishes illuminates the art and science of selecting aquarium species successfully. Choose well and you can have a fish that provides years of beauty, fascinating behaviors, and daily glimpses into tropical underwater worlds. Choose poorly and you may bring home a fish that fails to thrive or, even worse, threatens the peace and well-being of your whole aquarium community.

Simple to use, this PocketExpert Guide ranges from the most-hardy and basic beginner’s fishes to rare, exotic, and challenging-to-keep-and-breed species. All are presented with glorious full-color photographs and expert descriptions of personalities, social behaviors, special care considerations, with tips on feeding, balancing communities, and breeding.

In profiling more than 500 of the most interesting and commonly available species in the freshwater tropical aquarium world, the authors highlight the appealing qualities of each species—as well as emphasizing behaviorial traits, size considerations, and other characteristics that need to taken into account when buying any new fish.

As with other volumes in this series, this PocketExpert Guide has great appeal for beginners to experts, and the retail livestock personnel who serve them.
Features

• Essential Reference: A much-needed freshwater compendium of all popular, rare, and most interesting fishes available to hobbyists.
• Brilliant New Photography: 700+ full-color identifying photos by master aquarium fish portraitist Aaron Norman and other world-class underwater photographers.
• Comprehensive: Covers 500+ species, including all readily available aquarium choices, with scores of seldom seen, rare and recently discovered species of great interest to hobbyists. (Also includes many male-female comparison photos, juveniles and color variants of popular species.)
• Authoritative: The authors are among the most-respected names in freshwater aquarium writing and photography, with more than a century of combined fishkeeping experience on both sides of the Atlantic among them. Contributing editors include many of the internationally recognized experts in their specialities (catfishes, Neotropical cichlids, African cichlids, cyprinids, livebearers, and others).
• Informative: Includes species profiles, behavior notes, native range, maximum size, and all essential care, feeding and husbandry advice needed for each fish.
• Easy-to-use: Organized for instant look-up, with colorful icons signaling ease or difficulty of care and feeding.

Excerpt

See sample species accounts: Odessa Barb, Redline Torpedo Barb.

Reviews

"The one new aquarium title of the year sure to become a bible for involved freshwater hobbyists and retail shops that cater to them."
—Aquarium Professional