I have had Angel fish, parrot fish, guppies and some other strange mixture of whatever caught my eye at the moment. What I finally decided is that the chchlids are the most fun for me. There are hundreds (well, a lot anyway) of different types of cichlids, African, South American and probably some others. What you learn in a hurry is not to mix the regions of fish; they will kill each other off before you realize they are even fighting!

You can spend hours futzing with your tanks, carefully change the water, make sure you follow all the recommended procedures for the care of your fish, OR you can do it like I do. I change the water regularly but instead of having the water sit our for a day to equalize the temperature and whatever else they recommend, I take out 1/3 of the old water and pour in 1/3 fresh from the tap water (from a bucket no less) and get along just fine. Some of my fish are 4 years old and doing well. I figure that in Africa their ancestors had to endure long dry seasons followed by torrential rains so these fish can acclimate to the type of water changes I do without a huge problem. It seems to work for me.

I feed flake food and occasionally throw in some frozen shrimp mixture that they like, but that’s expensive and I’m not willing to do that often. They love cucumber slices, I throw one of those in every now and then and watch them and the sucker fish go after it.