What fish would you recommend for a beginner who wants an aquarium?

(05-27-2016, 04:54 AM)Novelangel Wrote: For a beginner tank, I'd recommend easy-to-care-for guppies. I'm not talking about the fancy varieties that are sensitive and require more care. I am referring to fish that don't need heat because it can be difficult for a beginner, let alone a child, to get the water temperatures just right. Guppies live about three years and don't take up a lot of room, especially if the males and females are kept separately. Also, if you do allow the fish to breed this gives your son the fun experience and responsibility of raising the young fry. To avoid having to keep a separate tank for the fry, you can simply add 'hides' to your tank, which means rocks, plants and little aquarium toys that the young fish can swim into to avoid predation. Quite often, if the adult fish are kept well fed enough, the fry will boldly swim out among them anyway. Feeder guppies are perfect for this little project as they can be colorful and fun to watch and still give your beginner fish enthusiast the experience he needs, without running to a serious expense.

Actually guppy is still tropical fish.   They might be able to handle lower than the usual tropical water temperature, it is not a good idea to have the water temperature to go below 66F or 19C.    The recommended range for water temperature is still between 70~80F.   

Yes, guppy is fairly hardy if you do everything right.   The problem is they reproduce too quickly.   Before you know it, you might need a few more fish tanks for all the growing up fry.   There is a reason they have the nick name of million-fish.    All live-bearers (give birth directly to fish fry instead of fish eggs) can reproduce very fast and overpopulate your aquarium in just a few months.  

Unless you actually want to breed guppy for some reason, I'd recommend to have a few good "predator" fish for guppy population control.    While guppy is not smart enough to leave their own fry alone (they will eat their own fry), you need something faster than guppy.