What is a good and easy fish to keep in a tank that is native to New York?

Question

Looking to set up a display for an environmental education center and need fish that can be kept in an aquarium, freshwater, and native to new york. any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

How large is your tank? Pumpkinseeds are great fish, and I've kept a trio in a 55 gallon.

If you're looking at something smaller, look at minnows (any of the shiners) and darters which are quite colorful. I've kept these together in a 20 or 29 gallon at room temperature. The minnows aren't too fussy about what they'll eat, and I've kept the pumpkinseeds on cichlid pellets. The darters may be more reluctant to eat at first, but they almost never refuse frozen bloodworms. After a week or so in captivity, they'll start to eat flake food, especially if there's a minnow in the tank eating them.

This is a good time of year to collect natives, since this is about as warm as the water outdoors will get. When I collected natives, I would collect from a single location (all the fish would have the same environment and exposed to the same diseases/parasites, so there was less worry about infecting fish with different problems), then bring the catch back in a minnow bucket. I'd add an airstone, and leave the bucket overnight in the same room where the tank was to be. By the next morning, their water would be the same temperature as the water in the tank, and I would spend an hour or so acclimating the fish to the tank water chemistry by doing slow water changes in the bucket.

If you have a really large tank, consider getting some small bullhead catfish as well. I've kept these from the time they were about 2 inches long, and raised them in a tank with sunfish and other natives. Just be sure that when you first get them, the other fish with them are too large to swallow.

Found a link for you - the species named are from Ohio, but you may have most of these in New York as well: http://www.pvas.com/articles/ultimate_native_fish_tank.pdf

And another source of information: http://www.nativefish.org/articles/

Answer 2

Pumpkinseed Sunfish are native to New York. Mostly sunfished are but they need ginormous tanks because they live in lakes up in the Finger Lake region and near New York City.

Answer 3

What do you mean by native to new york?