Fish For Your 5 Gallon Fish Tank

This article is about Fish For Your 5 Gallon Fish Tank. Nano tanks are quite popular, but it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what fish you should put in them.  Many aquarium fish grow too big, especially if you’re thinking of keeping schooling fish.  Then there’s the question of which fish is are compatible with each other.

Here are some suggestions for groups of fishes that are compatible inhabitants for 5 gallon tanks.  I have only included fish is that are at least relatively easy to keep.

Note: I am assuming a standard 5 gallon long tank. If your 5 gallon tank is tall and narrow, it will support fewer fish as it is surface area that determines the number of fish you can have. There are a variety of rules of thumb people use for determining number of fish. For a properly-filtered tank of standard proportions containing tropical species, a 5 gallon tank should contain no more than 10 inches of fish. I have kept the fish inches here to 8.5 or less because this leaves more room for equipment malfunction such as short power outages and human error.

Cold water fish need more space – no more than one inch of fish per gallon in a standard-sized tank.

The tanks:
5 gallon tank with plants and a pH of between 6 to 7.

Fish Tank One: Amazon Nano Aquarium 1
6 Neon Tetras
1 Otocinclus

Fish Tank Two: Amazon Nano Aquarium 2
6 Black Phantom Tetras

Fish Tank Three: Betta Bachelor Pad
1 male Betta

Fish Tank Four: Lady Betta and Frogs
1 female betta
2 dwarf frogs
1 Otocinclus

5 gallon tank with a pH of 6.5 to 7.5

Fish Tank Five: Subtropical Stream
4-5 White Cloud Mountain Minnows

Fish Tank Six: Mini Catfish Tank
6 Pygmy Corydoras
1 Otocinlus

5 gallon tank with plants and a pH of 7.0  to 7.6

Fish Tank Seven: Where’s the Fish?
8 shrimp of any mix of species that doesn’t exceed one inch, Cherry shrimp is a good beginner species
1 horned nerite snail

Fish Tank Eight: Guppies, Guppies, Guppies
5 Male Guppies
1 horned nerite snail