The Swordtail Be Careful With This Fish Species Profile

Well, everyone, this is Jason from Primetime Aquatics. Wanted to talk about the swordtail, how to care for them, how to keep them. They're amazing fish, and I think they're becoming more popular. Once again, the fish you're going to be looking at here came from Aquatics Unlimited, located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Really cool place. Swordtails are amazing fish. Size wise, they're going to get to around five inches or so. It's going to take them a little while to get there. They are from Central America and do like water. That is a little bit on the harder side. They have a wide range of water temperatures, as we're going to talk about. And I think one of the things that attracts people to these fish is obviously that amazing sword that the males possess. But also there are so many different color varieties, and this is a really active fish. And so if you're looking for all those things, looking for something different, this might be the fish for you. Now, something to consider. The males can be a little bit aggressive, especially towards one another and sometimes towards other fish. It's not unusual in a community tank to have your male swordtail kind of running the show. And so you're going to want to keep that in mind as we talk about stocking options a little bit later. And also as we begin to discuss the tank sizes that we want. So this is a fish that can be on the what I would call, especially the males on the sort of semi-aggressive side of things. But it's an awesome fish going to usually live anywhere from three to five years, sometimes a little bit longer. And the cool thing is, especially in the last few years, there are so many different varieties in terms of fins and colors. You can find pretty much a swordtail for any budget. They might cost anywhere from a few dollars up to twenty, thirty dollars or more, depending on the variety. And they're really easy in terms of tank mates. And so things to consider. One, if you're going to keep multiples, I recommend one male for every three to four females because they're going to want to breed and kind of spread out that aggression a little bit and a little bit of that persistence. It's going to keep the fish a lot happier. And I recommend that for most live bears. A one to three or four ratio male to female. You're going to be in pretty good shape, by the way. If you cannot find swordtails around where you're living, check out Flip Aquatics, flip aquatics dot com. They are a channel sponsor. They have awesome fish, quarantine all their fish for at least two weeks and their shrimp for four. You're going to get some pretty healthy fish and shrimp from them. So tank mates, you might consider some of the grommies like the dwarf, even the blues, the opalines, the golds, those kind of grommies that are a little bit more assertive might fit in well with your swordtails. Most of your tetras are going to be just fine, whether you're talking about black neon tetras or even more. Some of your medium sized like your Colombian tetras will work fine. Your quarry cats are going to work well with swordtails. Bristlenose plecos, a lot of your more mellow barbs like your snakeskin barbs might work out fairly well. If you want to do small cichlids, usually not going to be a problem. So maybe you've got a pistogramma or rams or crebensis or curviceps or checkerboard cichlids. Those are all fine. By the way, I will put species profiles of fish that you can keep with these guys down in the description below. If you want to learn a little bit more, start building your aquarium around these fish. Keep in mind that if you keep the swordtails with other live bears like mollies, platys, guppies, you might see some hybridization. Not always the best thing. And certainly if you keep different varieties of swordtails, you'll probably see some hybridization there as well. So if you get a really cool strain and you spend a lot of money on them, you might want to keep that strain, at least the only live bear type in that tank so that you don't get the hybrids and you don't ruin that strain and kind of ruin the genetic line. Caring for these fish in terms of water parameters, pretty easy to do. Temperature is anywhere, usually around 70, all the way up to 80, 82. We keep them in the upper 70s, usually pH. This is a fish that does like water on the harder side and pH that's a little bit higher. So if you're somewhere around seven to eight on the pH, you're going to be in good shape. We're close to eight. They thrive and breed readily in our water parameters. Water hardness somewhere in that upper single digits, at least eight or nine degrees up to 10, as much as 15 degrees on your GH and KH is going to work just fine as well. Now, make sure you've got a cycle tank. If you don't know what that means, check out that video in the upper right hand corner. No ammonia, no nitrite. We try to keep our nitrates below 20 parts per million or less. If it's a planted tank, sometimes let it go a little bit higher. Food, they're super easy to feed as long as they are healthy. We feed all of our fish North Fin foods. I did a video on how to best feed fish. I'm going to put that in the upper right hand corner if you want more information, but they're not picky fish. We feed all different types of flakes, whether it's community, cichlid flakes, the krill, the kelp. They eat all those flakes. They'll eat the smaller pellets as well. They don't mind some live baby brine shrimp when they are a little bit smaller. Frozen brine shrimp when they're a little bit larger works just fine. So not a very difficult fish to feed tank size. Now, here's where I'm going to disagree with the Internet. Sometimes, again, males can be fairly assertive. They are going to sometimes chase other fish. I would say the bare minimum tank size, at least for me, is a 29 gallon. But I actually like to keep them in even larger tanks. And our fish are right now. We have them in a 40 breeder, which is actually closer to 47 gallons. And we have them in a 60 breeder. So and that's worked out really well. So just keep that in mind. The 20 gallons. I know a lot of sources say you can do it might be OK. But then again, those males get, you know, become a little bit assertive. Maybe not setting up the tank. Not hard to do. The substrate doesn't really matter. It could be sand or gravel because these fish don't really interact all that much with the substrate. Usually some cover is nice, especially if you've got that one to three, one to four ratio males to females, just so the females can go somewhere and just kind of get out of the line of sight of the males sometimes if they're a little bit persistent when it comes to breeding. So plants fake or real rocks would that's all going to work just fine. Flow for your aquarium. It doesn't really matter all that much. As long as you're getting sufficient filtration throughout your aquarium, it should work out just fine. The substrate and the background colors actually don't matter all that much for swordtails. They have pretty vibrant colors on both lighter substrates and darker substrates, which is pretty nice. One thing to keep in mind in terms of general health, these fish can be prone to ick and sometimes they are bred in more brackish conditions. And so if you get them from pet stores and you see them kind of doing a little bit of a shimmy where their their fins are kind of clamped up against their bodies, might want to stay away from them. They're looking real skinny. That could be a problem. So again, as you are bringing this fish home, definitely a fish that you should be quarantining. If you don't know how to do that, please. It's one of the most important things you can do in the fish keeping hobby. Check out that video in the upper right hand corner. It will save you a lot of frustrations later on. If you want to breed these fish, not super hard to do, as most live bears. Again, you need a male. I've been saying it probably two or three times already. Get three to four females. Generally speaking, they will eventually produce fry once they get to that three or four month age or so. They're live bears, so they're going to give birth to live young, which means the fry are going to need a little bit of cover. Maybe that's some hornwort at the top of the tank or heavily planted aquarium. Some place for them to go because they're going to be tiny. And sometimes the adults are going to want to eat the fry. One way to help reduce that is feed the adults fairly well. So they're not looking for food as much. But cover is going to be key or removing the fry as you see them. Be a little bit careful, though, because depending on the type of sword tail you breed might not be the easiest thing to move to pet stores or sell them. Some of the ones, especially the ones that you're looking at here would be a whole lot easier. This is a great fish. It really is an awesome fish. The fry are super easy to care for. You feed them crushed flakes. They're going to be fine. If you want to feed live baby brine, that's fine, too. The challenge really is just you have to deal with the aggression from the males from time to time, certainly towards one another, but potentially towards other fish as well. You keep them in a right size aquarium, again, 29 gallons and above. Keep them in the proper ratio. You'll reduce a lot of those potential issues. As always, thank you so much for being here. I'm going to put a couple of species profiles up there for you in the upper right and left of fish you can keep with these guys. Have a great week.