About Animal Spaces
Animal Spaces is an independent website about freshwater aquariums. It is written for the person who has bought a tank and discovered that the difficult part is not the equipment — it is the biology running invisibly inside it.
What this site covers
Three things: the nitrogen cycle and why a new tank kills fish, how the main aquascaping styles are actually constructed, and how to choose fish that can live together for years rather than weeks. We do not cover marine tanks, breeding projects or equipment reviews.
Fish are animals
A great deal of aquarium advice treats fish as decoration with a maintenance schedule. This site does not. Where a common practice is bad for the animals — undersized tanks, single specimens of shoaling species, fish sold at a size that hides their adult size — we say so, even when it is the practice a shop recommends.
Who writes here
Articles are written and edited in-house by the Animal Spaces editorial team. We are not aquatic veterinarians. Our work is to read the published material of university extension programmes, aquatic veterinary organisations and species databases, and to write it in a form a beginner can act on.
Accuracy and corrections
Every article names its sources. Water chemistry and species requirements are areas where confident nonsense circulates widely, so if we have got something wrong, we want to hear it — see the editorial policy.
Languages
Published in full in English, Portuguese and Spanish. English is the original text.