What Your Fish Are Telling You

Learn to Read What Your Fish Are Actually Doing

What Your Fish Are Telling You is a practical guide to understanding everyday freshwater aquarium behavior without jumping to conclusions or turning every unusual movement into a diagnosis.

Understand Feeding Behavior

Learn how to tell whether fish are actually reaching food, being interrupted by tankmates, missing their share, or struggling with the way food moves through the aquarium.

Make Sense of Hiding and Resting

Discover how to distinguish normal shelter use and quiet periods from situations where a fish is confined, excluded, unable to reach food, or showing a meaningful change from its usual pattern.

Read Chasing and Social Interactions

Follow the beginning, route, and outcome of a chase to understand whether fish regain access to food, shelter, and resting space-and when repeated pursuit becomes a welfare concern.

Understand Groups, Movement, and Breathing

Learn what shoaling, schooling, surface visits, repeated routes, posture, breathing effort, and changes in group spacing can tell you when interpreted in the right context.

Connect Behavior to the Aquarium

Check lighting, routines, feeding times, flow, temperature, water quality, recent maintenance, and other changes that may help explain what you are seeing.

Know When to Observe, Investigate, or Get Help

Use a clear three-level response framework to decide when ordinary observation is enough, when conditions need checking, and when injury, respiratory distress, entrapment, or another serious problem requires prompt professional help.

With realistic aquarium cases, observation maps, feeding examples, timelines, decision paths, and practical records, this book helps freshwater fish keepers notice more, assume less, and make better everyday care decisions.