Talk:List of marine aquarium fish species

How-to, tone
This article has some major issues. It's written like a how-to in some places, and its tone is unencyclopedic. The "care level" section was removed on the correspond list of freshwater aquarium fish species due to how-to content. It should be removed here as well. Antrogh (talk) 03:10, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * The concept of this article is itself instructional in nature. The obvious direction of this and the corresponding article for freshwater fish species seems to be to direct readers to species that are kept in aquariums and how to appropriately select them or care for them. Virtually all species of fish can be kept in an artificial setting with the correct conditions and resources, barring a few extremes that may only be dependent on technological capability. "Reef safe" is almost as instructional as "Care level", but I agree that care level is contrastingly very subjective. If many sources are in agreement on a species' care level then stating "This species is easy to care for in aquariums" isn't necessarily instructional… but I agree the way it's presented in the table seems to be.
 * Feel free to be bold when editing articles, especially when implementing changes that are consistent with others that have not yet been contested in a reasonable amount of time. Rhinopias (talk) 03:40, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Is there some way to delete a whole column of information at once without having to delete the care level section individually from each entry? (If I could figure that out, I would have done this already.) Antrogh (talk) 03:54, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Go into visual editor and right-click on the column. "Delete column" will show up as an option. --HighFlyingFish (talk) 06:37, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added tag to http://www.reefcentral.com/modules.php?s=1ea155985f50cef9dde6d95ee7ce1303&name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=3
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20081208025823/http://www.reeftectonics.com/shark_keeping.htm to http://www.reeftectonics.com/shark_keeping.htm
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Where is the text in this list from?
The sections of text introducing the categories of fish read more like they were taken from a fish handbook than like encyclopedic text, and aren't wikilinked. Is this a copyright issue of some sort? How would I check? Thanks. Antrogh (talk) 03:38, 11 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Doesn't seem to be from an online source. (Copyvio detector results here, but took a long while to load for me.) I imagine it was just written poorly from an encyclopedic point of view. Rhinopias (talk) 17:53, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Section Photographs
Each section of marine animals is accompanied by a photo on the right side depicting an example of it, while this is great in concept the current way it is carried out looks incredibly sloppy. I'd recommend reformatting it to match other pages that add image media in and have an accompanying border and textbox below describing a brief amount of detail about the photo. It'd look more professional in that regard and less like someone was transcribing a budget tourist pamphlet. I might be able to do some of it later when I have time although it'd be a bit of an undertaking and I would need at least a few days to read up enough on the subjects to be confident doing so.

Jyggalypuff (talk) 18:34, 18 July 2018 (UTC)


 * I agree with you, and I'm not sure how it got this way. It's basically just a matter of converting the plain  format into thumbnail format, by inserting   into the line (and from what's still there, I'm guessing it used to be that way). I did it for the first section here:, where I also fixed the caption by deleting "A" and correcting the capitalization. If you would be so kind as to do the same thing for the remaining sections, that would be great. Thanks! --Tryptofish (talk) 19:33, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I found that I had some time, so I converted all of them to thumbs myself. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:56, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Sorry for the delay, I only just saw the response now. Thank you for converting them. Jyggalypuff (talk) 13:56, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Nurse shark and Wobbegong
This article lists the Nurse Shark and the Ornate Wobbegong, before going on to remark "Grows to over 14 feet and will outgrow any home aquarium" and "Grows to near nine feet and will outgrow a home aquarium". This raises several questions. First, the entry for the Ornate Wobbegong is inconsistent with the article Ornate wobbegong which says "The maximum reported length of the ornate wobbegong is 1.17 metres (3.8 ft). Reports of a larger maximum size are due to confusion with the recently revalidated gulf wobbegong, O. halei, which for the most part is found further south than the ornate wobbegong.". So which is it? 9 feet or 3.8 feet? Second, if these species would infact outgrow any home aquarium, should we still list them? Their articles don't mention fishkeeping. I suppose unscrupulus dealers probably sell young members of these species to ignorant aquarists, and some readers may benefit from seeing the warning on this list, but I'm afraid others could see them listed here as a sign that they are indeed legit "marine aquarium fish species". Your thoughts? I'm sure there's many other entries on here that aren't commonly kept in aquaria and deserve similar review, these two just jump out at me. --HighFlyingFish (talk) 18:09, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm of two minds about this. I agree with you that we should not mislead readers into trying to keep fish that will outgrow their tanks. On the other hand, I do know that there is a business in setting up super-large home aquariums for keeping sharks, as well as a number of sources that decry the practice. And in freshwater, there is no shortage of people who buy silver dollars or oscars as little fish and then are shocked at how they grow, and there has been a history about some giant catfishes. I tend to think that if there is any sort of documented fishkeeping (not including public aquaria, etc.), then it's fair to include the species in the list. But when that happens, we need to accurately source the maximum size (sometimes difference in numbers reflect in-captivity versus in-the-wild), and to clearly indicate issues of potential unsuitability. As an interim measure, I'd support rather liberal use of Category:Inline cleanup templates on the list. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:40, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
 * "On the other hand, I do know that there is a business in setting up super-large home aquariums for keeping sharks, as well as a number of sources that decry the practice" Do you have any good sources that these particular fish are kept that way/sources about this business in general? Come to think of it, lack of sources is a big problem on all the "list of X aquarium Y" pages, but usually the main articles linked from the lists have sources and "In the Aquarium" sections while here they do not. --HighFlyingFish (talk) 23:11, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
 * From just a quick web search, I found these two:, . --Tryptofish (talk) 23:21, 27 July 2018 (UTC)