Fishkeeping is a popular hobby, practiced by aquarists, concerned with keeping fish in a home aquarium or garden pond. There is also a piscicultural fishkeeping industry, serving as a branch of agriculture.
Fish have been raised as food in pools and ponds for thousands of years. Brightly colored or tame specimens of fish in these pools have sometimes been valued as pets rather than food. Many cultures, ancient and modern, have kept fish for both functional and decorative purposes.
Ancient Sumerians kept wild-caught fish in ponds, before preparing them for meals. Depictions of the sacred fish of Oxyrhynchus kept in captivity in rectangular temple pools have been found in ancient Egyptian art.
Similarly, Asia has experienced a long history of stocking rice paddies with freshwater fish suitable for eating, including various types of catfish and cyprinid. Selective breeding of carp into today's popular and completely domesticated koi and fancy goldfish began over 2,000 years ago in Japan and China, respectively. The Chinese brought goldfish indoors during the Song Dynasty to enjoy them in large ceramic vessels.
In Medieval Europe, carp pools were a standard feature of estates and monasteries, providing an alternative to meat on feast days when meat could not be eaten for religious reasons.
Marine fish have been similarly valued for centuries. Wealthy Romans kept lampreys and other fish in salt water pools. Tertullian reports that Asinius Celer paid 8000 sesterces for a particularly fine mullet. Cicero reports that the advocate Quintus Hortensius wept when a favored specimen died. Rather cynically, he referred to these ancient fishkeepers as the Piscinarii, the "fish-pond owners" or "fish breeders", for example when saying that "the rich (I mean your friends the fish-breeders) did not disguise their jealousy of me".
The first person to breed a tropical fish in Europe was Pierre Carbonnier, who founded one of the oldest public aquaria in Paris in 1850, and bred the first imported Macropods (Paradise fish) in 1869, and later more species.
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A marine aquarium is an aquarium that keeps marine plants and animals in a contained environment. Marine aquaria are further subdivided by hobbyists into fish only (FO), fish only with live rock (FOWLR), and reef aquaria. Fish only tanks often showcase large or aggressive marine fish species and generally rely on mechanical and chemical filtration. FOWLR and reef tanks use live rock, a material composed of coral skeletons harboring beneficial nitrogen waste metabolizing bacteria, as a means of more natural biological filtration.
Tropical fish are generally those fish found in aquatic tropical environments around the world. Fishkeepers often keep tropical fish in freshwater and saltwater aquariums. The term "tropical fish" is not a taxonomic group, but rather is a general term for fish found in such environments, particularly those kept in aquariums. Tropical fish is a term commonly used to refer to fish that are kept in heated aquariums.
The Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens), commonly known as the betta, is a freshwater fish native to Southeast Asia, namely Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. It is one of 73 species of the genus Betta, but the only one eponymously called "betta", owing to its global popularity as a pet; Betta splendens are among the most popular aquarium fish in the world, due to their diverse and colorful morphology and relatively low maintenance.
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