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If you are choosing between multies and similis for your first shell-dweller tank, here is the practical steer: get whichever your shop actually has, correctly labelled, because the two are so alike in what they need that the choice barely changes your setup. If both are in front of you, I would nudge a first-timer towards multies, mostly because they are easier to find and a fraction more forgiving. But this is a close-run thing between two lovely little fish, so let me lay out where they actually differ rather than pretend one is plainly better. I keep both on hard tap, and I still catch myself squinting at the glass to tell which tank I am looking at. ...

The short answer is empty escargot shells, and more of them than you think. If you buy a bag of catering-grade escargot shells, boil them, and scatter roughly three or four per fish across the sand, you have already done the single most important thing for a happy shell-dweller colony. Everything else on this page is refinement. I run my multies and similis on very hard tap water in shallow, wide tanks, and after a few years of fiddling with different shells I have landed on a setup that keeps the fighting down and the breeding up. Here is what actually works. ...

The question I get asked most about my multi colony is what else I keep in with it. The honest answer, in the tank I actually run, is nothing. It is a species-only tank on a bathroom shelf, around fifty litres of hard tap water, sand, a heap of escargot shells and a self-running colony of the smallest cichlid in the world. That is not me being unadventurous. It is the conclusion I came to after thinking hard about what a tankmate is really for, and what it costs the colony to have one. ...

There is no salt in any of my freshwater tanks, and there has not been for years. That is the short version, and for a healthy community tank it is also the complete version. Aquarium salt has a reputation as a general tonic, a splash of it in every tank to keep the fish perky, and that reputation is mostly leftover folklore from decades ago. It does have one genuinely useful trick, and a couple of narrow treatment roles, but the “add a bit to be safe” habit does more harm than good. Let me untangle what it actually does from what it is claimed to do. ...

Float the bag for fifteen or twenty minutes to match the temperature, then net the fish out and let it go. For most shop-bought fish, on most tap water, that really is the whole job. The elaborate hour-long drip rituals you see online are the right answer for a specific situation, and quietly the wrong answer for the ordinary one. I spent my first couple of years drip-acclimating everything because a forum told me to, and I now think some of those fish would have done better if I had just got them out of the bag sooner. Here is what actually matters, and why. ...

Hardscape is the rock and wood that gives a scape its structure, and getting it right matters more than any plant you add, because it is the part you cannot easily change later. Most guides talk about hardscape purely as design. They skip the thing that has caught me out more than once: some rock quietly changes your water chemistry. On my hard tap that is sometimes a feature and sometimes a fault, and which one depends entirely on what you are trying to keep. So this covers both, the look and the chemistry. ...

The lush green lawn across the front of a tank is the thing most people want from aquascaping, and it is the thing most people fail at, because the carpets in the photos are almost always grown with pressurised CO2 and strong light. Take those away and most famous carpeting plants either grow tall and leggy reaching for light, or melt away entirely. So before you spend money, here is the honest version: what actually carpets without CO2, what will not, and how I get a low green foreground on hard alkaline tap water. ...

Aquascaping looks like a dark art from the outside, all competition tanks and Japanese design theory, but the working version is much simpler than the photos suggest. It is arranging hardscape and plants so a tank looks deliberate rather than accidental, then giving it time to fill in. You do not need pressurised CO2, a nature-aquarium philosophy or an expensive light to make a tank that looks good. You need a plan before you start, patience while it grows, and a willingness to accept what your water will actually support. Here is how I approach it. ...

Substrate is one of those decisions new keepers rush and then regret. It goes in at the bottom, quite literally, so it gets treated as an afterthought behind the fish, the filter and the lighting. Then six months later you want to change it, and you discover that swapping substrate in a running tank is a filthy, disruptive job you would rather not repeat. It pays to think it through once, properly. The good news is that the choice is not complicated when you strip it back to what actually affects your fish and your water. This is how I decide, and what I would tell anyone setting up their first tank. ...

Swordtails were one of the first fish I kept that felt like they had actual personalities. Where a shoal of tetras drifts around as a single nervous cloud, a group of swordtails will stake out territory, chase each other about, and come barrelling to the front glass the second you walk past. The males carry that unmistakable sword trailing from the bottom of the tail, and a mature red male against a dark background is a genuinely striking thing. Best of all for anyone reading this site, they want exactly the water that comes out of my tap. If you keep hard alkaline water and you want something with a bit more presence than a guppy, swordtails deserve a serious look. Here is how I keep mine. ...