White Cloud Mountain Minnow

Looks how to spot one

Small, slender scaled minnow

A slim little fish with a silvery olive-green body, a glowing line running along each flank and vivid red in the tail and dorsal fin. Males are the slimmer and more colourful of the pair and spread their fins like fans when showing off, while females are rounder in the belly.12

Personality what they are like

A calm, gentle schooling fish that spends its time cruising the middle and upper water in a loose group. Males put on friendly fin-flaring displays to each other and to females, which makes a well-kept group lively to watch without any real aggression.21

Daily activity how busy a day looks

An active swimmer that needs open water to move around in as a shoal, balanced with plant cover to retreat into.2

Grooming and care the hands-on bits

Keep the water clean and cool with regular partial water changes. It naturally copes with seasonal temperature swings, so in a room-temperature home it usually does not need a heater. Best kept in a group of at least 5, ideally 10 or more.23

Home where they are happiest

Aquarium with a base of about 60 x 30 cm (roughly 54 litres) or more, planted and with some open swimming space. Water temperature about 14-22 C (FishBase gives 18-22 C as optimal), pH 6.0-8.5, hardness about 5-20 dGH. In nature it lives in clear, slow, spring-fed streams with dense plants.23

Food basics what goes in the bowl

A micropredator that eats tiny insects, worms and crustaceans in the wild, plus zooplankton. In the aquarium it does well on good-quality small flakes or granules with some plant content, supplemented with small live or frozen foods such as daphnia, brine shrimp and bloodworm.23

Company who they like around

A shoaling species that should never be kept alone; keep a group of at least 5, and 10 or more for the most natural behaviour and best colour. Good companions are other small, peaceful cool-water fish.23

The story where it all began

The fish came to science in the early 1930s after a scout leader named Tan Kam Fei found it in streams on White Cloud Mountain outside Guangzhou. Ichthyologist Lin Shu-Yen described it in 1932 and named both the genus and the species after that story: Tanichthys means Tan's fish and albonubes means white cloud. It quickly spread through the aquarium hobby, and in the 1940s and 1950s it was sold as a cheaper alternative to the neon tetra. A long-finned form called the Meteor minnow was developed in Australia in the 1950s, and golden, pink and blonde strains followed. Its original mountain streams changed so much with development that the wild fish there became very hard to find, but further populations were later found on Hainan Island and elsewhere in southern China and Vietnam. A 2022 genetic study showed that fish once treated as this one species actually represent several, and the genus now has nine recognised species.1423

Recognised by the official bits

IUCN Red List

Assessed as Data Deficient (15 December 2010)3

FishBase

Listed as highly commercial in the aquarium trade; described as thought to be extinct in the wild at its original sites3

Taxonomy (Lin, 1932)

Type species of the genus Tanichthys, described by Lin Shu-Yen in 19324