Best Fish for a Fish Bowl: Selecting Fish Bowl #1

Our Goal While Shopping

"The fish bowl" by Miyuki Kobayashi is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Our number one concern when doing these experiments is to do our best to do thing correctly right from the start.

We don't want to be cruel to any fish by creating an environment that would be unhealthy for the fish.

We shopped online and in our local stores for quite a while trying to decide what bowl would be our first fish bowl.

The Traditional Fish Bowl

Traditional fish bowls seemed to be the least desirable choice. These bowls had no lids and as we did our research we found that lids for these fish bowls were next to impossible to find.

Finding an Alternative

Next we decided to look at the newer more modern style of fish bowls or nano tanks that were readily available at one of our local stores. One that really caught our eye was the Aqua Culture 1 Gallon Aquarium Tank Starter Kit available at Walmart for $12.97.

We liked this bowl because it was affordable and came with a lid, light, pump and filter. We are planning to get one of these in the future for one of our other bowl setups.

We Scored!!!

While we were looking we stopped by one of the local thrift shops and came across two used Mini Bow brand 5 gallon aquariums. These were perfect for our first bowl or nano tank. This was really the maximum size we wanted to try as anything bigger would not fit well on an office desk.

Not only were there two nano tanks but inside one was a H.O.T. Magnum filter. These are excellent canister filters however it is much to big for these tiny tanks. We use the exact same one in one of our 55 gallon tanks with excellent results. What a bonus!

The purple tank with the H.O.T. Magnum filter was priced at $4.00. The blue tank had the stands for both tanks and one of the parts for the H.O.T. Magnum filter in it and it was priced at $5.00. Of course we decided to purchase both tanks.