Nurse tetra

Care at a glance

Overview

The nurse tetra is a big, robust schooling fish that cruises the open middle of the tank. It needs serious swimming room and suits a keeper with some experience.

Caring for the nurse tetra

Nurse tetras need a very large tank of at least 106 gal (400 L), ideally longer than it is tall. Give them a bright setup with a long open swimming lane and a sand base. Robust filtration suits them better than delicate planting.

Keep the water at 73 to 82°F (23 to 28°C), with a pH anywhere from 6.0 to 7.8. Run strong flow and keep the water clean. Feed this unfussy omnivore pellets, large flake and meaty frozen foods, along with some plant matter.

Keep a group of at least five or six, since a lone nurse tetra is jumpy and a group is far calmer. It is mostly peaceful and generally leaves tank mates of its own size alone. It will eat very small fish, so choose sturdy companions in the same size class.

Breeding is not recorded in aquariums. In the wild it spawns with the seasons on floodplains, scattering its eggs as the waters rise.

Good to know

Brachyalestes nurse, long known as Brycinus nurse or Alestes nurse, is a silvery alestid that grows large for an African tetra. The German naturalist Eduard Rüppell described it in 1832. It is an important food and market fish across the Sahel and the Nile.

In the wild

The nurse tetra is widespread across Africa, from the Nile west through the Niger and the rivers and floodplains of the Sahel. It lives in large, warm, open rivers and seasonal floodwaters. That water can run soft to fairly hard and slightly alkaline.

Common questions

Related species

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• 

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• 

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• 

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