The tiger endler is a banded endler line for a peaceful community tank. It is active, easy to keep and suited to a beginner.
Did you know
The class letters are worth learning before you shop for a tiger endler. N means documented wild descent, P means it looks pure with no paperwork, and K means known hybrid. Tiger sits in K, so a tank of tiger endlers is really a guppy cross bred back toward the endler shape.
Caring for the tiger endler
Keep tiger endlers in a group, and give a small colony 10 gal (38 L) or more. A planted tank with some floating plants suits them. They are active swimmers in the middle and upper water.
Give them water at 72 to 86°F (22 to 30°C) and a pH of 6.5 to 7.5. Feed quality flake and micro pellets, and offer frozen brine shrimp or daphnia from time to time.
Tiger endlers are peaceful and mix safely with community fish. A group with more females than males spreads out the males' constant courtship, so no one female takes all of it.
The males carry the orange and black banding, while the females are plain. Tiger endlers give birth to batches of fully formed fry rather than laying eggs, and they breed readily. For a documented endler project, this is not the line to start with.
Good to know
The tiger endler is sold as a male only line in most shops. How much orange and black a fish carries varies a lot by supplier. Shops also list Yellow Tiger, and whether that is the same line is not documented anywhere reliable. Endler and guppy hybrids are fertile, so a K class line can be selected until it breeds close to true. That is the sense in which a shop may call tiger endlers pure. Guppy blood usually shows as a bigger body, with a larger dorsal and tail than an N class endler carries. Because male color is largely Y linked, tiger sons resemble their fathers even where the female side is mixed.
In the wild
The tiger endlers in the trade trace to a cross between endlers and guppies, according to hobby accounts. The exact cross is not documented, and its beginnings are usually described as accidental. Do not confuse it with El Tigre, a separate population collected from the El Tigre stream in the Campoma region of Venezuela. That stream is not connected to Laguna Campoma.
Weekly picks
Tank mates
The tiger endler is a peaceful, social species that keeps to the middle. These picks share a community profile with it, are safe together in both directions, and overlap on water type, temperature and pH.
1.6 in (4 cm)11 gal (40 L)72–81°F (22–27°C)
2 in (5 cm)15 gal (55 L)75–82°F (24–28°C)
2.4 in (6 cm)16 gal (60 L)77–86°F (25–30°C)
2.4 in (6 cm)10 gal (38 L)64–82°F (18–28°C)
2.8 in (7 cm)29 gal (110 L)72–81°F (22–27°C)
3.1 in (8 cm)20 gal (75 L)72–81°F (22–27°C)