Aquarium Data and Free Resources

What data does AquaCompat publish?

AquaCompat publishes datasets that answer factual questions about the aquarium trade, released aquarium species, tap water, fish health and the fish themselves. A dataset, as used here, is a table AquaCompat compiled or recalculated from a named public source, published with the method needed to repeat it. Most of these questions have no single official answer: trade figures sit in customs databases, farm counts in a five-yearly census and water hardness in hundreds of separate utility reports. The pages below collect those numbers in one place, with each figure tied to its source and year.

Three free resources sit alongside the datasets. The free printable fish charts put every compatibility verdict and the core care data on one page each, the reusable aquarium illustrations cover the diagrams drawn for the site's guides, and the electricity calculator turns device wattage into a yearly cost. None of the pages carries product picks or affiliate links.

What are the headline figures?

The figures below are the ones most often quoted from each page. Each sentence can be lifted as written, with a link to the page it comes from.

• USGS holds records of 170 species of non-native freshwater animals whose fact sheets name aquarium release or the pet trade as a pathway, and of those, 84 species have an established-status record in at least one US state (NAS data accessed 22 October 2026). Florida has the most species recorded and goldfish are the most widespread, according to the released aquarium species figures.
• The United States imported 63.3 million USD of live freshwater ornamental fish in 2025, a change of -18.6% on 2021 in current dollars, according to the UN Comtrade aquarium fish import figures.
• US ornamental fish farms sold $77.1 million of fish in 2023, and Florida farms accounted for 75% of that value, according to the USDA census summarised in our ornamental fish farm census figures.
• The US reported importing 553,193 live specimens of stony coral for commercial trade in 2024, and 80.2% were declared wild-collected, based on the CITES records in our coral and seahorse import data.
• In their 2025 water quality reports, 12 of 22 cities in AquaCompat's sample of large US water systems named chloramine as the disinfectant, as the survey of chloramine in big-city tap water shows.
• CDC surveillance linked pet fish to 3 outbreaks of enteric disease in the US from 2009 to 2021, with 6 illnesses, against 241 illnesses linked to frogs; the zoonosis and fish disease figures give the full breakdown.
• The longest reported lifespan among the species AquaCompat covers is 25 years, a bristlenose pleco record listed by Practical Fishkeeping, while 7 of 29 species have no sourced lifespan at all, as the lifespan and adult size comparison shows.
• A 100-watt aquarium load running all year costs $150.93 per year at the 2025 US average residential price of 17.23 cents per kWh, and the running-cost calculator for aquarium equipment applies any state's price.

How is the data built?

Every dataset is built from published sources, never from our own tanks or tests. AquaCompat downloads or reads the source, keeps a copy, extracts the figures into a structured fact file and recalculates any share, change or ratio from the source table before it appears on a page. Each data page has a section headed "How we built this data" that names the source, the access date, the definitions used and the limits that matter, such as customs values that are not fish counts or survey records that track reporting effort as much as spread.

The figures on the pages are rendered from those fact files, so a number in a sentence, a table, a chart and the CSV download all come from the same record. When a source is corrected or updated, the fact file changes and every page that quotes the figure changes with it. The general rules for choosing and checking sources are set out in our sourcing method, and errors can be reported through the contact page.

Some limits apply across the library. Most datasets are US-focused, because US agencies publish the most open data on the trade. Several rest on a single study or a single year, and the pages say so where it matters. Where two sources disagree, both figures are reported and the one used is named.

Can you reuse the data, and how should you cite it?

Yes. The data, tables, charts, printable charts and illustrations published by AquaCompat are free to reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0), including in news articles, school worksheets, club newsletters, books and commercial products. The one condition is attribution: credit AquaCompat and link to the page the figure came from.

Cite a single figure by its page, for example:

AquaCompat, "Aquarium Fish Trade Statistics: US Imports, Exports and the World's Top Suppliers (2021–2025)", updated 22 October 2026, https://aquacompat.com/data/ornamental-fish-trade/.

Each data page ends with a ready citation line in the same format. Please also name the original source the page credits, such as USGS, USDA, UN Comtrade, CITES or CDC, because AquaCompat's role is compiling and recalculating their data, not collecting it. If you adapt a chart or table, say that it has been changed.