Finding a natural hangout…

I’m guessing a lot of our fish are often found hanging out in the roots of shoreline terrestrial plants, in the wild… 2 of my small red saddle back loaches, are in this Pothos root right now… I’m sure the roots snag out food, provide camouflage, and protection… this particular root, often has 4-5 loaches in it, but. 2 are here most of the time… these guys are small, and I’m glad they found someplace to feel at home… I was originally going to trim this root off, as it’s growing along the front glass, but since it’s become one of the hang out spots, that the smaller fish like, I decided to keep it, as it makes viewing these fish much easier…

I'd let it stay this way... But I'm a huge fan of natural looking tanks.

In my limited experience fishing out in the wild, we rarely saw the fish we caught before they were in the net. We blindly jammed nets into exactly the same types of roots you describe. Different plants, but the same basic idea. You need to fill those roots with weird spiders just above the water if you want to be really authentic.
We caught Characins, barbs, anabantoids, young Cichlids, catfish, killies - even the lampeye killies we'd see out in the moving water would stop for a coffee in the roots tangles. Everything spent time in the roots world.

It took me 3 days to destroy my first net on those roots.

A truly authentic tank for Central African fish would have a muddy/sandy bottom, scattered rocks, no aquatic plants and above water plant roots three or four inches thick in an almost impenetrable wall along the back and sides of the tank. It just so happens I have a 4 foot 40 gallon with 6 peace lilies above it where I'm trying to create that. I think I need to buy a plant light for the peace lilies though. The roots are very slow growing.

Nice. I like to provide lots and lots of little micro-environments in my tanks, so the fish can choose where they want to hang out. My schoolers tend to just wander around everywhere, but the bottom feeders have definite favorite spots.

Bigger and smaller… a couple of the larger Gold Ring Hillstream’s joining the smaller Saddle Backs…

Love the pothos roots! They also provide good biofilm surface for biofilm grazers