A real survivor

Something came through and wiped out my fish tank in a 24 hour period.
Except for one fish, which also survived a 24 hour period of no power shortly after all the deaths.

Took a sample of water to the petstore and everything tested in the safe range. I really need to get my own test kits.

Since there was no explaination for all the deaths, I broke my tank down, boiled the gravel, washing the tank in a very weak bleach solution and replaced my bio-wheel.
I set everything back up and seeded the new bio-wheel and let her go.

Today I put my very traumatized fish back in and a snail for algae control.
Once my tank is thriving again I need to repopulate it.
Gimme some ideas.
It's a 5 gallon tank, so nothing that gets over an inch long and obviously no more than 3-4 fish.
It's unheated, but maintains temperature at a nice 78 degrees.

I guess I also need a name for my survivor, a female black skirt tetra.

I'm sorry about your tank. I have one Danio that survived a tank crash on my 55 gal. I named it Lone Ranger 2. My Lone Ranger 1 was a female tetra and survied a 10 gal crash years ago.

sorry to hear about your tank crash! I would get male guppies, they are so gorgeous!! I've always wanted some but I've got no where to put them, they would get eaten in the big tank and I've got a beta that wouldn't like them very much in the little tank!

We had some goldfish that had survived moving house, their tank breaking (that was messy and they had to spend a couple of days in a rubbermaid box), and the subsequent move to a new bigger tank. Unfortunately something about that setup wasn't quite balanced because on a particularly hot summer night a huge amount of algae grew, blocked the filter and pump, and all the fish died. They were about 6 or so years old and the biggest one was about 5" long, I was quite sad as I was proud of the way they were growing so big.

I would like to have fish again as I find them very relaxing to watch, but keeping an aquarium is hard work.

Sorry to hear about the loss of your fish. I've always heard that it's harder to keep small aquariums in the correct water paramaters than a larger tank. I was never able to get fish to live long in my 10 gallon. But I've always had great success with my 45 gallon.