Kakadu National Park Native Fish and their Habitat, One of Australia's Hidden Gems

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:13]Good day and welcome to my channel. In this episode, I'm joined with Nick from Keeping Fish Simple and Haron Ford.

[00:00:20]They're two YouTubers that come along for this journey. In this video, we get to see some really cool rainbow fish all living happily together in one habitat.

[00:00:29]So join me on this journey as we visit Kakadoo National Park.

[00:00:34]I will show you some of Australia's beautiful native fish in their natural habitat.

[00:00:56]Kagadoo National Park is east of Darwin and borders Arnum land. It can cover a large area, so if you visit, be prepared to do some traveling.

[00:01:07]Before we entered the park, we decided to visit Fog Dam. I've always wanted to visit this area just because it's basically a large swamp with one of my favorite plants, the large sacred lotus.

[00:01:17]A beautiful plant with beautiful flowers. Unfortunately, we come towards the end of the season, but we still saw some flowering.

[00:01:28]It's also a haven for some beautiful water birds like the jabaroo, the icon of the area. So, this place is worth checking out.

[00:01:36]This place is also well known for its croc spotting, but we really didn't have time for that as we wanted to keep going. We did see a couple of small freshwater crocodiles on the bank, but they were pretty quick to remove away.

[00:02:01]After leaving Fog Dam, we drive along the Arnham Highway to Jabaroo, the small township in the northern end of Kakadoo National Park. Once known for its uranium mining, now it's a good place for tourists to camp out ready for their adventure.

[00:02:35]Jabaru is 254 km east of Darwin or 2 hours and 40 minutes drive.

[00:02:42]We arrive at Jabaru at the end of the day and we're lucky enough to find a camping spot in one of the parks. As we drive into the park, we notice at the back of the park where you pitch your tents, they are burning. This was a bit of a surreal sight at nighttime and was quite entertaining, although a little eerie. The next morning, we woke up to another beautiful sunrise in this place that looks like paradise.

[00:03:04]We originally come up from the bottom end of the park after leaving Catherine and stumbled upon this little known spot called Upper Ikawara Falls or Molen's Rock Hole. So, after setting up Camper Jabaroo, we thought we'd head out the next morning to check out this spot.

[00:03:19]It's 146 km or 1 and a half hours drive south of Jabaroo. So, we thought we'd check out a few spots along the way. The upper Ecuara Falls is springfed and runs into the M River, a well-known spot for rainbow fish, so we thought we might have a bit of luck here, so it was definitely worth checking out. We did see fish the day before and it was potentially a good spot to film as the water was pretty clear. Unfortunately, we come early in the dry season and a lot of the spaces along the way were closed due to still being wet or haven't been searched for crocs, which can be a problem for tourists. So, they remain closed until they're safe, unfortunately. So, we pressed on. It was a little bit disappointing, but we knew we still had a spot to check out. So, if you do come, make sure you come later in the dry season to make sure all these places are open. While driving down south, after being a little bit disheartened, we came across some beautiful rocky outcrops and decided to park on the side of the road and do a little bit of droning. These excess are beautiful, so we thought we'd have a bit of a rest here and wander around.

[00:04:20]To our surprise, just stopping at one of these random spots, checking out the outcrop, we stumbled across some Aboriginal art, which was really beautiful, and it excited us all to see it. Not really something we were expecting to see.

[00:04:44]finding Aboriginal arts. Awesome.

[00:04:50]What's that one sawfish there? Yeah, cuz you got like the fish and then you got like the saw and there's like a dude here.

[00:04:59]That's so cool. And then I don't know what that is, but We pushed on again and I stopped at this random spot on the side of the road that looked like a drying out swamp. We put the drone up to have a look around, but I thought I'll check out these little puddles on the side of the road where normally you probably wouldn't find anything, but I put the camera in anyway.

[00:05:33]The other two are a bit skeptical, but once we seen the footage, we're amazed.

[00:05:46]The first couple of puddles were full of penny fish and delicate blue-ey with the occasional blackbanded rainbow fish. It was amazing that these could live in just a couple of inches of water and seemed to be doing really well. It was full of elga and must have been really low in oxygen. So, these are tough little fish.

[00:06:11]Then I saw a slightly tannon puddle under a freshwater mangrove tree, so I thought I'd check it out as well. It was a little bit deeper.

[00:06:20]To my surprise, it too was teameming with fish. First off, I seen a northern purple spotted gudgeon with some tennalus and penny fish. But then other fish started appearing. There was the occasional blackbanded rainbow and checkered rainbow and even some northwest glass fish which haven't yet been described.

[00:06:57]I moved the camera to another deeper spot and there was even more fish species. It was spangled perch, probably little syrup.

[00:07:30]and even a freshwater long tom which was really cool to see in these small puddles. Unfortunately, these puddles probably won't last long for the dry season and these fish will probably perish within a few weeks as they are cut off from the main body of water.

[00:07:43]It's a little bit sad, but that's nature. They will then in turn feed the water birds. This is a photo I took of the area just so you can see how shallow the pools actually are. And there's not much to them, but it was amazing how many fish we saw. And it turns out it was worth stopping. So, when searching for fish, don't give up on these sorts of areas because you never really know.

[00:08:05]As we pushed on further down south, we came across another spot where they were back burning. These places can be pretty hairy. We decided to stop and take some video of it just to show you how these flames can really get out of hand in this dry environment.

[00:08:21]It was worth stopping cuz we couldn't even see in front of us on the road. But the flames moved on quickly.

[00:08:33]Then while checking out another small rocky outcrop to see if I could get some vantage point for some views, I was walking over the back end of it and stumbled across a herd of buffalo. They didn't seem very happy, so I backed off.

[00:08:44]Probably the best thing to do slowly went back over the outcrop and got Nick to the drone up. We thought it'd be pretty cool to film some of these for the video. They're not meant to be here.

[00:08:52]They're an introduced species, but they have become part of the tourism of the Northern Territory, although they do do a lot of damage to our waterways, so I'm not very fond of them.

[00:09:08]Finally, after looking after the first part of the day, we're finally at our destination right around lunchtime, which was the best time to film fish.

[00:09:17]Going into this place was pretty bumpy, and it's supposed to be four-wheel drive only, but we thought we'd give it a go anyway cuz we didn't want to walk from the road.

[00:09:32]The other two had to get out of the car as it was bottoming out. So, Nick took the opportunity to get some filming of the terrain as I was driving down. It's pretty rocky, but it's not so bad. We managed to get the car in.

[00:09:45]And as we got further down the gorge, started looking a little bit more tropical rather than desolate as it did on the top of the hill. So, we were getting excited.

[00:09:58]Checking out these areas with the drone just shows you the vastness of this land. It's beautiful country and I hope it will always be protected like this.

[00:10:29]We got to the bottom of the gorge and we were welcomed with this serene beauty of this escarment with the waterfall.

[00:10:35]Beautiful crystal clear water and we were the only people there so we couldn't wait to get our cameras in.

[00:10:47]You wouldn't believe how good it feels to get in the water after driving out in the arid landscape. And to my surprise, the first thing I saw was this large school of hurdles, catfish swimming around the root system. They broke up a little bit when I got in the water, but I still managed to get some film of them. And after a little while, they sort of warmed up to me.

[00:11:19]Then I spotted a beautiful large northern purples spotted gajudgeon just staring at me. So I sat there for a little while filming him as he slowly went along his way. After seeing the southern purples spotted gudgeon, it's amazing how large these animals actually get and they look so majestic in the water.

[00:11:35]Then in the slightly faster flowing water underneath the canopy, we were greeted by all these beautiful large rainbow fish. I was surprised to see a few species in the one spot. It was a first for me other than a couple of times in cans. But this brought it to a whole new level as the first thing I was thinking is why don't they hybridize?

[00:11:53]But in these large border bodies, they seem to stay separate for some reason and it was quite interesting. These beautiful large checkered rainbows shimmering in the sunlight were probably as large as a hand.

[00:12:04]At first glance, I took the smaller rainbows just to be younger versions of these fish, but then I realized they had different markings on them and they turned out to be exquisite rainbow fish and other species in this waterway. So, in this one little spot, we found three species of rainbow. It was really cool to see. Although these exquisite rainbows weren't as colorful as the ones we saw at Edith Falls, they were kind of bland looking to be honest.

[00:12:27]And this was the first time I've seen so many banded rainbows. I've seen them before in the D tree, but these were more colorful. The ones in the dainty were more blue. These ones were more goldy colored with much more prominent markings on them.

[00:12:51]It was interesting seeing these larger rainbows hiding out under the canopy more than anywhere else. So I thought about this for future scapes. Then I managed to capture a two big male banded rainbow fish sparring. It was an awesome sight.

[00:13:12]These fish look really beautiful glowing in the sunlight, but the larger fish tended to stay away.

[00:13:33]Then as I dropped down to slightly deeper waters, we started getting larger fish like sui grunt. They were teeming in the depths alongside of spangled perch, another common fish found all around Australia. They seem to pop up everywhere.

[00:13:57]You see these rainbow fish hovering around the surface and around the edges of the waterway. And there's a reason for that. The predators down in the deep. I came across this large tarpon circling around waiting for the fish to come down deeper. And every time the fish had come down, he'd dart up and try and catch one of them. I was lucky filming this because normally these are pretty elusive to me. I've tried filming him in the dane tree, but this one just kept circling around the same spot. So, I put the camera there and just let it roll. And I was quite happy with the footage I've got of it.

[00:14:50]After spending some time filming the fish, I thought I'd take a slow pan around the area just to show thecape in case anybody ever wanted to replicate this in an aquarium. There are at least three different species of rainbow you could put together in a scape like this.

[00:15:06]There were no plants, only tree roots, rocks, sedimentary sand, some sticks, and some leaf litter. A pretty easy biotope to replicate and quite a nice one at that with those larger fish. A biotope I might have to try in the future.

[00:15:26]Hey, hey, hey.

[00:16:04]What a way to end this video. Beautiful large rainbow fish all swimming together under this canopy.

[00:16:26]Hope you enjoyed the video. Please like and subscribe for future videos like this. Thanks for watching.