Abstract: Understanding swimming performance of fish is crucial for the protection of fisheries resources and the improvement of fish species diversity.Research about swimming speeds and metabolic costs indicates that there are both intraspecific and interspecific relationships between aerobic and anaerobic swimming in fish.By reviewing previous studies on fish swimming ability, we aim to identify a general relationship between swimming speed, metabolic costs, and external influencing factors such as temperature and turbulence.The results show that:(1) Swimming speeds of fish increase with tail beat frequencies, while no consensus has been reached regarding swimming speeds, tail beat amplitudes, and stride lengths.(2) Both rate of oxygen consumption and net costs of transport increase with swimming speeds at exponential or power levels, while costs of transport show a J-shaped trend.(3) As the temperature increases, the critical swimming speeds display a bell-shaped or quadratic polynomial curve.Similarly, the changes in rate of oxygen consumption also show a bell-shaped curve.(4) The influence of turbulence on the swimming performance of fish individuals depends on the relative relationship between vortex sizes and fish body lengths, while the collective behaviors of fish schools rely on the spacings among individuals, phase differences in tail beats, and on the Strouhal number.