sciencefiction
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- 26 Feb 2013
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I just wanted to open a thread to discuss general fish experiences...
I am not sure many will share but why not?
Most folks here seem to take a lot of care for their plants and are consumed with the idea of achieving a great admirable aquascape.
How about the fish? How much attention do you pay to them and how important are they in the grander scheme of things?
Would you actually sacrifice the "ideal" look of the tank/aquascape, or the fish if one doesn't work well with the other? Does the method of keeping your fish tank(planted, non-planted, high tech, low tech, etc...) also provide the best habitat for your fish? If yes, why...if no...why not and what do you think you can do better in your next fish adventure?
What does it take to keep healthy fish to full life spans?
And what brought you into this hobby in the first place?
Please share your story even if it is an embarassing example from the past...We all have "fish" skeletons in our closet
I'll start with one of my older stories....
I started keeping fish in buckets( I think I still do, ha, ha but more modern ones)...My mother used to buy live fish for human consumption...I'd pick the liveliest one and stick it in a bucket in the bathroom and feed it bread crumbs...Most of them poor fish died pretty soon with the water becoming super cloudy in the mean time... Then I thought some fish just can't be kept in captivity so I started visiting the tropical fish shops...There I got myself guppies, snails and plants....I put them in glass jars...The snails didn't survive either , you can guess about the rest...In fact, my friend and I used to think snails are very sensitive ...The plants didn't make it long either...No light...oops.. We also used to have very cold winters where I lived...I didn't purchase a heater for years (but kept buying tropical plants and tropical fish)...neither did I purchase a filter....I had no clue fish produce ammonia....and the importance of it being taken care of by means of filtration and/or plants....
So it took me years in the age of no internet communication to do right by any water critter....But I cried every time I killed a fish...I think I cried like that for the first 6-7 years of my fish keeping "career"... I got better in time and got better at noticing things...and started doing things by intuition and observation rather than any concrete knowledge..I noticed that when I did a water change, scraping the dirty glass of my filterless tank and making it sparkling clean kills my fish. I noticed that aged water didn't stress them as much as straight tap water....I noticed that the less I feed, made my water appear less cloudy...and I learned like that taking baby steps until I manged to keep a river loach(caught for bait) alive for 5 years(in a filterless, unheated, unlit tank....)I used to do a 100% water change weekly, moving the poor thing in a glass jar...dumping all water and debris from its tank and filling it with aged water (which I kept in "my red bucket" no one was allowed to use).My mom used to give out about the state of the tank(dirty glass)....
I was sent on a summer camp as a grown up teenager and my mom washed the tank with soap thoroughly in my absence scraping all "dirt" out of it).....fish was dead when I came back two weeks later....I was devastated at the time...It was a really likeable and actually active fish considering how it lived..., It looked similar to kuhli loaches in shape and size, but cold water type loach as it was caught locally there. To this day I don't know what species of fish it was....I've never seen it in fish shops ever....
To cut that long story shorter..I think it took me ages, years to learn for the better...but every dead fish or bad experience I've had has thought me how to be better "next time" and this still applies to this day...though now I try to learn a bit faster
Please feel welcomed to share your story, current or past...
I am not sure many will share but why not?
Most folks here seem to take a lot of care for their plants and are consumed with the idea of achieving a great admirable aquascape.
How about the fish? How much attention do you pay to them and how important are they in the grander scheme of things?
Would you actually sacrifice the "ideal" look of the tank/aquascape, or the fish if one doesn't work well with the other? Does the method of keeping your fish tank(planted, non-planted, high tech, low tech, etc...) also provide the best habitat for your fish? If yes, why...if no...why not and what do you think you can do better in your next fish adventure?
What does it take to keep healthy fish to full life spans?
And what brought you into this hobby in the first place?
Please share your story even if it is an embarassing example from the past...We all have "fish" skeletons in our closet
I'll start with one of my older stories....
I started keeping fish in buckets( I think I still do, ha, ha but more modern ones)...My mother used to buy live fish for human consumption...I'd pick the liveliest one and stick it in a bucket in the bathroom and feed it bread crumbs...Most of them poor fish died pretty soon with the water becoming super cloudy in the mean time... Then I thought some fish just can't be kept in captivity so I started visiting the tropical fish shops...There I got myself guppies, snails and plants....I put them in glass jars...The snails didn't survive either , you can guess about the rest...In fact, my friend and I used to think snails are very sensitive ...The plants didn't make it long either...No light...oops.. We also used to have very cold winters where I lived...I didn't purchase a heater for years (but kept buying tropical plants and tropical fish)...neither did I purchase a filter....I had no clue fish produce ammonia....and the importance of it being taken care of by means of filtration and/or plants....
So it took me years in the age of no internet communication to do right by any water critter....But I cried every time I killed a fish...I think I cried like that for the first 6-7 years of my fish keeping "career"... I got better in time and got better at noticing things...and started doing things by intuition and observation rather than any concrete knowledge..I noticed that when I did a water change, scraping the dirty glass of my filterless tank and making it sparkling clean kills my fish. I noticed that aged water didn't stress them as much as straight tap water....I noticed that the less I feed, made my water appear less cloudy...and I learned like that taking baby steps until I manged to keep a river loach(caught for bait) alive for 5 years(in a filterless, unheated, unlit tank....)I used to do a 100% water change weekly, moving the poor thing in a glass jar...dumping all water and debris from its tank and filling it with aged water (which I kept in "my red bucket" no one was allowed to use).My mom used to give out about the state of the tank(dirty glass)....
I was sent on a summer camp as a grown up teenager and my mom washed the tank with soap thoroughly in my absence scraping all "dirt" out of it).....fish was dead when I came back two weeks later....I was devastated at the time...It was a really likeable and actually active fish considering how it lived..., It looked similar to kuhli loaches in shape and size, but cold water type loach as it was caught locally there. To this day I don't know what species of fish it was....I've never seen it in fish shops ever....
To cut that long story shorter..I think it took me ages, years to learn for the better...but every dead fish or bad experience I've had has thought me how to be better "next time" and this still applies to this day...though now I try to learn a bit faster
Please feel welcomed to share your story, current or past...