Any fish geeks here?

What do you have? Tell me all about it. Tanks, fish, filtration, problems...anything you want to discuss.

 

Last fish I owned died swiftly and impressivly, however unintentional it may have been.

 

What happened to it?

 

It died entertaining pussy.......cats that is. Almost killed the cat that ate it though. Choked on the poor thing

 

i don't think that i've ever had a pet fish, but if i were to ever get a tattoo, a certain fish is candidate one out of two

 

Crappy! I just found out that a large fish I raised from a tiny size died at the 4000 gallon indoor pond I donated it to. Tangled with a Red Tail Catfish. Both died. The catfish choked on him. Kind of a bummer because I had that fish for a long time.

 

What kind of fish?

 

a variation of that one

there's a song by one of my favorite bands called penelope, about a fish.
so it's significant b/c of the band (kinda unoriginal for a tattoo though), and it reminds me of times with my brother.
i used to be on the swim team, always liked the water, went fishing a decent amount of times as a kid with my dad and brother.
so it reminds me of a lot of things.


i've started to draw this fish often, so i'd probably have one of those versions tattooed on me, even though i'm not a great artist - it looks cooler than the one pictured
i would just get black ink. on my ribs (prob hurt like hell) under my arm.

 

Several good reasons for the tat.

 

I've never had more than one fish at a time

 

When I was much younger I helped manage a tropical fish store. It was a small store and just the owner and myself working there.

I haven't had any active aquariums for well over a decade now, but at the height of my fish keeping endeavors I had at one time in ascending order of size;

a 1.5 gallon plexi hex tank in which I kept a pair of tank raised Percula Clownfish and a carpet anemone

a 5 gallon freshwater amphibian setup with just some red belly salamanders and frogs.

a 26 gallon show tank full of freshwater plants and Cardinal tetras, Marble Hatchet tetras, spotted Cory catfish, and four blue Discus. all the tetras were in schools of at least 15 each.

a custom 30 gallon plexi tank with an Undulate Triggerfish. He was awesome, royal purple background color with bright orange pinstripes.(pics never look as good as the real thing with these guys) He liked to rearrange his tank all the time and would pick up rocks and coral weighing ten time his weight like they were nothing. He was a total loner though.


a 50 gallon show tank, again another south American freshwater setup, lots of plants, tetras (over 50 Cardinals) of different varieties and some Angel fish, they actually bred in there, and other similar small fish from that region.

a 100 gallon saltwater setup which at that time housed a Lionfish, Snowflake eels, Blue Tang, Orbic Bat, Green Bird Wrasse, Brown Tang, and a couple other's I can't remember right now. They all grew pretty big and healthy until my heater went on the fritz and I came home from work with water temps close to 100 degrees and all but the Blue Tang and the eels dead.

So I did the most logical thing and got one of these;


a baby nurse shark
He was more or less abandoned at the store, so I adopted him. When I brought him home he was about 15 inches long, when I finally gave him up he was almost 36 inches long .
That was tough in a tank that is only 5 feet long, luckily Nurse Sharks are not very active. I was able to make arrangements through one of the fish wholesalers to have it sent to an aquarium in Tokyo. They were interested because it was essentially tank raised. Last I heard about a year later he was doing fine and almost 8 feet long.

Along the way I have had many other various setups and types of fish.
Pretty much all the obligatory Cichlids, South American and African, A Silver and a Black Arowanas, Pirahnas, probably every type of little freshwater fish you see in every pet store, and for a short time, an octopus.

 

Great post. My kind of fishkeeper! Totally overstocked tanks but...hey...what serious fishkeeper hasn't had a few overstocked tanks every now and again?

 

i'm sure you know your shit, but 1.5 gallons is a pretty small space for 3 fish. makes me a little sad for them. maybe they don't care.


cool post though. especially the octopus and the shark.

 

Yeah...1.5 gallons doesn't really count as a tank in my book but it did sound like he had some other nice set-ups. I'm sure he knows some things about fish but....as a general rule (with no reference to NG personally whatsoever)...the fish stores are the last place you should go for fish advice. I have spent so much time in different places and rarely have I heard customers be given solid advice. I've heard advice that was so bad that I talked to the customer in the parking lot so they wouldn't kill their fish. The fish stores goal is to sell fish. If you kill them, you will buy more. If you think they are sick, you will buy plenty of products that you simply don't need. I could go on. Not a fan of most fish stores but I love seeing peoples tanks and hearing about them.

 

Years ago before my daughter was born I had a 100 gal. tank in my living room with a freshwater wolf fish. The tank was beautiful with dense bog wood laying at the bottom on top of natural gravel. I was running three walmart variety filters on the back of it but they did they job. The downfall of owning it was having to run to the store to get feeder goldfish because it wouldn't eat anything else.

It was like owning a tiny great white shark though. That whole tank would splash and shake around at the mayhem that ensued once the feeders were released in the tank. Very sleek fish built like a torpedo and a mouth like a bear trap. Very cool fish.

 

Cool fish. Just curious...did you get them as small fish or big fish? Because sometimes feeder fish are a hard habit to break but it's easier if they haven't been raised eating them. But lot's of people feed predators feeder fish because it's cool to watch. I think it's kind of cool too so I'm not pointing fingers or anything. Just wondering what your experience was.

 

Well two fish and one anemone. They are the "Nemo" fish, so they are not much more than 2 inches for a huge one, so not really very crowded plus those fish only stay within a few feet of their host anemone anyway, so they didn't care.
They were actually pretty friggin cool because they were some of the first tank raised salt water fish ever. There were hatched Instant Ocean and were the first species to be successfully bred in captivity on commercial scales.
We are talking ~ 1982.

 

No, you have it all wrong.
Speaking from the perspective of a person with a couple of decades of retail management experience, including industry specific experience as well as being a customer, the LAST thing a fish store wants is for your fish purchase to die.
Most places have a replacement policy, so dieing fish is a direct hit on the bottom line and you tend to lose customers if your product keeps dieing.

What a person needs to do is educate themselves enough to know when they should just walk out of a store. I know I have found very few that I would actually purchase fish from. I tend to be very critical and can size up a shop/store pretty quick and know how to judge the health of their livestock within a few minutes.
That is key.

If a place has sick or dead fish in any tanks, don't purchase anything there.

As far as employees giving poor advice, you see that everywhere.
I almost got asked to leave a hardware store because I interrupted an employee and told another customer how to do something because the employee had his head up his ass. At least that's what I told him.

 

Well my fiancé is a Pisces, so I like to think of my house as a fish tank. Har har. ok not that funny.

Did you mean Phish?

We used to have an 800 gallon salt tank when I was growing up. Super awesome. We had one tank that was super passive, and then at another point it was full of really aggressive sea life. The passive tank was GORGEOUS. The anemones and carpets glow in the dark, and cute fish play in them. Then the aggressive tank was cool because we had an eel (blind, and would jump out of the tank if it was open up top) would sit and sway in the current until a gold fish passed (their treats) and then snap it up. We had trigger fish that would eat the guts out of the goldfish and leave them swimming. Kind of sad but circle of life.

 

Yeah we did have quite a few problems with dying fish. Puffers are really hard to keep alive. Once the tank gets ick, its really really hard to keep anything alive.