A quick search shows that we’ve had a few aquarium threads over the years, but mostly it’s been people posting a quick question. I thought it could be cool to have a thread where we can talk about what kinds of fish we keep, etc!
I have 3 fish tanks in the house. One is my wife’s 7 gallon betta tank. She used to keep it in her classroom (she’s a teacher) but she brought it home last year and never ended up taking it back. Home to a betta and four neon tetras.
The second is my pride and joy, a 75 gallon South American Cichlid community tank. Some angelfish, a severum, a discus, and schools of tetras and corydoras
The last tank is my discus grow out tank. I bought four baby discus a few months ago – sadly one ended up runty and died, but the other three are alright. One grew much faster than the others, and it’s getting to the point where he was preventing them from eating properly, so I moved him to the big tank. The other two should follow as soon as they catch up in size. This is just a boring bare bottom tank in the bedroom, but once the discus are out I want to turn it into a gourami tank.
The 75 is pretty fully stocked already, and I’m planning on adding at least two more discus, which means I’d need an upgrade. That’s why I’ve got a 30 gallon sump built – I still need to hook it up, but it will add a lot of load to the tank.
So what about you guys? Any of you partake in this hobby?
I’ve tried discus, and they kill each other. I have two in separate tanks.
I have the remains of a Tanganyikan tank. The freshwater store went white side up and I can’t get anymore locally.
I also keep killies and some salt water fish.
I have a 40 gallon tank that used to have 10 or 15 fish in it. Unfortunately, the ‘good’ fish store closed a while back so all I have left is PetCo. Every fish I got from the good place would live a few years. Of the PetCo ones, about half die within a few weeks.
Right now there’s only two fish left in the tank. It’s kinda nice. With just 2 small fish in a 40 gallon tank, I don’t have to drag hoses and buckets all over the house to do partial water changes. As soon as the water level gets low enough that I can hear splashing from the filter, I pull out about a gallon and add about two gallons back in. Doing that once a week or so has been working for the past few years.
I miss having fish- I’ve only got an axolotl tank at the moment, but I kept fish for years. They’re fish if the landlord asks
It just got a bit much, living in shared rental places, having, and moving, multiple tanks… I mostly had small community stuff, lacking space, but I did keep mudskippers for a while.
I used to have a bunch of tanks. Think my biggest was a 90. All freshwater, all focused on plants w/ high light, dosing, etc. Angels and cories were my main fish.
Used to breed bettas when I was a kid. That was a fun intro to genetics.
A few years ago, I realized I was viewing the upkeep as a chore rather than a pleasure. Was weird, because I had been a “fish guy” for so long. But it made me realize something could be good for a long stretch of your life, and then not a part of a subsequent part of your life.
Right now I’m down to a 3g hex on my desk here at work. Some crypt balansae, java moss, and cherry shrimp and Endler’s livebearers screwing their brains out.
I used to have a lot of tanks. Mostly saltwater. Then I became more of a kidkeeper than a fishkeeper. I donated my equipment to the Hudson Riverkeepers, the fish moved to new homes.
My recommendation for almost all tanks is to build a reverse flow undergravel filter. I don’t know if you can buy a reverse flow version but it’s easy to make one with some plastic eggcrate and plastic screen. You can send the output of a canister filter down under the filter or use upside down powerheads on the bottom. You’ll rarely have to clean your gravel and you’ll get a lot of biotic* action in the gravel with the power heads because they’re pushing highly oxygenated water from the top of the tank down under the gravel, and all of your water will be very well oxygenated.
75 gallons in the living room, blue LED, about a dozen glo fish & an old Plecostomus & fluorescent plants. Multicolor LED bubble wand along the back wall so the fish cast multicolored shadows on the ceiling. I’m running an external canister filter. The missus has a dragon problem (she’s got 3 now-a Beardie & two Chinese Water–all with their own 75 gallon enclosures) so to keep up I’m musing about getting either a largish acrylic saltwater tank, or maybe another 75 and making it a swamp tank with like frogs and newts in it.
I just have a measly 10-gallon tank at work. Nothing fancy like the rest of you! I have a few tetras and a platy (the other platy died)
My thoughts:
I love watching the fish - it’s very relaxing
I hate having to clean it - it’s a chore even with just a 10 gallon. I have an algae issue, so I have to clean it every few months.
It’s stressful sometimes. I hate seeing sick fish suffering.
To quit is almost impossible (for me). I could wait for all of them to die and then put the aquarium away, but when I’m down to the last fish, I feel bad for it and buy him some friends. And I’ve had some fish last for many, many years.
I too have had very bad luck with Petco fish. The last time I was there, all of their tanks looked horrible. The water was cloudy and numerous dead fish. I would have thought they’d have a sign up saying that the aquarium department was closed. But no…
I’ve found that water changes are a breeze now that I’ve got a Python. A Python is a length of hose with a nozzle on the end that connects to a sink faucet. Turn on the water and open a valve, and the water will drain into your sink, creating a pressure differential that will suck water out of your tank. That end of the hose is a gravel vacuum so cleaning your substrate is easy. When your tank is halfway drained, close the nozzle and water from the sink faucet will now flow back through the pipe, refilling your tank. Water changes for the 75 gallon now involve 10 minutes of gravel vacuuming and 15 minutes of waiting for the tank to refill. Super easy!
A friend had a roommate who kept four exotic crays and a zebra danio in a single ten-gallon tank. When the roommate moved out, said friend inherited. One of the crays died – recommended tank size is ten gallons per crayfish, so they were badly overcrowded.
He was concerned and asked if we’d help out with the surviving 3 (plus 1 fish). I know nothing about crayfish and precious little about fishtanks in general beyond the nitrogen cycle.
I started a 20-gallon tank. The crays immediately ate the zebra danio before the new tank was ready, and the red and cream-colored crays were beating up the third one, so I moved them into the 20 when it was cycled. Unfortunately I never really got the ammonia under control despite massive water changes and vacuuming and the addition of ammonia-neutralizing chemical, and they eventually both died.
Meanwhile the little beat-up green one in the old original “dirty” tank has thrived. He or she has lasted several years now and shed skin repeatedly, which I take to be a sign something is going right. I named him/her Kaiju, after the giant monsters in Pacific Rim, because this tough little being is a survivor and deserves respect.
I had something like that back when. The water was sprayed into the tank with a fine mist that de-gassed it. It took longer because of that, at best it might have changed 10 gallons an hour. I think it was the same place that made the peroxide oxygenator I had, and they probably went under because it’s been over 30 years since I’ve heard of them.
Is it necessary to spray the water out like that? The big benefit to oxygenating water during a water change is that oxygenating the water dechlorinates it, but I’ve never had issues with even a 75% water change. I just add Prime by SeaChem right after I’m done adding water and everything has been fine.
It’s not necessary but I preferred it to adding more chemicals. You usually don’t want to change that much saltwater at once either. You need to maintain the salinity of the water and the bacteria for the nitrate cycle. You may not need to change the water as often with proper filtering, or use a micron filter occasionally to clean the water.
Oh! Didn’t realize your tank was salt. Yeah, much more of a pain to do water changes for SW tanks! Tap water + prime is what my fish live in basically haha. I’ve always held the opinion that stable parameters > optimal parameters, so it’s tap water for me.
A guy I know at the pet store said he used tap water instead of reverse osmosis on a tank for a while, and had no problems. I guess it depends on what your tap water is like.
I have 5 tanks, a 150, 2 55 talls, a 40, and a 55 long I use for a bio.
All the tanks are plumbed together, with the 150 overflowing to the 55 talls, which flow to the 55 long, and the 40 can be put into or out of the cycle as needed for medicine or quarantine.
No filters, no noisy power heads, just 2 pumps in the bio and a couple of air pumps to power some bubblers. The bio is full of plants and sits in the window. Once every couple of weeks, I just turn off the pumps, which causes the tanks to drain to the bio, which overflows to my pond outside. In 15 minutes I’ve removed about 15% of the water, which I then top back off with water that I let settle in a large plastic trash can.
I have a motley collection of African Cichlids. None of them are even close to being a pure breed anymore, they’ve all crossed and made a whole bunch of mutts. Most still look pretty, even if some of them have faded or washed out colors these days.
I used to have a Red Devil. He was pretty cool. I trained him to take shrimp from my hand and to let me pet his bump. He got along with the other fish pretty well. He died a few years ago when he was about 7.
Back in the 1980’s I had worked myself up into a 90, a 75, a 55, and couple 20’s, all with different thriving plant communities despite there being no commercial products for growing aquarium plants nor an internet. There was an international newsletter that got circulated with bad translations of dutch, as I recall. My various fish reproduced easily in these spacious plant-filled tanks; angel fish, dwarf cichilds, danios, cherry barbs, I remember.
We were 4 miles from the epicenter of the California earthquake of 1989. Nothing survived, including the house. I never really got the magic back; it’s been many years since I had a tank.
