Hello!

[EmilyS]

I just joined tropical fish forums. I am a college student who enjoys fishkeeping.
My start to fish keeping was pretty unexpected. We were weeks away from moving into a brand new high school during a terrible season for ice dams. Water was dripping everywhere and the school decided rather than fix the problem, to just put buckets wherever there was a leak. One of the leakiest spots was a hallway with glass walls known as the "Fish Bowl." Some French students had recently learned that a French tradition on April Fool's day was to secretly tape a paper fish to someone's back. So on April Fool's day they bought a number of goldfish and put them in the water buckets in the Fish Bowl.
These buckets were of course disgusting, and the fish were quite miserable. People began moving a fish or two to their water bottles and taking them home. I ended up with one regular comet goldfish which I named April. My collection of fish has only grown since then.
April came to college with me for 6 months with a new fantail friend. I moved them to a bigger tank and bought two more goldies to bring to college. I soon found a used 50 gallon tank online which I cleaned, completely resealed, and which now sits in my mom's kitchen for all the goldfish.
I built an 800 gallon pond in my backyard and bought two shubunkin goldfish with the intent of testing the water quality before adding expensive koi. Those two shubunkin turned to 23 and then to 175 in two years. I have since sold many of the fish on Craigslist. We never got any koi.
Soon after moving my goldies to a 50 gallon, I got myself a Christmas present of a 10 gallon tank stocked with Peppered Corydoras and Gold and Leopard Longfin Danios. I haven't managed to breed the danios but I have recently had success breeding the corys, which I plan to give to friends and sell to my LFS.
Happy fishkeeping!
Emily

 

[PheonixKingZ]

Hello and welcome to the forum!

Very good for you, for rescuing those fish. People can be cruel to fish, so good job.

The API master test kit if very good testing water - a little pricy, but well worth it.

Would love to see pictures of your tank(s)! If you have any more questions, please ask.

 

[EmilyS]

Thanks! I actually have the API master test kit and use it quite often. We were actually more worried about residue on the pond liner. There wasn't a lot of risk to the fish, but still enough that we weren't about to put a hundred or even fifty dollar fish in there.

 

[PheonixKingZ]

What does the residue look like? Pictures?

 

[EmilyS]

The residue was very powdery, like sand dust. It came off on everything, but was also very difficult to get off the liner completely. All it does is make the liner look gray, so pictures wouldn't be very helpful, and it has also been in the ground for two years. It was advertised as a fish safe liner, so we weren't very concerned.
Neither of my tanks are very nice looking right now... The goldfish tank is completely bare and the 10 gallon is covered in algae with a breeder box hanging in the front.
Here's a picture of my pond, though:

And one of my favorite offspring of the original two:

I really like the black "scale" pattern that she has. A number of her siblings have it, too, but not quite as evenly as she does.

 

[Retired Viking]

Hello and welcome to the forum When my daughters were in college they rescued several fish and brought them home to me. 3 grew up to be large Koi which I gave to a friend with a pond.

 

[AilyNC]

Nice pond