How Did You Start Fishkeeping And What Was Your Craziest Fish?

[sami the cichlid]

hello all,

well, my first fish were goldfish called x-ray 1, x-ray 2 etc! Then one day my gran gave me her tropical fish tank and it began! now i have 4 tanks running with fish and turtles! my craziest fish were probalbly either puffer fish or piranhas! the piranhas didn't get along tho and ate each other........

how about you everyone?

 

[Haych]

the piranhas didn't get along tho and ate each other........

how about you everyone?

nice!

i have had fish for as many years as i can remember, my own OFFICIAL tank, i'd have been 10-12??

craziest, blue lobsters!

i was told they were community, so my "step dad type person" bought 2 for me, they ate all my sleeping fish, grew huge and escaped TWICE!

my mom was not impressed with a lobster running across the lounge floor. he had escaped through the hole in the hood for the pipes etc. when i tried to pick him up he just attacked me with his claws so i tried to scoop him into a glass using a spoon, and everytime i touched him, he panicked as he thought i was trying to get his inside squishy bit, and attacked the glass!!

they still creep me out to this day!

 

[dthoffsett]

I started keeping fish when I was around 16, just cause I wanted to.

My craziest "fish" was actually an escape artist apple snail. I kept coming home to her crawling across the living room, the funniest part was the cats were terrified of her.

 

[Oscar Betta]

I started fish keeping just by wanting a pet one day lol. My craziest fish are my ADFs if they count. They are so funny and weird.

 

[OldMan47]

I started by buying the unsorted fry at the local fish store at about the age of 10, yes over 50 years ago. They had a tank where they threw all of the fry born in the store and just let you dip some out of the tank at random for next to nothing in money. I had tanks at home because my dad was a fish keeper so I brought some fry home and asked for a tank to keep them in. It turned out that I had some very nice molly fry and I have had fish on and off ever since. Back then all of our filters required air to work because the power filters and canister filters of today had not been invented yet. We kept air pumps going all the time to run filters in the tanks. Even a HOB filter ran off of a air lift tube and it was a bit tricky getting everything set up right for the filter to move water efficiently through it. I can't recall any particularly unusual fish but I have always been a bit conservative in my choice of fish.

 

[snowflake311]

My love started with a water garden that had goldfish. I loved thoes fish but wanted some in my home. So I was at a tag sale with my mom when inwas 16 and saw a small 5 gal tank. I bought it with my own money my mom was not that crazy about it. The rest is history.

 

[Mr Bliss]

I wanted a dog or a cat as a kid, but my mom was allergic so I couldn't get one. Then, to my mom's horror, I wanted rats, and didn't get them either. Eventually mom got me a 15 gal aquarium to stop my whining. My first fish were like 5 goldfish in that small tank, and it was a disaster of course, but both me and my mom got better at it and eventually became addicted to the hobby.

My craziest fish was a weather loach I had for nearly a decade. He was extremely social (he'd come rest on my hand every time I put it in the tank) but also a highly skilled escape artist. He would jump out of any opening in the tank cover. Once I found him on the floor, looking a bit dried up and not moving at all, and he still made a full recovery. Despite being supposedly an intelligent fish species, this experience did not suggest to him that he should stop jumping out of the tank. Instead he'd sometimes leap out immediately when I opened the cover glass to feed the fish. His most impressive stunt was to charge straight upward, jumping about 30 cm above the water level and then plopping right back into the tank.

I now realize that part of the reason for his behavior might have been that the water was a bit on the warm side for him (24C if I remember correctly), making him hyperactive.

 

[Luke_emma_23]

It started like this..
About a year ago my youngest son became obsessed with my friends goldfish, we decided to get him his own, in a 35l tank (recommended by PAH) it has since been rehomed in a huge 400l aquarium belonging to another friend!!
This then progressed to a 125l tropical, since upgraded to a 220l
Then we dicovered Bettas, now have 3 boys in their own tanks & a sorority of girls!!
Finally we set up a 94l marine nano.
The end... (for now)

 

[lilacamy931]

Welll...mine a little random? I absolutely love pufferfish, we visit the local oceanarium just so I can play with my personal porcupine puff who ALWAYS comes to see me wherever he is (sadly passed on now, yep I did cry inthe oceanarium when found out..tad embarrasssing). Anyways never really visited LFS but one opened in local and looked new and enticing and going in, found out you could have puffers as pets! At this point I only knew two types of fish..goldfish and guppies. Well obsession ran within two months I had read every resource and brought a large tank but then couldn't get the other pieces until months later. I ended up with a free 14g which decided to cut my teeth with dwarf puffs in, boy did they take me on an absolute rollercoaster as my first fish! Since then discovered pufferfish aren't really for me as yet (I shall one day own my own puppydog eyed porc) and so for now have 8 bettas, one community tank, one fry tank (there are about 5 tanks currently) but Im not obsessed or anything..who said that?! My downfall has been discovering bettas...honestly why do they have to be so fantastic, and now cories have been added to the obsession..

 

[draconis]

Started back in high school with a project for a scientific fair with guppies. I have kept fish since then, mostly in ignorance, you know: angels with neons, boil the gravel, quaterly water changes, etc. The craziest (and the meanest) was a red devil the LFS guy assured me would make a great friend for my Oscar (RIP). Was a great fish to keep for over 5 years. He would smash against the walls, throw gravel arround and let himself be petted by visitors. He also survived 3 moves, including a 2+ hour drive in a 10 gallon tank in my car.

 

[llamalord305]

I started by buying the unsorted fry at the local fish store at about the age of 10, yes over 50 years ago. They had a tank where they threw all of the fry born in the store and just let you dip some out of the tank at random for next to nothing in money. I had tanks at home because my dad was a fish keeper so I brought some fry home and asked for a tank to keep them in. It turned out that I had some very nice molly fry and I have had fish on and off ever since. Back then all of our filters required air to work because the power filters and canister filters of today had not been invented yet. We kept air pumps going all the time to run filters in the tanks. Even a HOB filter ran off of a air lift tube and it was a bit tricky getting everything set up right for the filter to move water efficiently through it. I can't recall any particularly unusual fish but I have always been a bit conservative in my choice of fish.

Fasinating! I would love to see one of those work. Have any pictures?

 

[Water]

About four years ago it started with a pair of gold fish in a ten gallon tank for my daughter which didn't last that long. Then another ten gallon for my other daughter and another gold fish. Now we have 7 aquariums of various sizes. Our craziest fish is our gold fish. He likes to be fed and petted sometimes.

 

[drobbyb]

It all started with a 10 gallon tank and a few guppies when I turned 15. I didn't know anything about fish but my grandmother had kept fish since she was younger. I learned alot from her (mostly no waterchanges ever and fish in cycle and all the old hat habits.) I went away to the military at 18, and came back to pickup where I left off, but this time I had the internet to help me learn (and for the past year, I had this forum which has taught me loads!)

My craziest fish would have to be my oscar. He would ram the side of the tank in the middle of the night making a loud noise. I half expected to wake up to a ton of water in the floor.

 

[mjzuverink]

hmm, my fish keeping began when i was in middle school with a nice 29 gallon community tank. my craziest fish has been my clown knife, he has such a personallity and he is still with me today! I rememer moving him to his bigger tank and he jumped out of the tank when i was trying to net him. luckily i was able to grab and return him to his water when we feed him feeders or pellets we will still sometimes get excited to jump out of the water almost like a dolphin which often results in very wet floor and wall from splashing. but he has been a great experience overall

 

[OldMan47]

Sorry to disappoint you Llamalord, I have no fish pictures from over 50 years ago.
In those days I used black and white film, yes actual film, and would have never "wasted" a picture on my fish. I did have a kid's fixed focus camera that did really well using Verichrome Pan 127 film. My head is full of silly trivia like the film number. I took about 30 or 40 pictures in a typical month and really learned how to compose and frame a picture with that practice. Now I snap digital pictures constantly and do not worry about what it costs to buy film or develop the images. If I don't like a picture these days, I just delete it. After all it is just so many bytes on my hard drive.
The way a HOB worked using air is simple. The filter used a lift tube, the kind you see today on a UGF or a sponge filter. The basic flow path was easy. The air lift tube brought water up from he tank into the filter, it drained by gravity through the media and had an overflow thing that let water flow back into the tank. The return was a typical U shaped tube that worked on a simple siphon effect to let the filter level drop down as low as the tank water level. So here we go, lift tube to bring water in the filter above the tank water then gravity drain through the media and back into the tank. If you had several tanks that were all at the same height, you could even bring water into a filter in one tank and return it to another tank. Just set up a simple siphon to link the tanks together and when water level changed in one tank it changed in all of them. This means you could take that rather expensive HOB and use it to filter several tanks with just a bit of ingenuity and some custom setup. We were all amazed when the first of the power filters, the kind we call a HOB today, were invented.