Newbie To Fish

[Corleone]

Look around book stores for species books, I have a nice one that's limited to smallish community species that would be particularly nice, but I also have some 500 page behemoths. If you get him involved in picking out future fish, he might find the wait more bearable. You can also make weekly or every other week trips to the LFS to look at fish and decorations. Depending on his personality, this might just make matters worse, so I leave that to your discretion, but I do recommend weekly trips to the LFS anyway. If you become a fixture and seem knowledgeable, you can sometimes get better help out of the staff. If you can find out what day they get new stock in, hit them in the early afternoon those days, you'd be amazed how quickly their stock dwindles in the first day as people pick up special orders or eager collectors clean out any less common fish.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

yes and if you get friendly with the staff they'll also be much more willing to order in anything special that you fancy which they don't usually stock so it'll mean you can get pretty much whatever fish you set your heart on rather than being limited to just the 'bread and butter' species that they keep in all the time.

 

[jasonpetts]

couple of fish hanging around the heater all day, even going as far as wedging themselves between it and the side of the tank, temp set to 26 degrees, is it too cold? its 2 of my 3 platys that act like this 1 doesnt seam to bother! any ideas?

 

[waterdrop]

You want to be using one or more thermometers that are independent of the heater itself. Thermometers are cheap.

Have you run your normal tests? You always want to be sure you don't have ammonia or nitrite, despite the fact you cycled your filter ages ago probably.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[jasonpetts]

ammonia and nitrates are fine, had issues in the begginging but not since, im wondering if heater isnt acurate to temp gage, il try a thermometer, is 26 about right for livebearers?

 

[waterdrop]

The heater itself isn't an accurage temperature gauge at all. They shouldn't put numbers on them, just arrows for higher/lower, as the device is meant to be used in conjunction with an external thermometer distantly located in the tank.

26C?, not sure, maybe a degree cooler but I don't keep livebearers, so have not looked them up. Fairly simple to look up each fish here on TFF and write down its optimal temp range in your logbook so you don't have to do it again. Then find the temp that best overlaps all the fish you have.

~~waterdrop~~