What Fish Do You Regret Buying?

[jonny-5]

I am now more opened eyed when buying fish, I always ask about Water conditions Tankmates, Behaviour, Breeding......You would be amazed how many people that work in the stores dont know a thing about what they are selling !
..........But then again, im sure you have all experienced it at some point

 

[Slaphppy7]

I am now more opened eyed when buying fish, I always ask about Water conditions Tankmates, Behaviour, Breeding......You would be amazed how many people that work in the stores dont know a thing about what they are selling !
..........But then again, im sure you have all experienced it at some point

"You would be amazed how many people that work in the stores dont know a thing about what they are selling !"

Ain't that the truth....

 

[jonny-5]

I remember having a tons of snails in a 5ft tank, I tryed the lettuce leaf trick, Some snail away stuff (supposed to knock them down, then you vac them out) needless to say it didnt work & that was recommended by the LFS. Then he was trying to sell me all sorts of other c**p that was not even for the purpose. So whatever shop owners tell me, i take with a pinch of salt....literally

 

[Snagrio]

A lot of it was undoubtedly due to my inexperience at the time, but angelfish, rams and weirdly, even livebearers I've had a bad history with in terms of survival rate. Special mention to livebearers in particular, I remember the likes of platies and mollies never lasting long, which is weird because the natural water around here is the hard, high PH stuff they prefer.

And kind of a half regret, clown loaches. Got one that came with a 30 gallon, over the years upgraded to a 55 gallon and 3 more, and eventually rehomed them due to the fact that even a further upgrade to a 125 gallon wasn't going to be enough long-term. That and they single-handedly changed the community type of my setup once they figured out that they didn't have to wait for small fish to die to be considered edible...

I did find them enjoyable for the years I had them, but I don't regret the decision to ultimately rehome them and have the chance to completely redo the makeup of my new system.

 

[Sgooosh]

some websites say random tankmates for fish that aren;t even compatible with the hardness, like neon tetras and guppies. whaa???

 

[Essjay]

Websites can be written by anyone from a very experienced person to someone with no knowledge whatsoever. That's why you need to know who has written it. Some of them know less than the average per store worker.

 

[Sgooosh]

Websites can be written by anyone from a very experienced person to someone with no knowledge whatsoever. That's why you need to know who has written it. Some of them know less than the average per store worker.

haha yes, one of my first threads were if you can put guppies, neon tetras, a betta fish, gouramis, or angel fish together lol

 

[OnlyGenusCaps]

I also think there is a tendency towards dogmatism to beware of as well. I've only been on this forum a short time, but the number of times I have seen people asserting that something simply "won't" or "can't" work, to then have many people contradict it with their experience is astonishing. It's becoming an expectation of mine here.

While it is true that there are certain situations that are highly unlikely to result in success (perhaps a full grown oscar and guppies being long term compatible?), others seem as though people hear something from a "trusted" source and take it as unassailable fact. For example, pH tolerances of many fish seem much higher than people give them credit for. I've already contradicted, and likely irked some in doing so, that Endler's can't be kept with tetras because of the difference in preference for hardness and pH. I've kept these two together. They both did well. It leaves me wondering where dogma like this arises. Can we trace its origin? Probably not. But I do wonder what drives some of the dogmatism I see. It's interesting and I'd like to understand that better.

 

[Essjay]

Before I knew about hardness, I had endlers. They were pure endlers (yellow top swords), bought from a specialist breeder. They never lived more than a year but I had a self sustaining population with both males and females.
I have no idea how long endlers are supposed to live, but I'm sure it must be longer than a year. The question is - was their short lifespan due to my hardness of 5 dH or something else?

 

[Essjay]

There was a study done in Germany in the 1980s on cardinal tetras kept in hard water. Examination of the body after death showed calcium deposits in the bodies. I wish I could find a link to the study, it's probably on some website I don't have access to.

 

[FishFinatic77]

I regret getting guppies when I first started keeping fish, as I have very soft water and, at the time, I had no idea what I was doing and I didn't have my tank cycled. Many of them died.
I regret getting red-eyed balloon belly tetras because they nipped the guppies' fins.
I also regret getting otos, not because I don't like them, but because I put them in an uncycled tank and they all died.
All of these bad decisions happened because I didn't do enough research before getting fish, and I took the advice of someone who didn't know what she was doing. Now, 5 years later, I know a lot better and I won't make those mistakes again. I still feel bad about all the fish I killed though.

 

[clambert122]

Black Skirt Tetras.

I bought a school of 10. Put them in the tank, and they just formed a gang and started to kill everything. I had 3 dead angel fish in one day. THey kept grabbing them by the training fins, dragging it down to the bottom, and then they would all just sit there and bit it over and over keeping it pinned to the bottom.

Never seen anything like it. I think they might have been half breed pirahana's.

I just recently put some Trumpet and Mystery snails in. Lets see how that goes.

 

[Jennjenn22]

My son got 4, 12 cent goldfish for a 10 gallon. Wow I didn't do my research. As they got bigger so did my tanks. I am on my 4th bigger tank for them. They are currently in a 75gallon, and well I found an amazing deal for a 100 gallon tank. So they get to move again soon. It's hard to find decorations that are inexpensive, and Large for them to swim threw and not get hurt. Lucky me I have a friend who got into glass blowing as a hobby. She made me this thick blue pulled glass and twisted around to a ball shape, and it's perfect. My goldy's just swim threw it and it's really smooth glass, so no one gets hurts when they spawn, and it's pretty. Can't wait for her to finish a bigger one for the new tank.

But I will never buy gold fish again. They get big if there happy and the water is right. They are 4 years old now.
Or molly's my molly's had so many baby's.Over population in that tank when I was a kid.

 

[OnlyGenusCaps]

Before I knew about hardness, I had endlers. They were pure endlers (yellow top swords), bought from a specialist breeder. They never lived more than a year but I had a self sustaining population with both males and females.
I have no idea how long endlers are supposed to live, but I'm sure it must be longer than a year. The question is - was their short lifespan due to my hardness of 5 dH or something else?

That's a very good point. Just because a fish is alive and breeding, doesn't necessarily mean it is experiencing optimal health. To be sure, we humans do this to ourselves all the time.

I have N-class Endler's from a specialist breeder, so sounds a bit similar to your situation. I don't know how long they live either. Some of mine are up to 3 years at this point, so at the very least I've not run into the same longevity you found. Who is to say why. Could it be that you got a genetically weak strain? There are just so many factors. And that's really all I'm getting at.

I do think this is natural human responses to things to overly cling to belief. We start uninformed, make mistakes, someone kindly suggests modifications (or we discover them), they work, we accept that those modifications are necessary, we continue with them and begin to believe that those modifications are the only road to success. It happens in many human endeavors. Once we've decided something is true, we, as humans, are very good at amplifying data that supports our previous conclusion and minimizing data that contradicts it. It's a whole type of study in psychology. That said...

There was a study done in Germany in the 1980s on cardinal tetras kept in hard water. Examination of the body after death showed calcium deposits in the bodies. I wish I could find a link to the study, it's probably on some website I don't have access to.

Sounds like there is a study out there with data that suggests tetras have physiological issues (I'm assuming the deposits were correlated with increased morbidity and mortality) in harder water. Though I've had them in non-optimal conditions, perhaps I should not. I'll see if I can find the study - I have access to nearly all those sort of sites. If I can find a sharable link to a PDF or something similar, I'd be happy to send it your way for future reference. That way you have that at your disposal for future discussions such as this one.

 

[Uberhoust]

What an awesome thread. I regret purchasing just about any fish I did not research before going to the store. Those ones that look really cool but you don't know anything about. The most recent for me was the Dwarf Neon Rainbows. They are a pretty fish if you can get over the skinny head look, but they are just so active that it raises the tension level in the tank too much for my liking. After we got them I had to move some fish around to get the peace again. On the other hand on the same day we purchased a female Neon Stream Gobi (don't know the real name). The Gobi has been a character in the tank and has done a better job at cleaning algae from the tank then any other fish.