Freshwater Tropical Fish

[Crumb]

(You saltwater snobs can go elsewhere. :P )

I have no idea who here keeps fish. This thread is where you can let me know.

I have a 100 gal. plexiglass tank. It currently houses ten fishes.

2 blue gouramis
2 bala sharks
2 white irredescent things whose name I can't remember :blush:
1 tiger barb (His buddy recently died :( )
1 clown knife
1 African butterfly fish
1 plecostomus

My bala sharks and my African butterfly are my favorite fish. They have been in my tank since I got it. African butterfly fish look like this:
http://a1272.g.akamai.net/7/1272/1121/20040331221204/www.liveaquaria.com/images/products/large/p_89621.jpg

This is not my fish, but mine looks just like it. It is a cool looking fish, but it barely tolerates me. I am closer to my sharks. I even saved one of 'ems life a bit ago. (more on this later) attached are pics of them the first taken when I just got them and the second taken just a bit ago. Please pardon the blurry pictures they are a tad camera shy. Just notice how big the little buggers have grown, I left the heater in both pics so you can get a size comparison. They are so cool, shiney and fast. You should see how they can jump! :eek:

If you have a tank or any fish tales. Please to share with the group.

[Roland98]

We have a 10-gallon tank now for my daughter, with a plecostomus (she named him "sucky," heh), 2 tiger barbs and 2 something-other barbs (they're kinda pinkish). She just got it a few weeks back and has been raving about it to all our family back home. When she was a baby, we had a 120-gallon monstrosity with about 8-10 oscars, several pacu, gars, a few other random cichlids...hell, I can't even remember what else, but it was a shitload of fish. We spent like $10/week just on goldfish feeders for the oscars and pacus--more than we spent on dogfood. It finally got to be just too much of a pain to keep clean and keep the fish fed, plus the oscars got a disease and all but one croaked (and there was no flushin' those babies--they were all at least 8 inches long or so). I think the 10-gallon tank should be more manageable.

[viscousmemories]

Cool fishes, Crumb. :fish: I've never had any underwater pets myself.

[Crumb]

(Arghhh! I lost my bloody post! :madrant: Here is an attempt to recreate it.)

Thanks vm.

Roland:
Oscars are impressive, but they tend to dominate the other fishies. I went with less aggressive fish. They are like one big happy family. Well, unless the new guys get too close to the butterfly around feeding time. Then he snaps at them.

I really wish I could remember the names of the two fish I just got. I will post their pics later, but I doubt anyone could tell me.

[Roland98]

(
Roland:
Oscars are impressive, but they tend to dominate the other fishies. I went with less aggressive fish. They are like one big happy family. Well, unless the new guys get too close to the butterfly around feeding time. Then he snaps at them.


Heh. Yeah, they ran the aquarium. Actually it wasn't so bad since we had so many, and the pacus were pretty aggressive as well, so they just kinda all thought they were each the alpha fish or something and really didn't bother each other very much (it was crazy to watch them eat the goldfish, though). I really like the smaller ones, myself; we used to have a bunch of kissing fish in a smaller tank before we got the big one.

[Crumb]

Ok well here's a story...

One day I am in my bedroom typing away at my computer. I am sure I was typing something important as I am not one do waste my time on frivolity. Anyway, I hear some noises coming in through my open bedroom door, but I think nothing of it. I assume it is a neighbor banging around in the causeway between our apartments.

A short time passes and I hear another sound that gets my attention. It sounds strangely like someone is in my kitchen/dining area rattling my pop cans! I cautiously make my way to the cans but there is no one there. But the cans rattle again and I see that they are moving on their own! I think: "Rodents? eww" and I don't really want to go near it. But I do. I pick up the self rattling bag of pop cans and there underneath it is one of my bala sharks suffocating! I drop the cans and I scoop him up and throw him back in the fish tank carpet fibers and all. He floats on his side, he gulps for oxygenated water. He slowly rights himself and, dazed, swims slowly around the tank.

The little bugger is still alive months later. If he hadn't flopped himself over to those pop cans he would have died right there on the carpet. I make sure all the openings on the fish tank are fully covered now. I haven't had another one jump out yet. Though they have tried.

[JoeP]

I wanna get fish. More stories will motivate me further!

[livius drusus]

A lady here at work had a lovely blue fish with fins that looked like silk drapery. It's one of those that fights if there's another of its kind in the tank. His name was King Arthur and he was very handsome. She kept him in a bowl at her desk, though, and it was totally depressing: no space, surrounded by flourescent lights and printers and whatnot.

I've never had any fish myself, but I think a well-appointed aquarium is a wonderful, beautiful thing. Much proppage to Crumb and Roland (except for that nasty sucky thing 'cause they totally gross me out).

[ceptimus]

I used to keep tropical fish. I had a fairly small tank with siamese fighters, orange swordtails, black mollies, tiny neon tetras, a kuhli roach, a sucking roach and a few others I forget. But no angel fish. Angel fish give me the creeps. :shudder:

My fishes all seemed to do fairly well. I think the main thing is not to overfeed them - they seem to survive best on almost nothing. Adding extra food just makes the tank need more frequent cleaning.

The orange swordtails had the neat trick of the dominant female changing sex.

I could never get the weeds to grow properly, despite experimenting with different plant types and different lighting arrangements.

Anyway, after a few years, I tired of them, and donated them to a pub, where they joined some of their fellows in a much larger tank.

Kuhli loaches are fun. They are a small stripey eel-shaped fish. They burrow into the gravel at the bottom of the tank, and sometimes you don't see them for weeks at a time. Then, just as you are thinking your Kuhli must have died, you see it zooming around the tank taking a bit of exercise. :)

[pescifish]

I wanna get fish. Should I be worried? :noid:

:chase:

[Crumb]

My (now former) brother in law kept a lot of aggressive fish in some large tanks he had. Jack Dempseys, green terrors, red devils, bunch of different cichlids and he had a snakehead too. When my Mom got herself a 100 gal. or so tank, he gave her a red devil and one other fish that was called something like sephellian (or something). Anyway it was a large bluish silvery thing that he pawned off on her because it was too aggressive.

The damn thing tore up my Moms tank and the poor red devil that had to live with him. At one point my Mom had the tank segregated with two panes of glass. Neither pane was wide enough to divide the tank so she used both to separate the two fish. The big guy could have nothing on his side of the tank, no heater, no plants, not so much as a rock. He spent his time moving the fish tank gravel around. He would even take a mouth full of gravel and spit it at the thermometer.

The divider didn't work very well and he would periodically break through to the poor red devil's side, chase him around the tank and both him and the red devil would get badly injured from swimming rapidly through and around the glass dividers. The fish was a fucking menace. My mom finally pawned the damn thing off on an unsuspecting pet store. I think we told them it was very aggressive, but I bet they didn't imagine to what extent.

[MooseIBe]

I've always wanted to keep tropicals .. they're very soothing to look at. My ex and I used to keep fancy goldfish but not terribly successfully. We named them after Roman emperors and within 72 hours, Augustus was floating upside down and generally looking unwell. We bought Tiberius to replace him and he and Claudius lasted a few weeks until one day we came home and found them BOTH floating on top of the water, with no visible signs of ill health except that they were dead (which is a fairly visible sign of ill health, come to think of it). We were up to Caligula by that point and I didn't have fancy having a fish named that so we switched to British Prime Ministers. Walpole snuffed it fairly quickly, doing that strange upside down thing first. Blair (we didn't have all the ones in between, I promise; we just decided to name them after the first and last PMs) was still alive and kicking when my ex and I split up (he got custody :shock: ) although all his fancy golden scales had fallen off and he had gone a murky grey colour.

Good job we never had kids, I suppose...