sushiray
Aquarium Advice Newbie
Hello aqua friends! As the title states I could be either!
I actually started the hobby over 40yrs ago!! a little 10gal. tank & stand special (metallic brush gold aluminum!!) from of all places?! Macy's!! Yep! for those NY'er's old enough to remember - at Queens Center when dept. stores had a pet shop. I kept a lot of fish (a newbie no no) including angels that spawned with a red tiger oscar roaming the tank, a kisser gouramie which had a very bad habit of kissing too much! albino catfish (which I fell in love at 1st sight!) & algae eater, neons, swordtails. but my favorite were my silver dollars! they were fast & furious!
I continued on for 17yrs, then took a hiatus for couple of years, restarted for 2yrs then been absent for the past 13yrs! just picked up the "sport" again this past april (thus the title newbie oldie) & did another newbie no no!
one day with my kids in tow, I had the sudden urge to buy a 20gal starter tank package from petsmart. This was not the bad part. I also bought 3 baby silver dollars, 1 bala 1 redtail 1 rainbow 1albino sharks, 3 albino corys, 2 bloodfins 1 reg.pleco & started up the same day! w/o cycling the tank! I just used the water conditioner, waited an hr. then had them all "dive" in!
the salesperson warned me against doing this even tho I insisted (yes I was one of those customers you hear about from LFS salespeople!) - said I will lose many.
well to my surprise & theirs they all survived for 2 months. but one thing lead to another & I now only have my 2 albino corys (now big & fat!). how I lost them is another thread story - but briefly, I had a fin rot disease that swept thru my corys, used jungle fizz tablets & not realizing I needed to increase aeration (no such warning on the package) I found almost all my fish gasping at the surface, but surprisingly the corys were not gasping (including adding 13babies), just shooting to the surface a lot.
The silver $'s my prize possession raised from nickel size to twice the size of silver $'s all suffocated. the bala & albino were gasping wheezing but they survived (after I placed an airstone & increase filtration flow). all the albino corys survived also.
that was the major ordeal.
so now I just started a discus tank & received 8 BN oh so cute baby baby sized plecos (2 of them albinos). so far so good.
but this may be another mistake - I just added a baby baby oh so cute royal pleco. I know they will grow big (but I plan on moving it to another tank when it gets to 3-4", right now it's an inch). so far so good. just hope it doesn't bother my discus.
as for how I was introduced to the pleco (or as we called it growing up & now my kids - sucker fish) dad bought it one day to add to my 10gal tank.
thks all for reading my long bio!
I actually started the hobby over 40yrs ago!! a little 10gal. tank & stand special (metallic brush gold aluminum!!) from of all places?! Macy's!! Yep! for those NY'er's old enough to remember - at Queens Center when dept. stores had a pet shop. I kept a lot of fish (a newbie no no) including angels that spawned with a red tiger oscar roaming the tank, a kisser gouramie which had a very bad habit of kissing too much! albino catfish (which I fell in love at 1st sight!) & algae eater, neons, swordtails. but my favorite were my silver dollars! they were fast & furious!
I continued on for 17yrs, then took a hiatus for couple of years, restarted for 2yrs then been absent for the past 13yrs! just picked up the "sport" again this past april (thus the title newbie oldie) & did another newbie no no!
one day with my kids in tow, I had the sudden urge to buy a 20gal starter tank package from petsmart. This was not the bad part. I also bought 3 baby silver dollars, 1 bala 1 redtail 1 rainbow 1albino sharks, 3 albino corys, 2 bloodfins 1 reg.pleco & started up the same day! w/o cycling the tank! I just used the water conditioner, waited an hr. then had them all "dive" in!
the salesperson warned me against doing this even tho I insisted (yes I was one of those customers you hear about from LFS salespeople!) - said I will lose many.
well to my surprise & theirs they all survived for 2 months. but one thing lead to another & I now only have my 2 albino corys (now big & fat!). how I lost them is another thread story - but briefly, I had a fin rot disease that swept thru my corys, used jungle fizz tablets & not realizing I needed to increase aeration (no such warning on the package) I found almost all my fish gasping at the surface, but surprisingly the corys were not gasping (including adding 13babies), just shooting to the surface a lot.
The silver $'s my prize possession raised from nickel size to twice the size of silver $'s all suffocated. the bala & albino were gasping wheezing but they survived (after I placed an airstone & increase filtration flow). all the albino corys survived also.
that was the major ordeal.
so now I just started a discus tank & received 8 BN oh so cute baby baby sized plecos (2 of them albinos). so far so good.
but this may be another mistake - I just added a baby baby oh so cute royal pleco. I know they will grow big (but I plan on moving it to another tank when it gets to 3-4", right now it's an inch). so far so good. just hope it doesn't bother my discus.
as for how I was introduced to the pleco (or as we called it growing up & now my kids - sucker fish) dad bought it one day to add to my 10gal tank.
thks all for reading my long bio!
