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[Mister Gardener]

Bill - this topic is wide open. Please do us the honor of kicking it
off with a little introduction.

MG

[humBill]

Thanks Mr G - I guess that means at least 1/6 of my guesses were
correct:)
So - I started my voyage into lunacy right at 3 years ago with an
existing pond in a house we were fortunate enough to buy here is
Austin, Texas (actually Leander to be exact). A question about 'little
red worms' let me to rec.ponds. I was asking question after question
there, even more than here, if you can imagine that. Well 6 months
later I decided an aquarium would be appropriate in case I needed a
sick/quarantine tank - and the lunacy began. I then found Puregold
(goldfish) and a little later rec.freshwater. I really love the hobby
and the people I get to 'meet' online. I am forever grateful to the
many, over the years who have kept my mistakes as small as possible. I
found TFA in an invitation from the poor rec.ponds. Right now I have
2-10 gals with platys, an 18 in limbo but cycled, 2-29's one with blood
parrots and congo tetras, the other with fancy goldfish, and 2 55's -
one with mbunas, that you helped me with, the other I am still building
up with non mbuna Malawi's. This is not to mention the
20L,29,37,2-55's and a 60, which I eventually plan to jam in my house
somewhere (or find a bigger house:). I went Craiglist crazy for a
while. I am a self employed garage printer. I always check into 'the
group' at least once or twice a day, but when business is slow (like
today) my posts can be a little more frequent. I am also the editor of
our local Austin Pond Society newsletter- Ripples.

You will probably notice a theme in some of my posts - I'm trying to
stretch a dollar. So often I will ask what can I do, and what can I do
cheaper but with possibly similar results.

Well, nuff said. I'm usually am not short on words so I'll leave some
for later. Thanks sooo much. This is a wonderful group and I
appreciate you all!
Bill Brister

[larflu]

Lar,
...hey if little Billy can be Bill and little Timmy can be Tim I figure
lil Larry can be Lar

A Ponder...put in a small pond, around 300 gallon with a 25 gal veggie
filter in June of 2005
http://arrow-pestcontrol.com/pond.htm
guess I need to put in some updated pics on that page...a years worth
of vegetation and added features has it looking a bit different.

In the Dallas area and was pleased to see the weather extremes this
year had no effects on the little aqua world.. a cold Winter gave us a
weeks worth of below 20f, several nights close to single digit temps
and a Summer heat wave of well over a months worth of over 100f days.

Fish population consists of 2 feeder goldfish put in last
Summer..thought they might be comets, but they don't have the deep
forked tails, so guessing they are just "common" goldfish, though a few
of the fry do have the deep forked tail. There was another GF in the
possible gene pool of the fry, a FanTail that made it through April,
but a day after seeing a Blue Heron at the pond, fish scales were found
at the bottom of the pond and the fantail had disappeared....9 GF
ospring, added this Spring/Summer a moore, a calico fantail and a
"bubble eye". A blue and a red male betta..the red one will be seen
daily and actually was in the pond last Summer but brought in for the
Winter, the blue one rarely makes an appearance. 4 red (minor I think)
tetras, 4 black skirted tetras, 6 marble mollies..and fry...6 male and
female fancy guppy, and fry...6 mickey mouse platys, and fry and 4 long
fin danios. Needless to say I will be needing to start up an aquarium
or two real soon for the tropicals.

Lar

[Pauline]

Hi all,

 

I'm Pauline from the Manchester area of the UK.  I've been lurking on this group after lurking for a very short while on the newsgroup, picking up lots of tips daily. 

 

I'm sorry if this is too long and boring, but I'll tell you about my newly found obsession with freshwater tropical fish. 

 

I was given a second hand, 40 UK gallons fish tank just before Christmas time last year.  My husband and I set it up and put various types of 'goldfish' in it.  We had kept goldfish, not very successfully, in smaller tanks over the years.  Fingers crossed in this bigger tank, we hoped to manage to keep them alive.  No such luck.  They all got ich and died pretty quickly.  A friend suggested that maybe the room we were keeping the tank in was just too cold at night which maybe causing the water temp' to drop too low, and suggested that maybe putting a heater in and then adding goldfish was the route to go.  Or, we could try tropical fish.

 

I had always fancied trying my hand at keeping tropical fish, but always thought that there was some magic formula and that I, as a mere mortal, did not possess it.  I got all the books out of the local library before starting to set the tank up and they were such an eye opener.  For example, I never knew that you had to treat the water before adding it to the fish tank, or that you needed to test the water.  My thoughts had been that the water was crystal clear, so the fish must be loving it.  My heart goes out to the poor goldfish we had tried keeping over the years.

 

Anyway, doing everything by the book, and with a lot of advice, not always good, from my local LFS, I finally get my first lot of fish installed and the tank eventually cycled.  There has been no looking back.  I have now got 4 fish tanks  on the go, the original 40 gal and 3 x 20 gals.  They are all running remarkably well, for me anyway.

Right now I couldn't say that I am interested in any particular fish, I'm just loving everything and anything.  I've been the proud 'grandma' of new baby guppies, mollies and pineapple swordtails.  I've completely fallen in love with plec's and fallen out of love with spotted talking catfish. The reason for that one was that my LFS assured me that it was a great community fish, but nobody told the catfish.  Every morning I would find a half eaten guppy or platy in the tank and would never see the catfish from putting him in there to taking all the pieces of wood etc out of the tank to catch him to take him back to the shop a week after purchase. 

 

OK, I think that's enough from me for now.  I'd just like to say thanks for all the help and advice you folks are readily willing to hand out to all us newbies.  I haven't asked anything myself before now, but I have taken lots of your advice, so once again Thanks!

 

Pauline
--
I wish i was a glow worm, a glow worms never glum, 'cos how can you be grumpy, when the sun shines out your bum!

[humBill]

Hi Pauline - I don't want to make this a conversation in the 'New
Members' area, but your catfish reminds me of , I thought, a funny
story. I was talking with a veteran pond guy recently and we were
talkin. I mentioned 'I had read' something about these fish in a book.
His reply was 'Ya know, that's probably generally true. But the thing
is, none of these fish can read, so they don't necessarily know that's
what they're supposed to do':) I'm pretty sure his point was fish have
tendencies, but not steadfast rules (and surroundings and circumstances
certainly differ). Which is why he mentioned, when he used to give
written advice he used to always end it with YRMV -- (Your Results May
Vary).
Bill

[Mister Gardener]

Many more member profiles can be found in an earlier edition of this
topic by clicking on

http://groups.google.com/group/The-Freshwater-Aquarium/browse_frm/thread/86c2d65bbef3e6c7/#

[Jason]

This thread is still sticky on Google, so I'll reply ;-)

My name is Jason, thus the handle. I'm a web designer by trade, which
is a remarkably stressful job, and much to my girlfriend's chagrin (and
my cat's delight), fish and aquarium plants are my source of Zen. Who
needs a bonsai tree?

I'm still a relative newbie, but I refer to myself as an educated
newbie. Meaning, I know what I've read and what I've had to learn, but
there's still SOOO much to learn! I've only recently started
introducing live plants into my systems.

I now have the following tanks:

- A 55G tank with an assortment that changes fairly often. It has 4
dwarf gourami, 5 platys, 5 neon tetras, a pleco that I never see, and
about 50 snails. The snails came in with a purchase of hornwort, which
was suppose to take care of an algae problem I had. The hornwort all
died within a few days, but the snails ended up taking care of the
problem. Now that I'm use to them, they're a welcome addition to the
family.

The pleco comes out so rarely that I forget he's there. I have a rather
large fake log with caves, and he pretty much stays in there 24/7.
Every time I do see him, though, I would swear that he's 2" larger than
the last time! He's by far the biggest fish I've ever had.

The neons were an accident. I was buying them for my 10G tank, and I've
had such bad luck with my LFS in the past that I figured if I bought
10, then 2 of them might survive... and I really only wanted 2. But,
wouldn't you know it, almost all of them survived, but I could only fit
5 in my 10G so the other 5 had to stay in the 55G. That completely
threw off all of my future plans; I intended to purchase a rope fish
and maybe a few bala sharks, but now I'm afraid that they'll eat the
neons.

This tank was my first successful experiment with plants. I bought 2
packs of Miracle Bulbs, so now I have 6 huge plants dominating the
tank. 2 of them are lillies, which are nice looking but I planted them
too close to the front of the tank (I didn't know they would get so
HUGE). I can't remember the name of the others, but they were hybrids.
One of them has leaves that just grew straight up and float on the top;
one of them has dark green leaves that look jagged, and are really
pretty neat; two of them look like swords, and are lighter green in
color. I recently added some anacharis, from where my 10G was getting
overwhelmed.

I use a Magnum 350 filter on this tank, which has worked out well. The
only problem is that it's a little hard to change the filter.

- A 10G tank, which is my pride and joy. It stays in my office, so it
gets a lot of attention. It hosts 4 black-fin tetras, 1 dwarf gourami,
4 neons (one died recently, and I never knew why), 2 otos (one huge,
and one tiny), and a dwarf frog that's really very cool. I had
introduced some platys recently, but every one of them died within a
few days and I haven't figured out why.

For plants, I have a TON of anacharis (it started with one stem), and
one of those lighter green sword plants like I mentioned being in my
55G. I also have several fake plants that I've had for awhile, and once
I figure out what they are, I'll try to step up to live plants to
replace them.

The filter is a Whisper filter, but I've been thinking about changing
it out to a canister filter like I have on the 55G. I'm hesitant,
because the water is beautiful right now, but I'm constantly changing
the filter right now and I can't help but wonder if a stronger canister
would alleviate some of that.

- a 1G betta tank. This is a squat bowl that sits on my desk, and hosts
a vibrant red male betta. I added black and purple gravel to the
bottom, and a fake yellow anemone towards the back of the bowl, so the
red betta really stands out when he's in front of it. I lovingly call
the betta "Pops," because his color pops so well.

This tank gets the most attention from me, because it's only a few feet
from my monitor and easy to see. Plus, since it's not a filtered tank,
I feel like I'm constantly working with it! I wish I could find a way
to make the tank a little more self-supportive, but not lose the
attractiveness.

That's it for the inside! I wish I had a local friend that was into
fish, so we could trade some back and forth, though.

Did I mention that I have a single LFS which is kind of crappy? The
closest decent LFS is about an hour and a half away, so if I need
medicine or something... I'm SOL. I've recently started stocking up on
things, figuring it's better to spend money and not need it than to
wish I had bought it and not have it.

- Jason

[KarlZona]

Hi Group,

I'm Karl and I've resdiscovered fish keeping early this year after an
almost 10 year break. My favorite fish is the cute and silly Clown
Loach. Hope I don't sound like a fruit cake saying that... :)

My other interests/hobbies are cat rescuing/collecting, pinball machine
collecting/restoring, and cooking/eating.

I've just gotten my first "big tank" (135 gal) and it's almost ready to
do... I'll make another topic with questions on it. I'm very excited.

Thanks, Karl.
honda...@cox.net
(note, my aol email is shut off and only there as a spam magnet, don't
use it please)

[ifb-online]

I vaguely remember contributing to a guest book here a while back or
did I dream that?! :)

As a ten year old living in Indonesia in 1971 while my father was on
secondment to a UN agency there, I was introduced to the magic of
tropical fish. I was able to look after the classroom tank in the
holidays and we had angel fish in the pond outside! A fish peddler
would visit the house, on foot, once a month with a wooden yoke
balanced on his shoulder of glass jars full of brightly coloured fish.
I wish I'd taken a picture...

I'm now a professional journalist in the IT and digital imaging sectors
here in the UK and run my own digital photography magazine website
(http://dpnow.com). With two daughters aged 10 and 8 I thought the 35
year gap since my last flirtation with tropical fish had lasted long
enough and in April we bought a 120 litre (32 US gallon or 26
imp.gallon) Juwel Rekord 120 and haven't looked back. It's a bit
over-stocked but is well planted and gets cleaned and water-changed
regularly. I have DIY modified the tank hood to double the lighting
wattage to 60W, with one tube being a wide spectrum triphosphor type.

Current stock includes three types of danio, a pair of blue dwarf
gouramis, a female orange gourami, a shoal of neons, some peppered and
unidentified corys, a dwarf puffer, four amano shrimp, an albino
ancistrus and a lot of snails!

I've just started an online photo gallery of my fish on my site, which
I will attempt to update regularly, see:

http://dpnow.com/galleries/showgallery.php/cat/535

I'd be more than happy to help answer any photography questions if
there are any :)

The tank is going reasonably well, with no mortalities for several
months, but our original ancistrus and one female dwarf gourami died
(unrelated causes) recently. The tank is getting rather over grown with
what I believe is hair and/or beard algae and tufts of brush algae
which is beginning to concern me - any suggestions welcome!

Ian

[Mister Gardener]

Ian wrote:
> I vaguely remember contributing to a guest book here a while back or
> did I dream that?! :)

You didn't dream it. Google closes topics if they have not been active for a
period of time, and the original guestbook was locked. Group managers were
unable to re-open the topic, so a new topic with a similar name was created,
and it is hoped that occasional entries will continue to be made so that
this second guest book doesn't get locked as well. The original guestbook is
floating about in the old topics - and should appear if someone does a
search for it.

MG