ranchwest

Wow, read this whole thread, interesting. Some thoughts:

1) I once had a fish store and have had literally thousands of fish. In retrospect, there's something good about nearly all of them. A few get too big for aquariums, but the only normal sized fish I still can't stand at all is Chinese Algae Eaters. The rest, they just need the right setup.

2) Fish behave differently in different sized tanks and with different tankmates. Find out what other people think about a type of fish before burning a memory in your mind forever. The most violent fight I ever saw between two fish was an angel and a plecostomus in a 20 gallon long. Put those two fish in a 100 gallon tank and they probably get along just fine.

3) If a fish can fit in another fish's mouth, assume that is where it will end up unless you learn otherwise. I had a 135 gallon tank with carefully matched/selected good sized fish that never fought at all, but they'd eat any small fish that entered the tank.

4) If a fish is very quick, assume it is an agitator/fin nipper until you learn otherwise.

5) Water changes, prefer 20% or less at a time. One big factor that is often overlooked is temperature.

6) Ich, temperature needs to be over 78 degrees, 83 is better if the fish don't distress. If it isn't a planted tank, add a lot of salt.

7) Quarantine, if you aren't or can't q, dip the fish in a heavy salt solution before introducing into your display tank. It helps cut down on disease.

Specific fish:

1) Red devil -- you can easily spot the female, she's the dead fish.

2) Irridescent sharks, also known as pangasius catfish -- can get very large, as much as 3 feet!

3) Cardinals/Neons -- large initial losses are common, don't be shocked if it happens to you, if you can't bear the thought, don't buy the fish -- neons are usually easier than cardinals because neons are usually commercially raised and cardinals are often wild

4) elephant nose -- very sensitive, especially at first, very good jumpers, not a beginner fish

5) discus -- not a beginner fish

6) chocolate gourami -- not even an advanced fish, stay away unless you've got a pretty good idea of what you're doing

7) blue rams -- not the easiest fish to keep, very interesting and pretty if you can keep them, may be a little feisty for a small community tank

clown loaches -- neat fish, but if they get ick they don't have scales so it limits your treatment options, usually peaceful but sometimes don't like it when another fish tries to claim a territory, flipping over on their side is one of their antics and doesn't necessarily mean anything negative

LIONHEAD

A pair of beautiful Discus, that I was not ready for, a really bad impulse buy. Dead in three weeks........

grim

i bought a chinese alge eater the guy behind teh counter told me he would keep my tank nice and clean for a very long time as soon as he hit around three inches or so he stoped eating then he turned on my red tail shark and bore a hole in him i however dont have a heart and was able to get rid of the fish well leave it at that

Jerroldw91

Florida Flagfish. I bought 3 of them thinking they would be cool and would bring color to my tank. Well the male decided it was gonna become alpha male of the tank and killed about half of the other fish. I moved him and the 2 females into my 10 gallon were he insisted on reproducing witht he females (killing them). so now he is a bachelor in the 10 gallon all to himself. While he was in the 29 he would eat up all the plants, i changed to plastic but he decided to eat those too.

The bad thing about him is he won't die. on the plus side if i forget to feed him for a few days, or a week, or erm a month (i havnt done this but it wouldnt surprise me if it worked) it doesnt matter!

Fishman123

Probably 2 giant danios. I was a noob at the time, and they seemed cool. Now they are just mediocre quick-moving nuisances.

Danielle

can I change mine? lol...

Right now my ember tetras are my biggest regret. Beautiful fish, very skittish though. Thats not the bad part however. They are freaking massive piggies! I can't get any food to anything else in the tank because the embers eat it! Hide sinking algae pellets deep in the plants for the shrimp? No problemo... doesn't matter if their little tummies area already packed with micro pellets.. they'll find and eat every last morsel. If a wafer piece happens to be out in the open it's like a shark feeding frenzy.

I'm going to have to devise some contraption to feed the shrimp so the tetras can't get to the food!

I dunno what I'm going to do when I add the pearl danios. They are slow feeders

Maybe I'll have to donate the embers to the new pet store down the street.... or maybe they'll just eat themselves to death and save me the trouble of having to catch them.

trag

I've kept fish since 1975 so I have a few different experiences that stick in my mind.

1) Whichever goldfish I bought which brought in the anchorworms which killed my beloved Red Cap Oranda. I no longer have any memory of the parasite carrier, but that Red Cap was my beloved very first fish. I had her for years--and yes, she laid eggs once. At first anchor worms are just little easily removed clear slivers, but they grow anchors like grappling hooks when mature. The books at the time recommmend potassium permanganate, but it didn't seem to help. I pulled them off by hand, while I could, but once the mature ones started forming, and more were anchoring inside her gills... Well let's leave it at that. It's been thirty years and it's still bugging me...

2) Yellow Headed Jawfish. A marine fish which are beautiful and fun to watch. They will also jump out of a 30 gallon low (36" X 12") no matter how well the lid is secured and sealed. Perhaps they need a deeper tank, or maybe that would just give them a longer launching run.

3) Gold Severums. This one was actually kind of good, but as an earlier poster mentioned, severums get *big*. They will rival oscars for size. And they are voracious plant eaters--eat tough-as-nails-giant-sagitarious plant eaters. I bought six wanting to breed them when they were these cute little 2" circles. I thought they got maybe to the size of a jewel cichlid (4 - 5"). I put them in a 200 gallon tank. Then I went away to college and left the 200 gallon in my parent's basement. My Dad is wonderfully dedicated and did water changes every two weeks without fail--more reliably than I would have managed.

After a couple of years, between one summer and winter visit, I returned to just two gold severums, now grown to the size of full-sized oscars and about 60 little gold severums following them around the tank. So they did breed, but they were huge! And I couldn't keep any plants in the tank.

4) Ten years later, my roommate at the time and I built a new 200 gallon tank (the first "severum" tank was kind of ugly). He had been keeping fish about as long as I, and had a 40 gallon with some tiger barbs and kuhli loaches in it. So when we set up the 200 gallon, we moved his fish to the 200 gallon. Then we arranged with a pet store owner friend of ours to order us 100 young glowlights and 100 young neons, which we picked up still in the bags.

We acclimated them, and released them, and it was feeding frenzy time for the six tiger barbs. They ate all except perhaps the dozen largest of each kind of tetra. You wouldn't think that there is enough room in that few barbs for that many tetras, but there is. The barbs went back to the 40.

5) Most recently (a few months ago) the cherry barb and/or the rasbora het. which brought in the mystery disease which killed off all eight cardinals, seven cherry barbs and four of six rasboras. At this point I'm pretty certain it was an internal parasite or bacteria, as there were never any external symptoms.

I never used to use quarantine tanks, figuring the trade off wasn't worth it. But now, I'm not buying any more new fish until I have one set up. I firmly believe that the rate of infection in imported fish is much higher now than it used to be. Looking at the fish in several LFS in the area, I think all livebearers and rasboras and cherry barbs should be treated for internal worms and bacteria before introducing into the community. There are probably other species as well, but these are the ones I've noticed that just look sickly everywhere I look. There are no externally visible signs of disease but the fish are listless and many in the tanks clamp fins and hover near the top.

KJS

I love the looks of zebra danios but their are insanity inducing behavior isn't worth it. Bought three green/emerald raspboras for my ten gallon planted tank in the bedroom. After a few months they ware as active as any danios (which is why I haven't had any since I was a kid) Named the emerald raspboras the Dashabouts and moved them to my 75 gal. planted tank. Their antics work in the big tank but I won't get any more.

Peacefull, planted are my thing.....

dawntwister

Yey, wathcing danio's is like watching a tennis ball. But the longfinned danio's aren't as active.

overboard

My most regrettable purchase was in the early days, a relatively expensive pair of sailfin mollies for a new uncycled tank. The male was like a disease magnet; when a sailfin molly gets fin rot, they REALLY get fin rot. My most misguided purchase was a bumblebee goby. No one at the LFS could tell me anything besides they are sensitive and fussy. I went over to the bookrack, read that they love live food, and didn't really grasp the full meaning of that. I feed frozen food, so I thought it would be OK. A few weeks later my young son said, "mom, why aren't there any more platy babies?" The goby was just sitting on a rock, grinning and burping. Now he is my favorite.