Welcome to my introductory blog on freshwater fish keeping! I myself am a novice, not an expert, fish keeper. While this site should be a good starting point for anyone new to the hobby of freshwater fish keeping, it should certainly not be your only stop or source of information. The information in this blog is not guaranteed to be comprehensive. Nor is the advice I give necessarily the best to follow. This blog is, however, based on logic, my own experiences and to a large degree the advice of others. Keep in mind when reading this blog or any other that advice you get online is worth exactly what you pay for it, and to always double and triple check any information you receive. With that said, good luck with keeping fish, and I hope you enjoy your new hobby!
Please note that more sections are being added, and this blog is being improved all the time. Thank you.
9/11/20
Introduction
So you decided that you want to keep freshwater fish, or maybe you have tried to keep them in the past without much success. Fish keeping can seem difficult if you do not know where to start, and the advice you receive may seem overwhelming and often contradictory. From experience I know that there is nothing worse in the hobby than to carefully set up what you think is the perfect home for your fish, feed them, watch them swim around and marvel at their antics, then find them all dead or dying one day. When budding hobbyists start out, this is usually the fate of their first, and all too often last, batch of fish. For obvious reasons, people who lose a whole tank of fish within a month of buying them often leave the hobby in disgust. After all, fish are supposed to be very easy to keep. Just add water and food and watch them grow, right? It is not that simple, unfortunately, yet if you follow a few basic guidelines, you can successfully keep fish almost that easily.
Fish are some of the most abused pets in the world. They are horribly neglected, stuffed into tanks too small for anything to live in, or even worse, unfiltered bowls. Goldfish receive the majority of this mistreatment, at the fish’s – and the novice hobbyist’s – expense. Goldfish can live for over 20 years and often grow to over a foot in length. They are so badly abused, however, that even supposedly “expert” pet store owners tell people goldfish only last a year or so, while in the same breath offering to sell them a “goldfish” bowl or 1 gallon tank. Goldfish are extremely messy, and require 20 gallons of water for each fish in a well filtered tank. There will be more goldfish information in another section.
The point is most beginners have large numbers of fish deaths not because fish keeping is a difficult hobby, but rather because they are given bad advice, or no information at all when starting out. Now there is one thing you will have to be able to accept before you decide to invest your time and money in the hobby. You will have fish die on you. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, how much good advice you get and follow; you will have times your fish get sick and die. Sometimes a whole tank of fish will die without you being able to save any. The more you learn and more careful you are, the less the chance of this, but it can happen to anyone. There is something called (tongue-in-cheek) the dead fish club, which you can only be a member of and a true fish keeping expert after you have had a thousand or more fish die on you over the years. If you get so attached to the fish you acquire that you cannot bear to lose any, this is not the hobby for you.
It is actually quite amazing that we can keep fish successfully at all, considering their natural environment. We are taking sensitive animals with hundreds or thousands of gallons of water per fish and sticking them in a few gallons of water that is usually much different chemically than their natural homes. Do not let early failures or the seeming complexity of fish keeping turn you off from the hobby. By simply learning some basic facts about fish and fish keeping you can turn your interest into a very successful lifelong hobby.
Fish are some of the most abused pets in the world. They are horribly neglected, stuffed into tanks too small for anything to live in, or even worse, unfiltered bowls. Goldfish receive the majority of this mistreatment, at the fish’s – and the novice hobbyist’s – expense. Goldfish can live for over 20 years and often grow to over a foot in length. They are so badly abused, however, that even supposedly “expert” pet store owners tell people goldfish only last a year or so, while in the same breath offering to sell them a “goldfish” bowl or 1 gallon tank. Goldfish are extremely messy, and require 20 gallons of water for each fish in a well filtered tank. There will be more goldfish information in another section.
The point is most beginners have large numbers of fish deaths not because fish keeping is a difficult hobby, but rather because they are given bad advice, or no information at all when starting out. Now there is one thing you will have to be able to accept before you decide to invest your time and money in the hobby. You will have fish die on you. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, how much good advice you get and follow; you will have times your fish get sick and die. Sometimes a whole tank of fish will die without you being able to save any. The more you learn and more careful you are, the less the chance of this, but it can happen to anyone. There is something called (tongue-in-cheek) the dead fish club, which you can only be a member of and a true fish keeping expert after you have had a thousand or more fish die on you over the years. If you get so attached to the fish you acquire that you cannot bear to lose any, this is not the hobby for you.
It is actually quite amazing that we can keep fish successfully at all, considering their natural environment. We are taking sensitive animals with hundreds or thousands of gallons of water per fish and sticking them in a few gallons of water that is usually much different chemically than their natural homes. Do not let early failures or the seeming complexity of fish keeping turn you off from the hobby. By simply learning some basic facts about fish and fish keeping you can turn your interest into a very successful lifelong hobby.
Emergency Help section
If you have sick fish, dying fish or a serious problem with your water, this is the section for you. If your fish are in a new tank (less than 3 months since you added your first fish) please see the Nitrogen Cycle section after reading this section. Also, read the euthanasia section if putting your fish out of its misery becomes necessary.
The first thing you should do when you have any concern that your tank is in trouble is a significant water change, of 30-50% of the water. Make sure you treat the new water with Amquel or Prime or some other de-chlorinator that eliminates ammonia from chloramines as well as the chlorine. Save enough water to run tests on your water parameters, and once you change the water, test the nitrite, nitrate, ammonia levels and the pH of the water you removed, NOT the tank water you just added fresh, treated water to. Not only will testing the water AFTER the water change give you diluted results, but dechlorinators have a habit of interfering with the indicators in certain test kits, making your test results inaccurate if you test the water after adding treated tap water to your tank. Clean out the filter, rinsing the filter media in removed water from the tank to ensure the water is being adequately filtered. If you have a hospital/quarantine tank available and empty of fish, isolate any fish that have visible symptoms there, leaving the fish that seem healthy in the permanent tank. To do this, you need to acclimate the fish from your main tank to the hospital tank water in the same way you acclimate new purchases to your home tank. Put them in a bag ½ full of tank water, float in the quarantine tank until the temperature of the water is equilibrated (30 minutes), and then add ½ cup of water from the tank to the bag every 15 minutes for an hour. Like fish store water, you don’t want to transfer diseased water to your hospital tank if you can help it, so try not to let any water from the bag into the hospital tank. If your fish will tolerate salt, such as mollies, guppies, tetras, goldfish, etc. add anywhere from 3-5 teaspoons of salt per 5 gallons of water in both the hospital tank and the main tank the fish were originally in. Make sure when you are done treating your fish, if you want to reduce the salt level, it is best to do so slowly. Fish are much better able to handle a sudden increase in salt level than a sudden decrease. Once the water changes and tests are done, you should contact expert help, such as a trustworthy fish store or good online newsgroup. Just beware of adding medications to your tanks without being sure of the disease your fish have, as often the medicines sold for fish are as harmful to the fish as the diseases themselves. Make sure you keep your fish that were sick in the quarantine tank for 1-2 weeks after they appear to have recovered before re-introducing them to the main tank, both to be sure that they are fully healed so as to avoid sickening the remaining fish, and to allow them time to recover from the stress before exposing them to the stress of transferring from one tank to another.
The first thing you should do when you have any concern that your tank is in trouble is a significant water change, of 30-50% of the water. Make sure you treat the new water with Amquel or Prime or some other de-chlorinator that eliminates ammonia from chloramines as well as the chlorine. Save enough water to run tests on your water parameters, and once you change the water, test the nitrite, nitrate, ammonia levels and the pH of the water you removed, NOT the tank water you just added fresh, treated water to. Not only will testing the water AFTER the water change give you diluted results, but dechlorinators have a habit of interfering with the indicators in certain test kits, making your test results inaccurate if you test the water after adding treated tap water to your tank. Clean out the filter, rinsing the filter media in removed water from the tank to ensure the water is being adequately filtered. If you have a hospital/quarantine tank available and empty of fish, isolate any fish that have visible symptoms there, leaving the fish that seem healthy in the permanent tank. To do this, you need to acclimate the fish from your main tank to the hospital tank water in the same way you acclimate new purchases to your home tank. Put them in a bag ½ full of tank water, float in the quarantine tank until the temperature of the water is equilibrated (30 minutes), and then add ½ cup of water from the tank to the bag every 15 minutes for an hour. Like fish store water, you don’t want to transfer diseased water to your hospital tank if you can help it, so try not to let any water from the bag into the hospital tank. If your fish will tolerate salt, such as mollies, guppies, tetras, goldfish, etc. add anywhere from 3-5 teaspoons of salt per 5 gallons of water in both the hospital tank and the main tank the fish were originally in. Make sure when you are done treating your fish, if you want to reduce the salt level, it is best to do so slowly. Fish are much better able to handle a sudden increase in salt level than a sudden decrease. Once the water changes and tests are done, you should contact expert help, such as a trustworthy fish store or good online newsgroup. Just beware of adding medications to your tanks without being sure of the disease your fish have, as often the medicines sold for fish are as harmful to the fish as the diseases themselves. Make sure you keep your fish that were sick in the quarantine tank for 1-2 weeks after they appear to have recovered before re-introducing them to the main tank, both to be sure that they are fully healed so as to avoid sickening the remaining fish, and to allow them time to recover from the stress before exposing them to the stress of transferring from one tank to another.
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