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.