Anybody else into fish keeping? I recently got back into the hobby. I guess I kind of forgot how much I enjoyed it. For now, I'm sticking with fresh water.

Here's my favorite fish at the moment. It's a Green Phantom Pleco.



Feel free to share pics of your fishes here.

Thats neat

I have a single goldfish at work, xabot, sadly his twin tomax died last year.

I want to get an octopus!

I'll have to drop some pics later, currently running a 20 gal extra high with an angelfish and a handful of random tetras, not too happy with it though, so I have been contemplating switching it over to malawi cichlids til I can start up my 75 gal for them

I recently got back into the hobby myself. The challenge of a planted tank lured me back. right now i'm working on a 10 gallon

heres a pic I took back in November...


I've learned a lot since then.
i'll post a pic in a month or so after updating

I use to have african cichlids when I was in my teens. I actually got them to breed which was really nice. Sometimes I think about getting back into it but remember what a chore tank cleaning was. Have there been improvements in the last 20 years?

Does anyone own Japanese Jellyfish (moonfish)? They look great, and there's a tabletop aquarium, that I'm thinking of buying soon. Does anyone own one?
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/149 ... yfish-tank

awesome. i've been thinking about getting a tank forever.

dustin, can we see a shot of your whole set up? I remember seeing your dad's and that was quite impressive.

Sorry Lixx, there have been plenty of improvements but you still have to clean the tank.

My favorite setup was a 300 gallon tank built as a terrarium/fishtank I had turtles, and freshwater fish, as well as a few smaller lizards. I used a waterproof glue and piece of plexiglass (about 5 inches high) in the middle of the tank, so I could fill up half with water, and half with dirt. I grew plants on one side and the other side was filled with fish that the turtles could eat. It was great, but I don't have any photos of it.

I was really into lizards, (Chameleons, bearded Dragons, Turtles etc...) and fish, although I wasn't as experienced with the fish, as the lizards, I had a nice freshwater tank going.
That said, I went to Wal-mart one day, and saw a bright blue colored fish, and they were marked as electric blue ram fish, and the tag said they mixed well with other freshwater fish. I bought 3 of them, not realizing the were cichlids. By the end of the week, every fish that I owned, besides the ram fish, were dead. That was the end of my freshwater career.

My favorite fish was the puffer fish, and to this day, I'd like to get a smaller tank that could hold a few.

I'll get some more pics up later. I've currently got three tanks going. A planted 15 gallon with a pair of Rams, a planted 20 gallon, and a 37 gallon for my bigger guys. These will be fine for a bit but sometime this summer I'll pop for a 75-100 to give the bigger fish the space they'll need. All of the tanks have AquaClear HOB filters and the big one has an additional sponge filter to add extra biological filtration. So far, so good.

That is a cool looking fish !!
I never had fish - but I did have turtles growing up.
Had a Mata Mata turtle for a while - would love to get one again, it was so cool - and watching him eat was a trip.
Also had a pretty big soft shell turtle a long time ago -

I have something like a 47 gallon freshwater with 8 Rainbowfish (5 Boesemani, one Australian, one Turquoise and one hybrid), 2 dwarf Gouramis, 2 Weather Loaches, 2 angels, and a single platy. I love them, but I'm not looking forward to moving the setup when we move to our new apartment in a month.... =P

I kept many, many fish as a kid, starting in first grade when the teacher gave me a handful of guppies, snails, and duckweed. Those grew into a colony that I maintained through high school. I was a nut for information about fish, subscribed to Tropical Fish Hobbyist, had the big fat Axelrod books, etc. I kept brackish flounder and puffers, all types of gobies, freshwater prawns, any oddball I could get my hands on.

The coolest fish I ever kept were some African mudskippers. They were incredibly intelligent fish, could recognize different people, would eat out of your hands, etc. Kept those for about 7 years.

In college I gravitated towards herpetology, and my first job afterwards was (don't laugh) as an editorial assistant for a tiny publication in Pennsylvania called Reptile and Amphibian magazine. It wasn't glamorous but I was having feature articles published at 21. Kept lots of salamanders, a very cool Chinese Big Head Turtle, snakes, etc.

The only animals I have left today are these:


Fire Belly 1 by rogerharkavy, on Flickr

Fire Belly 2 by rogerharkavy, on Flickr

Two Japanese Fire Belly Newts, they're going to be 20 years old this year. I treat them with ghost shrimp every once in a while.

This drives me nuts:

http://altjapan.typepad.com/my_weblog/2 ... rp-me.html

When I was younger I got 5 dime sized Piranhas and 2 made it to the age of 7. One got hungry and ended up with 1 Piranha for around 14 years. I have a pic somewhere...

My wife is really the aqua-nut but I get to care for these guys when she works out of town (as well as Sport, the peach-face love bird and Mr. BunBun, the lion-head rabbit.) We have a 75 gallon tropical tank with two sharks, a silver barb, a uaru (a South American cichlid), a bristle-nose catfish and a leopard pleco. She also has a 20 gallon salt tank w/ two puffers, a few corals including a gorgeous frog spawn, and two types of urchins. We plan on refinishing our basement this year and she wants to start a saltwater 90 gallon, bowfront, corner tank.

love the tanks man, thank you for sharing. i'd like to get a bigger tank but i have to work on the foundation this summer and the extra weight is a bad idea.

Ha, I used to subscribe to that magazine about 15 or so years ago! That's really cool. No laughs here.

Man, I miss all the critters I had growing up. So wonderful your red-bellies have lived so long

Right now I just have an english budgie bird, Sir Sullivan Sparks. Ha, although he is quite the needy one, but I love it.

oh fire belly newts you make my heart grow soft, those guys are like harry F'in houdini as escape artists, would die for a tank big enough for a japanese giant salamander!I'll not hold my breath on that subject though

was forced to get a small tank last year after my kid won a gold fish over a year ago at a fair. She's getting pretty big. Anyone know how big or long they last?

Depends on the care and the fish. Some can last for over 5+ years...however most of the ones I got as a child..last less than two weeks.

I've seen ones released into lake erie get to about a foot, wierd as shit seeing one swimming in open waters

I used to own a 55 gallon tank some years ago. It was a community tank with an assortment of oddities but it was primarily for loaches and knifefish.

Properly cared for freshwater fish can live for a very long time depending on the species. I had a huge 7-8 inch clown loach that I had raised from when it was just a tiny thing I bought at Petco for a good ten years before I had to sell him because I couldn't take the tank to where I was moving...to this day I still have dreams that 'I need to remember to feed the fish when I get up this morning', even though they're long gone.

Cool! Look for me on the masthead in the late 1993 issues.
Tell me about it. Every time I do a water change I have to keep them in tightly-lidded bait buckets. The only thing that keeps them in the tank is that it's only 1/3 full.
For a long time I had this daydream about catching a hellbender and keeping it, but it's not easy. They need chilled water, and I can imagine that the giant ones have the same requirements (plus the added space).

Here's my albino bristlenose pleco. This guy's awesome. He eats sinking wafers and loves zucchini. I got him when he was tiny and it's been wild watching the bristles/tentacles develop on his face. He looks weirder and weirder all the time.

My Blue Rams are trying to make babies! Here's the male tending to the eggs. Here's the male tending to the eggs. It's the pair's first attempt so it probably won't work but it's still pretty rad.