good & bad aquarium or fish related experiences

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

Best Experience: I would say when I first saw eggs hatch from my german blue rams. I have had several different fish lay eggs but either they were eatan or destroyed. Even though the fry only lasted a day, rainbowfish targeted in on them, it was a pleasure to know that I could achieve being a breeder, even if not that successful.

Worst Experience: When I came home one day and saw my beautiful stingray dying. Everyone said would having it with smaller fish would result in the ray eating the fish. Actually my bolivian rams and others found that the edges of the stingray were tasty and when noticed one day he was slowly ripped apart. I tried to move him to another tank that was cycled but she died the next morning. RIP. She was my baby.

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

FW Stingrays are so cool... I was thinking about one.... Let me guess, you got him/her from Azaleas Aquariums

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

what kind of ray?

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

Pet Forum is getting in a few freshwater rays soon.

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

Ha, how'd ya guess! Yeah, got her from Azelea. She was a retic. Got fat off of earthworms from my backyard and walmart.

Was gonna replace her but i wanna wait until I build a stingray pond, which may not be anytime soon since I have several tanks I'm about to set up with various cichlids, tetras, loaches, and oddballs.

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

anthony let me know what kind of rays they get and prices

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

Okay. They told me what they were but I don't remember. Next time I go in there I'll ask.

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

pearls or motoros I would definetly be interested in depending on the price

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

My best experience with an aquarium was my 2nd tank...it was a 30G long, and I had 2 angles, and a golden algae eater in there. I have heard all of the horror storys about the algea eaters attacking angels and other fish, but mines was pretty docile...it ended up growing to about 9 inches in length....it was huge. That was my favorite fish I had ever owned.

Worst experience was crashing my biofliter on a 55G tank, killing the golden algae eater, and 2 angels shortly after I moved them in there. I was medicating the tank with malachite green....for a tad too long one day when I came home, they we all dead. Somehow, I had 5 corys in there that survived.

I want to try saltwater one day, but with the economy the way it is right now, I don't want to sink a ton of money into it.

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

Having a 125 gallon tank with a leak.

Fixing the leak before it got worse.

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

I figured I actually have some bests and worsts now..

Best:
Actually is happening now, I am successfully raising a spawn of around 150 Angelfish. It feels really good to get this pattern down! As those who know me on here know, for quite some time I have been struggling with raising the Angelfish Fry. I think I got used to it now...

Worst: Few know of this on this board but some do...
I had 2 Oscars (1 Proven Male and 1 Proven Female, I seen their tubes) that I raised from less than 1" and were about 10" preparing to breed. I also had in the tank with them a 14" Plecostomus. The Oscars spent each day a few weeks leading to this event digging holes in the sand every day and vibrating next to each other... also doing "dry runs" on the slate and tank bottom. I was SURE that they were going to breed VERY SOON.

I came downstairs in the morning to find the male wedged under a fake stump I had in there for the Pleco to hide in. He was not moving and was dead.

I tested my water and all parameters came up good. I changed the water 60% in fear that I was missing something with a Python Water Changer. I added the AquaSafe to the tank and filled.

The next day my Pleco was burned from Chlorine I think (white coloration all over) and almost dead. I got home from work and he was dead!

Later I found another Male Oscar and got him (12"-14" long) and added him with the female hoping they would bond. Well needless to say they never did as the Male was too passive (came out of a tank with a Flowerhorn so he was bullied A LOT) and my Female Oscar took that to her advantaged and bullied him.

About 6 months later he eventually got a bit more aggressive to the female and must have spooked her bad to make her jump out of the tank! She was dried up and stiff outside the tank.

I gave the male to a good home and shut the tank down, cleaned it and turned it into my current Blackwater Aquarium I have now. I gave up on Oscars and moved to more docile fish instead (also smaller )

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

FW was surprisingly uneventful (no busted tanks, leaks, or bizarre events over many years)

On the other hand, with SW I've had a handful of "worst events":

I stayed up all night setting up a 56gal (column) quaratine aquarium to deal with our first (only) outbreak of ich a year back... filled it, got the saltwater mixed, rebuilt the canister filters and even put in the air lines although I couldn't immediately find an extra air pump. I went to sleep, figuring I'd deal with it in the morning once the water was warm enough to move fish into it. The water was turbulant enough to kick enough water to make a siphon in the airline, which emptied all of the saltwater on the brand new (less then 1 month old) wood floors we had just laid.

I also had a 6 ft shelf over our 180 full of dried coral a brother used to collect. 1.5 years after setting up, one of the brackets snapped, sending the shelf and all of the dead coral crashing down onto our light fixture. The legs broke out under the light fixture and everything dumped into the tank, kicking our GFCI and cutting power to the tank. Everything survived, but it was a LONG clean-up. When we set up the metal halide fixture as a replacement... a couple weeks later the extra draw threw the circuit breaker overnight and the aquarium temperature dropped 5 degrees. When we woke up the button polyps were all dead, clown fish was swimming upside down until we warmed the water, and our mandarin was curled in a ball for days.

Finally, we had the pump on our coralife skimmer start dumping electricity in the water. It killed our sleeper gobies, blenny, all snails (basically everything that touched the bottom of tank) Now our tank is grounded, and free of all coralife crap.

As far as goals are concerned... this is a fairly long-term goal that I've been slowly building my main tank towards for years, but I need more experience before I attempt it. I want the tank primarily full of various acropora. and I mean FULL of it, it's by far my favorite coral.

 

Re: Best/Worst Experience with your aquarium

In retrospect, this was actually pretty funny; just didn't seem so at the time
About twelve years ago, I had the 55g in my dining room, with big Malawi cichs. Next to it was a 45g with one large Taisho Sanke koi. I was running Magnum 350s on both tanks.
Soooo, it was two days before Christmas, we're expecting a housefl of guests the next day. I'm at my work Christmas party and the phone rings. It was my husband and he was so mad he was kind of incoherent. Apparently my cichs had decided they didn't like the spray bar on the filter, and they'd knocked it loose, the Magnum kept running, pumping a whole lot of water on the floor. He'd noticed it when he drove up to the house and saw the outside wall was wet. He unplugged it, and I just hit the high spots on the way home to fix everything. Fishes were okay, as there was still about eight inches of water in the tank. I refilled the tank and slapped another filter on it. Being in kind of a hurry, I just popped the loose hose from the Magnum into the 45g tank. Big mistake, as gravity took its course, and the next morning it had siphoned almost all of the water out of the 45 and the poor koi was laying in the about four inches of water left. Hubby was in the shower, so I got every towel I could find and started mopping up. My daughter, about 12 at the time, walked in and said "Oh my god, Mom, dad is gonna S**T !!!!!" About that time he walked in, saw the problem, got very very white around the mouth and got into his truck and left.
Anyway, he came back, the floor had had a very thorough rinsing, and we had a great Christmas despite.

 

Mad

Mad
So I bought a new 55 gallon tank that was destined to go on the bottom of my current 55 gallon tank setup, well the tank I bought is literally 1-2mm wider than the old tank which also makes it 1-2mm to wide to fit into the bottom of the stand

 

Re: Mad

wow thats gotta blow azz

 

Re: Mad

1-2mm makes it too big ? That's a real disappointment.

 

Re: Mad

is it the same brand tank as the one on top? maybe there is a slight width difference between brands and you could bring it back for the other version. Also, I'm pretty sure those double stands can hold 2 -29gallon tanks on bottom instead of the 55

 

Re: Mad

Can the tank fit in the top of the stand?

 

Re: Mad

yeah it could I think, keyword being think, I thought it would fit underneath, but to no avail, so I just bought a desk and put the tank on top of that

 

Re: Mad

Strong sturdy desk I hope! Could be very dangerous as many desks are not designed to hold a quarter ton of water. I know that you know that, but figured I would at least ask!