To Start Again
by Andrew Boyd
First published in Tank Talk, Canberra and District Aquarium Society, Australia
Aquarticles
I am sitting here writing this on my office PC, at 01.20 a.m. on a quiet Tuesday
morning. Sitting in a room surrounded by vast quantities of soon to be obsolete computer
hardware gives a bloke pause for thought: If I had my time again, how would I have done
things differently?
- I would probably have joined the club before we purchased our first tropical fish.
These didn't last too long, and were the first link in the chain of guilt associated with
the early demise of so many of our finny guests through the years.
- I would have never overcrowded tanks the way I did. This caused filter breakdown,
algal blooms, and death of plants and fishes. You can only keep so many fish, so recognise
your limits and work within them.
- I would have always done water changes religiously, 25-30% every single week on every
single tank. This would have partially mitigated the overcrowding.
- I would have bought good heaters, and always had one or two spare for the inevitable
breakdowns.
- I would have studied diseases more, and bought more cures, thus enabling me to save
fishy lives once they are 'under the weather'.
- I would have fed live foods at least once a week to all our fishes.
- I would not have joined the Committee until I knew what I was letting myself in for.
- I would have read more books.
- I would never have tried to keep marine fishes in 'natural' aquaria.
- I would have taken the time to adequately explain the hobby to my long-suffering
spouse, Julie. Don't laugh, there are several aquarists that are single today because
their 'Significant Other' didn't understand and therefore became hostile towards what is
otherwise quite an innocent pastime. (Compared to, say, drinking Scotch before lunchtime
or Big Game Hunting.)
- I would not ever ever ever have impulse-bought fish. They invariably died gruesome
deaths. Try and confine each tank to one particular type of fishes, such as warm/soft
water/small/inoffensive or big/mean/piscivorous, and stick to it while the other
inhabitants please you (i.e., it is not yet time to replace the lot. Those of you that
have put an inch-long Oscar in a heavily planted Tetra tank will know what I am talking
about - it's OK, for a while, but sooner or later the Occy will eat all the other fish in
the tank and destroy all those beautiful plants). If you want to keep Rift Lake Cichlids,
fine, by all means do so but buy them their own tank and look after it.
- It has taken me several years and thousands of dollars to realise that one hundred
tanks are worse than nothing if you don't have time to adequately maintain them. I now
keep fewer fish than at any time in the last seven years but am satisfied that everything
that can be done is being done. If only I had a few more breeding tanks....
- I would not have tried to spawn every fish that I had at the same time. Patience is
indeed a virtue when breeding, and those fry which are today only 2mm slivers of silver on
the tank glass will be 2 cm or longer shortly, and they need room to grow properly
otherwise they are best left unbred or killed (‘culled’) at hatching time.
- I would have stuck to a couple of worthy species that needed to be maintained, such
as Desert Gobies and Peacock Gudgeons. These little fish have all but vanished from the
local fish scene because they were guilty, in their day, of being too common, and we were
all a bit guilty of neglecting them accordingly.
- I would never have kept tanks strewn throughout the whole house on coffee tables and
stands made of planks and bricks.
- I would not have bought a single fish with the motive "I could make some money
out of this one," especially where it involved breeding them.
- I would not have sold a fish that I suspected was sterile or ill, even to a perfect
stranger.
- I would never have encouraged other fishkeepers to do things that I was not prepared
to do myself.
- I would not have ever bought a second-hand tank, or first-hand Chinese Algae Eater.
- I would have learnt not to put Ammogon into the canister of a Fluval 303, or to
entrust relatives with the transport of valuable fishes that I had not yet bred from.
- And finally, I would then have no regrets. But we live and learn. All that you can do
is learn as much as you can so as to combat the ignorance that kills our fish.
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