I’ve always wanted a fish aquarium. A real aquarium, not one of those little 2 gallon bowls with the usual goldfish. I wanted something exotic; something cool.
I finally got my first aquarium in March, a retired salt water setup that belonged to my brother. He gave me everything to get started. I have a 75 gallon tank, trickle filter, lights, and an aquarium stand. These were the 3 things I expected to have, what I didn’t expect was the other pile of stuff he gave me: hoses, pipe cleaners, flourescent lights, a thermometer, viles, little blue tablets, fish food, a pile of decorative rocks and slate, bent up coat hangers, marbles, plastic buckets and cups, a box of something called biogrip, a container of white powder called “Superbuffer,” a bottle of “Cycle,” a scrub-brush, aquarium how-to books, scraps of paper with pH readings from 2001, and little boxes of pills that say things like “fin and tail rot, popeye and fungal infections.”
Looking through all of this stuff made my head-spin. Putting the filtration system together for the first time was enough to make my head explode. Luckily, I found the tattered “Americle Advanced SL Trickle Filter” instructions tucked inside of a roll of white filter media, making the assembly job far easier.
I quickly had an empty aquarium sitting in the corner of my house, complete with working lights and filter. Now all I needed to do was decorate the thing, fill it with water, add some fish, and presto, I would have a home aquarium. Easy, right?
Fist things first. I needed some tank gravel. It took my wife and I an hour and $20.00 to agree on the perfect gravel. We decided to mix two different colors, grey speckled and blue. I dropped another $7.00 on a sunken car - that should give the tank a little character. I asked the pet store people for any advice, and found out that I needed to condition my tap water before I could add fish. I bought something called “Prime” for $4.00. Use it with every water change to remove chlorine and other harmful chemicals.
After a couple of hours of rinsing gravel and scrubbing decorative stones I was one step closer. I now had a tank filled with gravel and rocks, but still no fish or water. 15 trips to my basement filling 5 gallon buckets and I had an aquarium full of water too. The filter was turned on, and everthing was humming along. After 24 hours, I had the tank heated to a fish pleasing 78 degrees. Time for fish!
I had dreams of going to the store and buying a buket load of fish, only to find out that before I could go fish nuts, I must let my tank “cycle.” Basically, this is the process of letting your tank build up with a bunch of fish waste, then allowing it to clean itself up and create the proper biology to keep the fish alive. Should only take a few weeks. A FEW WEEKS!! fine, I had come this far, and can finish.
The only way to get your tank to cycle is to have some fish in the tank. Super, I get to at least add a few fish at least. So, on the advice of the pet store guy, we bought 15 Neon Tetras, and 3 Rainbows (a red one, yellow one, and blue one).
This is where I learned another lesson. Don’t trust anyone’s advice about fish tanks, unless they can provide you with a PhD on fish. Everyone likes to talk a good game, but very few people know what they are talking about.
Turns out there are special fish called “starter fish.” These fish are supposed to be strong enough to survive the cycle process. Evidently swimming in your own waste for weeks can be quite toxic. These fish are basically the equivalent of Keith Richards in the aquarium world.
Well, I didn’t buy super fish. They were more the equivalent of Urkel fish. A strong current could kill them. I was told by ANOTHER so called fish expert “Well, all your fish will most likely die before the cycle process is over.”
Great, I had a fish tank for less than a week and could already expect to kill ALL of my fish. Depressing, but I decided to let ‘em ride.
Turns out, most of them survived - several died, but let’s not focus on the negatives. Well, bizarre as it may be, but my inexperience with fish tanks probably is what saved my weak fish.
I didn’t know how much I should feed the fish, and REALLY over fed them. The excess food in the tank slowed the cycle process. My tank cycle ended up taking over 3 months. This SLOOOOOOW cycle process helped my weak fish become more immune to their own wastes, and many of them managed to make it through the cycle. This is what ANOTHER pet store worker explained to me - so, he may be full of hooey, and i may have just been lucky.
Once I FINALLY got my aquarium cycled, I was able to add some great fish to my tank.
“I’ll set up an aquarium, it’ll be easy and I’ll have a beautiful living decoration for my home in a weekend!”
Boy was I stupid. But, boy do I have a nice aquarium, an aquarium that I EARNED.
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