Feeding

[salts155]

hi every one

i have just set up a tropical fresh water tankand need help with feeding.

i have not got any fish yet but should get them tomorrow.

wat sort of feeding would you normaly give tropical fish.

king regards

ricky

 

[waterdrop]

Hi ricky and welcome to TFF!

Please stop and consider the health of your fish! You've stumbled on to a serious hobbyist site with dozens of experienced fishkeepers who can help you learn the best way to start a tank. A tank is NOT ready for fish until it can process their waste and the most common way for a beginner to get that going is to learn how to build a "biofilter."

It can take up to a couple months to get that biofilter properly built, but its well worth it! Choosing of fish and learning how to feed them can all be accomplished DURING this period of building the biofilter and then you will be rewarded with happy, healthy fish that love their environment.

Our "Beginners Resource Center" articles are great for getting your questions focused in the right direction.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[onebto]

Welcome to TFF Ricky

I would endorse waterdrop's advise whole Hartley

Its so important to get your tank set up correctly before adding fish if you do not it will cause considerable stress to any stock you put in your tank and a very good chance of loosing some

It may take a bit of time but it will save you so much in the long run

Regards onebto

 

[salts155]

Hi and thanks for the warm welcome.

i am using a product called stability by seachem, i set the tank up sunday morning and was advised that i could put 5-10 fish after a 3-4 days.

they also said that this would the bacteria in the tank by adding fish that have a very high tolerance.

any more info would be help full.

sorry for any spelling errors is this or further posts

 

[Gr44]

Welcome to the forum Salts155.

As has already been mentioned if you want to really make a hobby of keeping fish you don't want your first experiance to be dying fish left, right and centre. Not to mention the welfare of the fish!

To avoid this you really need to do a little reading, there is a good thread available HERE that can run through the basics.

Basically you need to 'cycle' your tank before you add any fish to the system, while fish can cycle the system for you it very often results in the death of fish(s) and is certainly very painful for them to live in your tank while it cycles.

You can 'cycle' the fish before adding them, that will give you time to read up on what fish to keep and learn more about the hobby, it does take some time but it's worth it in the long run! (Just finished my fist tank 1-2 months ago and all fish still here!)

Nearly everyone on this forum will tell you to fishless cycle, to read how to do that, check this thread: HERE

If you insist on a fish-in cycle then you can get some guidance HERE

Typically those 'booster bacteria' products do very little, if anything!

All the best,

Sean

 

[salts155]

thanks for your input the advice on a fishless cycle seems to be in favour of the health and welfare of the fish,

at this stage i have read abit fish keeping,

on a fishless cycle can i add white spot treatment to help prevent white spot happening and how does it start.

rick

 

[salts155]

if i send a photo of my dads tank can you help with a prolem with one of his fish please.
#it seems to have 3 white spots on the top and one at the base of it fin. the pics are emailed so dont know what the quality is like.

 

[Gr44]

Salts155,

If you're doing a fishLESS cycle there would be no need to add any medication as you wouldn't have any fish!

You're best of posting in the 'Fish Emergencies' section as there are members who will be much more able to assist if your father has poorly fish. If the marks are quite large and the fin looks like it's torn or being eaten it could be fin rot rather than white spot. Believe white spot is like grains of salt on the body of the fish.

Best to ask in the other forum though.

Regards,

Sean

 

[salts155]

sorry for that post trying to do 101 things at once.

brill thanks sean. might get my dad to log on here and have alook him self.

this is the most helpful forum on the web.

thanks for all your help.

salts155

 

[OldMan47]

There is never a reason to add any white spot treatment to an empty tank. Ich, the parasite that causes white spot, cannot live more than a few days without a host. Long before you get any tank cycled, any ich present will be long dead, even if you fill the tank with water from an ich infested tank.

 

[salts155]

Hi all have just a water test and my stats are

ph 7.2

nitrite 0

ammonia 0.02 less than

nitrate 5.0

are these ok to start to add fish for a fish in cycle

 

[waterdrop]

Hi rick,

We are trying to take you *beyond* the average experience that beginners have when they follow fish store advice! Fish stores tell people they can put fish in the tank within a week because they don't want to lose impatient customers - if they told them the truth that setting up a healthy environment for the fish really takes longer and requires some understanding, they feel they would lose money and customers.

A "Fish-In" cycle, for a typical beginner such as yourself, is a fast way to disappointment usually, either because the fish die, their lives are shortened (or you will see them get ich or other diseases from their weakened condition) or at the very least that you end up being shocked at how many manual huge water changes you have to perform for weeks on end. Its really mostly an "emergency" situation to help people who didn't understand how important fishless cycling was.

Seachem Stability, despite coming from a great company (most of us highly recommend their Prime conditioner product and their good liquid plant nutrient products) is really not going to magically cycle your aquarium. We get to watch dozens of cases each month of people starting up tanks and believe me, the bacteria in a bottle products are just there to take money from your wallet. The bacteria are living creatures and its well-known how long they take to grow and reproduce, it just takes time.

This hobby is all about slowing down and escaping from the world of speed and stress. Its about creating a crystal clear underwater world where you can sit and get away from all that. One of the most enjoyable parts of that is the learning and understanding of how to create this environment.. there's really no rush to reach the point of actually having the fish. You will enjoy them much more knowing you are giving them the best water you can!

~~waterdrop~~

 

[salts155]

how will i know when the tank is ready.

i have put 4 plants in the tank so far (plants are ok at this stage).

the water is crystal clear looks lovely, but my children are eger to get some fish.

i ahve done fish befor but with no understanding of what really goes on in the tank.

reading articals on the web a lot of it goes against what has just been said but i signed up here for expert help.

my mum started a fish in cycle about 2 days after setting up the tank and the fish went on for about 8 months (maybe she was lucky)

what time scale and what do i need to do for the fishless cycle.

plants need feeding right?(what do they need)

salts155

 

[OohFeeshy]

Simply put, to do a fishless cycle, you add some ammonia to the tank and wait until it's completely converted to nitrate, which is much less toxic. You'll need a source of ammonia- usually household ammonia is used (found with the cleaning products in some shops), but you could do a less precise one using prawns or similar. You'll also need a test kit for ammonia and one for nitrite- these are to see when you need to add more ammonia, and when the cycle is finished. You'd need at least an ammonia kit even if you did a cycle with fish.

On the plus side, although it means you need to wait a bit longer before having fish, you're not limitedto 'hardy' fish to start with, there's a much lower chance of them dying and you can use the extra time to decide exactly what fish you want, finish decorating the tank, adding more plants and so on.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, I'm completely with you, it was *extremely* difficult with my family. Everyone gave me a hard time and I had strong doubts, especially since it was coming from an internet forum and I just didn't know how much to trust it. It all seemed very arcane and difficult.

I too had "fish-in" cycled in the distant past and knew a tank could be started that way. In fact, I had been a hobbyist with dozens of tanks filling my basement and lots of experience with how fish behave when healthy or when sick.

I got fascinated, however, to find that in the 1980's a few fish hobbyists, who happened to be scientists and who were discussing their hobby on the early "usenet" (prior to the web) and experimented and promoted this new idea of simply mimicking nature and "driving" the Nitrogen Cycle to prepare the "biofilter" prior to exposing the fish. I felt I just had to try it.

The end result was beyond my wildest dreams. Not only did it (eventually, because yes, its slow) work just as advertised, but I have *never* seen fish be so consistently vibrant and obviously healthy. Having a proper (started up and maintained) biofilter was just something I did not understand way back when (when the info really wasn't there anyway!)

The unique thing about this particular forum I feel is that there are a bunch of people who have got the whole process down to a bit of a fine art with lots of little details added in to the rougher approach seen elsewhere. The members can really help keep your fishless cycle on track and during the time you can really get a good understanding of making a good stocking plan, which is a difficult thing to learn too!

So here's what I finally realized from the family standpoint: waiting for the bacteria to grow is indeed hard but what would be much harder would be explaining to your kids why their new pets died or became diseased. So what I did was to help my son study the Nitrogen Cycle diagrams (in our documents) and to talk about bacteria etc. and all the other things like that. Meanwhile, as the adult, I worked hard to begin to learn the basics of what fish to stock and how to make things more hospitable to plants and of course to understand the cycling.

~~waterdrop~~