Your First Fish...

[Truck]

4 goldfish in a 5 litre bowl

 

[Betta5]

2 female guppies. One grey one with a black drab small tail and one yellow gold bodied one with a red and yellow tail. They were great little fish.

 

[liam&stacey]

oh god here we go lol. got into keeping fish about 6 years ago or somthing. i knew NOTHING about keeping fish. i had a 48x15x18 tank in it i had far too many fish that wud be far too big for the tank:

4 angels
20ish neons
4 silver sharks
1 red fin shark
2 pangasius catfish
2 plecs
1 giraffe catfish
and some other stuff, all bought from a lfs that i no longer use, very very bad advice .

then got my first "pet" fish, was sold to me as a short nose gar (from the same shop, was told it wud be fine in my tank) turned out to be a alligator gar!! needless to say it went through almost all of the fish in my tank. the angels went to my bro in law, which he still has . giraffe catfish was too big for it to eat, so it stayed for a while. ended up gettin a 72x24x24 tank for it, at this point i was still under the inpression it was a short nose gar and affter some research thought this thank wud be ok.

ended up gettin rid of the giraffe catfish when it was about 2 footish long. had the gar for about 2-3 years, woke up one morning & she was dead! i was absoluty gutted, once i had found out she was a alligator gar i had looked into trying to get a tank big enough to house her, we were talkin BIG money here, so in a way it was sort of a gud thing that she passed away. i was devastated that she had died tho, used to spend hours watchin her in her tank, think she was about 2 n a half foot when i lost her, she was just startin to get her adult colours.

i know im probs going to get wrong off alot of ppl on here for this post, but this is the biggest lesson ive ever learned in fish keepin. so to everyone please please research ANY fish you are going to get and only take advice from ppl who really DO know what they are talking about.

liam

 

[FISH-FRY]

Probably Tuna with a little mayo and black pepper on white bread.

 

[jennybugs]

Childhood goldfish from the fair for me too some 35 years ago 15L plastic bowl that mum used to put in the sink and run the tap to change the water with the fish sitting in an old plastic ice cream tub on the worktop.

I cringe about that now when I look at my goldies in their huge tank with tons of filtration and 50% weekly treated water changes!
My next fish after the goldies were white cloud minnows in a decent tank with filters etc

 

[dipsydoodlenoodle]

My first fish were 2 goldfish; my second fish were goldfish (I still have them 9 years later and I am very attached )

 

[chrisbassist]

my first fish were 2 goldfish when i was about 6.

they had a small tank but not too small, about 10G,

but they had no filter, only about monthly water changes (where they would be removed, tank emptied and cleaned properly, all substrate cleaned, and all ornaments cleaned) when the tank was refilled, it was left for about 24 hours then fish put back in. dreadful conditions... but in all honesty, they lastly really really well considering...

when I was about 15, we moved house, and took some water out of the tank, and transported them as they were. just put the tank in the car and drove really really carefully.

1 died shortly after transport, the other lived another 2 years

first fish in my tropical tank were guppies

 

[Darkstar]

3 Koi

 

[reeeedfish]

First fish were 2 gold gouramiis and 2 rainbow sharks. I guess their vivid colors stood out to me

 

[MrPandaram]

BUMB...

 

[didz04]

i won three fish at the fair, kept them for ages in a plastic tank with no filter or heater
i used to clean them out totally empty the tank so they went from high ammonia to chlorine in an hour, they must have been tough as boots, a boy i knew had built a pond in the garden for his mum and i donated them and a few years later he told me he still had them. That was about 30 years ago now, di

Oh if your talking about back then, when I was 3-5yrs my brother had a goldfish and same he used to empty the whole bowl out and put new cold tap water in. Then we bought a 30l plastic tank, where they went to the park caught these small grey fish not very attractive looking and probably had diseases from the dirty water, as there were bottles and maybe people peeing in there yakk. Once they put them in about 9 of them with the gold fish, they went for them but mouth was too small and they couldn't fit so my dad said 'they would be fine' lol. My brother checked up on them later on and they were all missing and seriously thought they had all been eaten, then he checked behind filter and they were all there and swam around the tank. Next morning same thing happened, but then next morning after that they all disappeared again, he thought they would be at the back of the filter when he checked they were not there. The goldfish's mouth must have grown a mm within them days lol.

 

[OldMan47]

It is going back a ways but my first fish were fry that I picked up at my LFS. They LFS always kept their fry from teh whole shop in a tank for kids to choose their first fish from, at next to no cost. I took some home and when they grew up I found that I had some nice looking black mollies. I had been fairly sure they were mollies since I had seen molly fry before in my dad's tank.

 

[Honeythorn]

Goldfish here. My mother won him/her from the fair ( it was still legal and very common then ) when I was a year old. My granddad gave her one of his spare 10 gallon tanks and Harriet lived in that on a table in the hallway, decor was plain gravel and a bridge. Nothing else.

No filter , and she was of course stunted by the tank, but she lived to be ten years old ! I suspect this was because mother did clean the tank every single week. Admittedly she did it the wrong way and destroyed any bacteria living in the gravel, but the weekly cleans must have kept the ammonia down at a reasonable level.

She'd get a big green plastic mixing bowl (which we still have ) , scoop Harriet out in her own tankwater, then remove the rest of the tankwater by hand, remove the gravel and clean it with BOILING water from the kettle. Byebye bacteria.... Then she'd rinse it again under the cold tap and put it back in the tank along with the bridge. Then she would refill the tank with a mix of cold and warm water to get it to room temperature..no dechlorinator ( no idea if this was even around then ) leave it to settle for a bit then pour Harriet back in.


Sadly mother made a mistake one day when I was 11 and added too much warm water when filling the tank. The shock killed Harriet when she was put back in

I wouldn't be surprised if she'd lived a lot longer despite such treament, had mother not made that fatal error. Goldfish are tough things, it's a pity in a way because it's that toughness that leads to thir mistreatment in most cases.

 

[simonas]

long timoe ago now but my first fish was charles and diana I won at a fair in 1981 at a charles and diana fair!!

 

[rhstranger]

Splish and splash, yup you guessed it. Two goldfish. small bowl. It was the early 70's.....nobody knew any better.
Gotta give my mum credit. She at least changed the water every week. (Or so she says).