My first fish tank - Circa 1979 - Oh how things have changed!
- Thread starter Redearsunfish
- Start date
I don't have pictures but I have some memories. The first fish I 'owned' was a black moor goldfish when I was 3. My parents kept it on the kitchen counter in a gallon sized fish bowl and I got to feed it after dinner. I don't remember how long we had it or what happened to it, it was just gone. After that I was given a ten gallon aquarium when I was 7 or so. I had so many thing in and out of it over the next 3 years - bullhead catfish babies, frogs, tadpoles, sunfish, bluegill, pretty much whatever we caught in the ponds and streams. Most or the time mom would let me keep whatever I caught for a week and then we would take back and let it go again before the weekend. Then that weekend we would go somewhere else and catch stuff again. I never had many fish die during that time, the worst by far were the frogs. We would bring home small leopard frogs and bullfrogs and sometimes they would hop out of the 10 gallon and end up dried up dead behind the porch furniture before we could find them. After that a friend gave us guppies to keep in the tank, so we had them for quite awhile in there with no filter and no decorations. I think I was 8 when I was doing a water change and it was winter. I shocked all the puppies by putting 40 degree well water in the tank and my mom had to rush getting water heated to add to it. They recovered though. When I was 9 we got our first high tech tank. The 10 gallon got an undergravel filter and 2 inches of fine grain gravel over it. It also got a lid with a florescent light and a heater. My dad took me to a local fish store and bought all the stuff and then we set it up - and I had to wait 6 weeks before putting fish in it because the guy at the store said it needed that time to cycle or the fish would die. Finally we went to get fish, and ended up with a black and orange goldfish, and 6 giant danios. I don't know why or how that happened, it was what my dad picked out, I think I picked the goldfish though. That tank sat on the counter next to our dining room table for 3 years until we moved with the same fish in it, although I think we lost some danios along the way. After that it's a blur, I had my own tanks in my room from the time I was 11 or 12 and so many critters and fish. Most of my stuff was run by undergravel filters until I moved away in 1997 and found another lfs that opened me to hang on back filters and a whole new world of fish.
