Your Very First Tank

[Scuba Diver Gal]

Originally Posted by SeaHorse_Fanatic

My first fw tank that I owned myself was a heavily, heavily overstocked 5 gallon that I bought with some money my parents left us when they went on vacation (ok, it was for food, but I wanted a fish tank). Boy did the LFS owners see me coming cause they loaded up this unsuspecting kid with a brand new 5 g and about 30 small tropical fish and sent him on his way (by bus) home to figure it out before he killed everything.

Fortunately, when my dad came back, he saw the tank, took me to Fraser Aquarium and bought me a new 33g. That was back when I was a weee little lad of eight years old.

My first sw tank was in the early 80s (around 1980-81) and it was a seahorse tank. 10 gallons with no live rock (what's live rock???) and I kept the wc seahorse alive for almost a year on live brine shrimp that I would cycle out to Main Aquarium in Vancouver to buy every week. Then there was a huge storm in San Francisco and all the brine shrimp that they usually collected for the petshop trade were washed out to sea and the poor little guy eventually starved cause I couldn't raise adult brine shrimp from eggs fast enough. 30+ years later, still traumatized (jk) but really, still remember that terrible feeling of hoping a new brine shrimp shipment would come in time and being disappointed each time.

My first two bigger sw tanks was in the mid-80s. Had a 33g for a Volitan lionfish (got it at 3" and raised to over 12" before he poisoned me while I was cleaning his glass and I sold him. The other tank was a 110g with a Passer King Angel, Smooth Horn Shark, Moorish Idol, and Snowflake Moray Eel. 110g was the largest tank you could get back then and I used to hand-feed all these fish with squid and smelts. Wow, that was 30 years ago. Ok, now I feel old.

Anthony

What an awesome story! I laugh at envisioning 30 fish in a 5g…and how you would be shamed for feeding strictly brine fish (cause there's no nutritional value to it)….fortunately there were no forums around back then
Well we just returned from ordering my son his new tank…Jumping in…hope I still have a husband when this is all said and done

[SeaHorse_Fanatic]

Originally Posted by Scuba Diver Gal

What an awesome story! I laugh at envisioning 30 fish in a 5g…and how you would be shamed for feeding strictly brine fish (cause there's no nutritional value to it)….fortunately there were no forums around back then
Well we just returned from ordering my son his new tank…Jumping in…hope I still have a husband when this is all said and done

I was eight and naive back then. I trusted the LFS owner. First and last time Now I do my own research before I buy anything. Ask my wife, hehe.

As for the seahorse's diet, I was feeding the brine shrimp powdered baby fish food and also growing phytoplankton cultures on my window sill to feed to the BS before feeding them to the seahorse. I was able to keep my first WC seahorse alive on adult brine shrimp for about a year on that diet, which is not bad considering this was decades before the internet or Canreef or seahorse.org. There was also NO mysis shrimp for sale. I was in high school at the time, but nobody really knew much about seahorse husbandry back in the 80s. I was doing what I thought was logical with the resources available.

Anthony