For all the aquarists out there

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Thanks Jan for providing me with their names.

I used to keep African Cichlids - electric yellows


and electric blues

 
Cichlids are beautiful, but also aggressive. Not good for community tanks.
 
Aren’t Discus like that, too? I always wanted some but I didn’t want a mono community.
 
I’m not that familiar with Discus, except that I know they prefer low pH water (more acidic than neutral). They’re also a bit touchy to keep healthy.
 
I kept the blue and yellow together and yes they do defend their territory when nesting. Very fast swimmers when chasing others away - they’d outdo the road runner! 😂 🤣
 
35 years ago I worked in an aquarium store, and kept all sorts of fish tanks and other pets. One was this 100 gallon salt water aquarium. We lived near the Pacific Ocean and my dad loved to go surf fishing, so we decided to populate this tank with whatever he caught. The picture is old and not clear, but you can see we had a small leopard shark. an orange sculpin, and a sea bass. We also had a purple starfish and a kelp fish. When we eventually tore down the tank, we gave most of the fish to the marine biology department at one our of local Catholic high schools. As others above have said, keeping marine aquariums requires a lot of time, effort and not inconsiderable cost, too. My aquarium keeping days are behind me now, but it was fun.

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I had a local tide pool tank when I lived in southern California. I took marine biology classes through UCSD’s extension program, and thus was able to obtain a collectors permit from the state.

Instead of using Instant Ocean and mixing it with freshwater to create the salinity needed, I just took plastic Jerry cans down to Scripps Aquarium in La Jolla and used the filtered sea water from their huge public aquariums. We were permitted to do that back then. It already had the needed trace elements, and it was the actual ocean water used in their tanks and not artificial. It was free to anyone to fill us their cans.

For awhile, I had a heater in that tank and tried to keep coral reef fish, but found that so many of those species are so touchy about water parameters, including temperature and salinity, that it was hard to keep them alive. Feeding was another problem.

I also had a five-gallon mini marine tank in which I kept tiny dwarf seahorses, whose adult size wasn’t more than an inch or so.

That was my brief foray into saltwater.

I also had freshwater tanks back then, then went for decades without any aquariums until I recently started keeping them again, beginning in 2010. Now, it’s freshwater only, and no tropicals. Cold water fish are hardier and easier to keep.
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JanR said:
collectors permit from the state.
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Permits? We didn’t need no stinking permits 😁

Dad had a fishing license, of course, but we were rogue back then. My dad never brought back a Garibaldi, however, the California state fish which was protected then.

We also did our water changes straight from the ocean, since that’s what those fish were used to.
 
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I’ve tried to like christofirst post, only to have two hearts appear on Jans’ post above 🤣
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