How Great Was Your First Tank ?

[saltpeter]

1964,the Beatles sang, I wanna hold your hand, on our black&white and on Moms buffet table sat my 30 gallon creekwater special. I grew older(not up)on a dairy farm in central Ohio. I stocked it constantly with fresh water from the creek and my livestock consisted of any minnow I could catch and every cray dad I found . My pride and joy was the bluegill. Feeding was easy cause of the huge supply of night crawlers in the back yard. Let's hear of yours...

 

[rhysiboy]

my first ever tank was 5 gallon freshi which had 6 tiger barbs and 6 danios. very very over stocked but i soon moved up to a 14 gallon... then the barbs all died. My 3rd tank is my 24 gallon salti tank and its awseome

 

[trigger111]

My first tank had 3 peieces of lava rock, and undrgravel filter, fake plastic plants and two doomed domino damsels. It was AWSOME!

 

[tigeroscar]

lol 10 gallon community tank when i was 14 (2002) with a few tetras, a few small sharks, and a pleco, big rainbow gravel, fake plants and a sunken ship decoration...no water testing...a UGF and a water change every 6 months LOL

 

[Gary Majchrzak]

Re: How Great Was Your First Tank ?

It was great.
Dad took me fishing and I caught a Redhorse Sucker.
We brought it home, he filled the bathtub with water and we plopped the fish in. I think it was the beginning of a lifelong fascination.

 

[justinl]

fishbowl (no, not the little half cup death trap ones... the 1gallon one) with a single male betta. added plants later. still loving him.

 

[alan214]

Mine as a kid was a 10G with guppies. They constantly died and I could not understand why the little box filter I used that contained carbon and filter floss would not sustain my tank.

I was so worried when I started back into the hobby as an adult that my luck would not be any better. Thank God, I had better results with saltwater!

 

[fishyz]

When I was 6, I got a 10g tank for my birthday. I put 6 neon tetra's in it. I thought it was the biggest and best tank ever!

 

[SDguy]

My brother and I had a 10 or 20g (don't recall). We kept all sorts of aquatic insects in there, including water scorpions, water bugs, and a really big diving beatle that would eat raw pieces of meat tied to a string.

 

[Myka]

I had a fish bowl that was maybe a 1/2 gallon and I had a mini UGF for it, and an air pump and 3 or 4 neons and a couple guppies. Poor doomed critters... I remember when I cleaned the bowl I would take everything out and rinse it all and scrub it, and put freshwater back in...oi!!!

My first saltwater tank was a 20 gallon hex that had crushed coral, an UGF, a PowerGlo 18W fluoro tube, a couple pieces of dry base rock, a couple fake percs, a coral banded shrimp, a condy anemone, some mushrooms, and some fake plants. It ran for a year like that. Amazingly I had good luck....except with the Queen Conch I was told I could put in there - it stunk up the whole house when it died!! what eventually killed the entire tank was the $4 WalMart heater I was using - it cooked the tank at 94 degrees one day.

 

[Bambalam]

My first tank was a 10 gallon that I won in a drawing in the local newspaper (with cottonball corner filter included, no less) when I was about 10 or 11 years old.

Been into it ever since.

 

[Sheol]

A plastic bowl with a baby bullhead catfish. Followed by a 10 gallon tank of Mbuna ( yeah, that worked. Sigh) . First SW was also a 10 gallon. One baby black damsel & a blue Linckia starfish.

( all these errors were made in the 1970's. what can I say?)
Matthew

 

[doomicon]

55 Gallon Freshie, first fish was a Green Sevrum(sp). I still have him only transferred to a 75.

 

[arts007]

First tank when I was 9yrs old was a standard goldfish bowl with a goldfish in it. It sat on top of the TV set and got too hot for him so he died.

 

[gig]

10 gal freshwater handmedown tank that included a tiger botia (loach), killed everything and anything I put in the tank....plus the damn fish hid all day! Poor tetras were toast!@

 

[gig]

10 gal freshwater handmedown tank that included a tiger botia (loach), killed everything and anything I put in the tank....plus the damn fish hid all day! Poor tetras were toast!@

 

[pledosophy]

18g eclispse tank with a pair of seahorses. For some reason that tank was bullet prrof. Never had any problems at all. Now that I know what I'm doing all this cray stuff happens.

Ignorance is bliss.

 

[davidryder]

55g guppy breeder - undergravel filter, HOB power filter, lava gravel, fake plants - 10 years of that!!!! lol... crazy to think!

 

[Frick-n-Frags]

my first salt tank was homemade about 50gallon in school.
undergravel, dolomite, whisper air pumps BOOWAH!
I had a batfish, a lionfish, a royal gramma and a singapore angel. they were all getting fat and huge when the heater stuck. part of me died that day. (in hindsight, man was I lucky picking a fish mix that wanted nothing to do with each other).

that batfish was like a puppy always begging for food, same with the lion. I remember, it was scary working in the tank because he was always nosing around for food too.

I didn't touch salt again until I stumbled across a certain series of articles about "mini reefs" in FAMA around 1986, then I got rolling again a year later and haven't shut down yet.

 

[RicksReefs]

found a pair of french doors in the spring of 71 and built 6-2 1/2 gallon tanks out of the glass panels, went to the beach (in massachusetts) and got my sand, critters from the tidepools, etc.
then for my 10th birthday that summer, my mom got me a 29 gallon tank. woohoo! I'd hit the bigtime then...