gardenman

If I was intentionally raising maggots on good food, yeah. I'd feed them to my fish. I'd be nervous about them from the bottom of a trash can though. It's possible there was something there that they've come in contact with (weed killer for example) that doesn't kill the maggots but could be harmful to the fish.

When I get fish from an online vendor, I follow their acclimation instructions whether I agree with them or not and document everything. That way if there is an issue, I can show it wasn't my fault. If there are no specidfic instructions then it's plop and drop.

Yeah, the South Jersey, Delaware, Southeastern PA region was great for fish hobbyists in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and into the nineties. I was very lucky growing up here. There are still a few good places around. Just Fish over in Delaware is reportedly a nice local fish store, but they don't open until noon and I tend to be done shopping and on my way back home by noon, so I've never hit them. I may have to make a special trip sometime. That Pet Place in Lancaster, PA is fantastic, but about a two hour (or so) drive. Aquarium Center is the best "local" place now, though it's still about an hour away. We used to have a small store locally owned by a guy named Woody that was quite nice. There's a small petshop locally now but their fish tend to look horrible. I'll buy frozen food there, but that's about it. Their fish never look good and their staff is a bit clueless much of the time.

Hi back neighbor! Another Salem Countian here. The South Jersey region was great for tropical fish hobbyists for most of my life. Sadly, most of the good places are now nothing but memories. I wasn't sure if the Aquarium Center was still open or not until a few days ago. I would check out their website whenever I was heading that way to see what they had in stock and they hadn't updated the website since mid-April so I thought they might have closed. (They had been doing weekly updates on new arrivals until then.) Just a few days ago I stumbled upon them on Facebook and saw they were posting regularly there, so I was happy to see they were still open. I may have to make a trip up there in the coming weeks now that I know they're still open. (They should put a note on their website that they're now updating their stock list on Facebook instead of the website. I'm probably not the only person who thinks they might have closed.) There was a fish store over on Governor's Prince Boulevard in Delaware that was amazing back in the day. They were pricey, but had a gorgeous fishroom largely lit by nothing but the light from the tanks and every tank was like a show tank. They even had indoor ponds in the middle of the room. It was the prettiest fish store I'd ever seen. Most fish stores are kind of blah, but that was a fish showroom and very impressive. The tanks were all built-in and they had a huge display tank on the far wall with a big Arowana and assorted other large fish in it. It was like buying fish in a fancy public aquarium. Sadly, even that building is gone now.

I was born in 1958 and was keeping fish myself from the mid-sixties on. My grandfather had been a fishkeeper and gave me my first tank when I was around six or so. I've been keeping fish ever since then. My grandfather died when I was eleven and I inherited his fish tanks and stuff then. Our old WT Grant store had a rack of metalframe fish tanks in their pet department and that was my primary fish buying site in my early years. There was also an older couple in a nearby town (Evan's Tropical Fish) who operated a fish store out of their back room. They bred their own fish in their basement and were very helpful. They'd often throw in an extra fish or two for free. Most of the fish back then were cheap, so even with a minimal allowance I could afford most of what I wanted. I think neons were like ten for a dollar on occasion, so stocking a tank wasn't a huge issue. I hit pretty much every fish store in the Delaware Valley in my younger days and there was an endless variety of good stores. Mantua Tropical Fish and Pet Island was a favorite of mine. Maryann was the owner (along with her husband) and they carried everything including lots of live food. I bought tanks and supplies at Discount Aquarium off of route 202 in Delaware. Every now and then I'd make a run to Worldwide Aquarium in Upper Darby a wholesale/retail operation where you could save a fortune on stuff and buy it from the same people the local retailers were buying stuff from. I'd occasionally make a run to Martin's Aquarium in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. Martins expanded to a second store in Cherry Hill in the 80's, but both stores closed a few years later. They were the best fish store around. Anytime I was around Cherry Hill I'd also hit up Tisa's pet shop on route 38. There were a couple of aquarium stores in Berlin NJ that I'd hit up when in the area. In Vineland there was Chick and Barbs. Every mall had a Doctor's Pet Shop with a good fish selection. Echelon Mall had a huge aquarium store in it for a while. They actually got a baby sea turtle in a shipment once while I was there and the owner was worried if he could legally keep a sea turtle or not. He had a marine fish supplier who ran a diving school in the South Pacific and when the diver didn't have students he'd collect marine fish for the store and ship them to him. The store paid something like $300 per box and never knew what they'd be getting. It was just whatever the guy could catch. The sea turtle had the store owner very concerned though. It was a great time and place to grow up as a fishkeeper. You had endless variety, good shop owners, competitive pricing, and lots of people willing to share their experiences with you. It's become something of a fish desert these days with very few stores other than the occasional Petsmart/Petco. There's still one old school type store in the Aquarium Center in Clementon, NJ, but most of the good local places are gone now.

It could have been a WT Grant thing as that's where I got most of my fish back then, but the fish and hamsters were put in those boxes for transport. They'd use a hole punch to make air holes for the hamsters and it was always a race to get one home before it chewed it's way out of the box. Their pet department used to have a stack of the boxes alongisde of the tanks for the fish and hamsters.

Back when I first starting buying fish 50+ years ago, fish were put into the white boxes with the metal handles that are used for Chinese food these days. (Photo below.) There was no way to float them to temperature acclimate. The fish were caught, plopped into the box with some tank water, the top of the box was folded closed, the price was written on the box and off you went holding the box by the handle to check out your new fish. When you got them home you'd just open the box and pour the fish and water into your tank. When plastic bags became more common for fish the first talk of the need to temperature acclimate them came along. Before that everything was plop and drop.

When linear piston air pumps are used for septic systems they're often outside in plastic boxes with screens to let fresh air in. I would assume a plastic box sitting outside in full sun with an operating pump inside would get well over 100 degrees on a regular basis.

I like the Fluval boxes. The net breeders can sometimes have fish getting eaten through the mesh if a baby is lying on or against the mesh. A piece of foam does a nice job of stopping baby fish from sneaking out the overflow on the Fluval boxes.

Michael's Fish Room on YouTube did a video tour of That Pet Place last July. Much of it in a bit unfocused and blurry, but it gives you a feel for the size and scope of the place.

Google Maps Street View even went inside That Pet Place and shot photos so you can do a virtual walkthrough and tour of how it was back in 2013 when they took the shots. It's pretty neat to be able to wander around inside a store virtually. If you Google their store and use Google Maps and then switch to Street View and zoom in you can see where the images were shot and click on them to take you inside their store.

Where are you on the east coast? If you're in driving range of Lancaster, PA, That Pet Place in Lancaster is pretty impressive. If you're not in driving range they now sell their fish (most of them anyway) online also. I've never ordered fish from them online, but I've bought fish there in person in the past and they were good and healthy. I would hope their fish sold online were the same.

With extra emphasis on the "drop" in that case. If you ever watch how fish are handled before they get to us, the stuff we do makes little sense. I watch a lot of YouTube videos on fishkeeping, wholesaling, catching in the wild, and retailing, and it's pretty amazingt that any fish lives long enough to get to the customer. Wild caught fish are typically caught in pretty murky water. Then they get transported to an exporter who plops them in fresh clean water with little to no acclimation. Then into a bag, often with new fresh water with no acclimation, then into a box and off they go to an importer. Then at the importer they're plopped into new water yet again with little to no acclimation. Then as they're shipped to the regional distributor they get put into bags filled with fresh water again and off they go. At the regional distributor all fresh water again with little to no acclimation. Then off to the local retailer where they get all new water yet again. Then finally, off to the customer who babies them as he/she slowly acclimates them. Some online retailers even bag their fish in fresh water before shipping them to you rather than the tank water they were holding them in and that the fish were at least somewhat acclimated to. It's not an easy life being a fish.

Just pay attention to the images on Aqua Huna. They typically have a coin (a penny often) to show you the size of the fish you're buying. Their fish tend to be on the smaller size, so be sure you pay attention to the size shown in the photos.

I use a coffee grinder to grind up food for fry. What goes in varies with the type of fry but the coffee grinder (Mine is a Mr. Coffee version for under $20) grinds up whatever I put in to a fine dust.

Depending on where the leak is, you might be able to avoid replacing it. O-rings and gaskets tend to go bad over time but o-rings are pretty universal. If you have an old school hardware store or an auto parts store nearby and you take an o-ring there they can often find you a comparable replacement. If it's an oddly sized gasket that's leaking a good coating of petroleum jelly can often help it to seal better. If it's a flat rubber gasket that's causing the trouble, some scrap pond liner or a bicycle innertube can often be used to fabricate a new one. You have options other than replacing it if you can identify the source of the leak and get to the area.

I started out with just seven and they've multiplied many, many times since then. They're pretty neat fish though.

Mine love the shrimp pellets and also freeze-dried tubifex worms (they get six cubes a day and at four or so in the afternoon they start lining up where I place them waiting for them), they get a good handful of French-style green beans each morning also. I think overfeeding them helps the spawning process.

You might want to take a very close look at the two "female" swordtails who are harassing the female. They could be hidden males trying to spawn with her. Check for a gonopodium on them. When I have an aggressive female swordtail, it typically turns out to be a male who hasn't shown a tail yet. And I've got a lot of swordtails as the photo below will show. And that's just one of four tanks of them.

Depending on where you live, you might want to wait for the temps to moderate a bit before ordering. Midsummer and midwinter can be tough times to ship anything living. Also check out where your source is and their weather. I tend to order most of my live stuff (plants, fish, cultures, etc.) in the spring or fall when temps are more moderate and less likely to freeze or roast what I'm ordering.

I always kept live brine shrimp in the fridge and they'd last about a week or so for me. The same with live bloodworms. Now that was about thirty years or so ago when I had sources for them. These days they're just not available locally. The live bloodworms I'd take out and rinse with fresh water every few days. I had marine tanks then also so changing the water every few days for the brine shrimp was also easy.

There have been a few attempts at chain aquarium stores here in the Delaware Valley, but all have failed. Predatory Fins (currently in Florida but moving north soon) is trying to start up a chain operation now and we'll have to see how it goes for them. I'm not wildly optimistic about their chances of success. Most of the attempts here to start chains were in the seventies and eighties. Martin's Aquarium then in Jenkintown, PA opened a chain store in Cherry Hill, NJ but ended up losing both stores. There was a larger chain (eight to ten stores I believe) of small aquarium stores whose name escapes me. They had a store in the Airport Circle that was run by a young Hippie-type couple who later opened an independent store in Washington Township after that chain went under. Chain stores work in principle by giving the stores more buying power. If you're ordering for ten stores you can buy more and pay less for each item which then lets you undercut your competition. But for that to work you need everything sent to one central location and then redistributed from there. The warehousing and transportation costs then have to be passed on and that's where you run into trouble. If you could create a large breeding facility and raise your own stock, and use that facility as a hub, you could probably run satellite stores off of that main store supplying adjacent areas, but you'd want each satellite store maybe thirty miles or so apart so they weren't cannibalizing one another. That big facility would have to be in a cost-contained location also. It's not something you could just pick up and move easily if costs increased. A series of those breeding hubs and satellite stores spread across the country could work, but the startup costs are insane. To build a national or international chain, transportation costs start to spiral out of control. Loading up a van and driving thirty miles isn't terribly expensive. Moving something from Seattle to Florida is a whole different story. And you're competing against online retailers now. It's a nice idea, but I'm just not sure how practical a chain concept is for aquarium stores these days unless you're breeding and raising the fish yourself.

If your tap water has ammonia, or nitrites out of the tap, by storing it with some crushed coral in a container the good bacteria can set up housekeeping in the container and make the water safer for your fish. It's kind of a win-win. My well water has an absurdly high ammonia content from the tap, but a few days in the bottle and the ammonia is gone.

Fish collecting isn't always all sunshine and rainbows. If you've ever tried to catch an oto in a tank you can imagine how hard it is to catch them in the wild. The use of poisons and anesthetics is pretty commonplace (also with marine fish where cyanide is often used to catch reef fish.) The poisons/anesthetics will disable the fish and they float to the surface for easy capture, then into freshwater to try and revive them. Some people use electric shock to stun fish to make them easy to capture. It's called electrofishing. For small, fast-moving, bottom hugging fish like otos, conventional seine nets are pretty much useless to catch them in the wild. When you look at the price of an oto (typically under $5 here) and realize that they were wild caught, flown halfway around the world, went through an importer, wholesaler, local distributor and finally the pet shop and still retailed for under $5, they had to be caught in large numbers and fairly easily. The only real way to do that is by using poisons and anesthetics to bring a lot to the surface for easy collection at one time.

I like crushed coral. It slowly dissolves and adds minerals to the water. It bumps up the pH also. It's a handy tool to help stabilize an aquarium. If you're worried about water changes, store some water in containers (I use old kitty litter bottles that each hold 2-3 gallons) with some crushed coral in the bottom. You can reuse the coral by not pouring it into the tank.