Achievement Unlocked!

[Travis]

What is your proudest achievement as an aquarist? I have kept a variety of sizes and styles of aquarium over the last 35ish years and still get super excited by little things. Today i added a bristlenose pleco to my planted community tank and it promptly spooked a Galaxy Rasbora fry out of hiding! This was my first time keeping and now breeding Galaxy Rasbora/ CPD. I added 4 males and 2 females to the tank a couple weeks ago and within days they were displaying and exhibiting spawning behavior. I set this tank up with no plan to breed with the mindset if anything other than the cherry shrimp breed bonus! Now to see if it makes it and see if there are any others!  I will add pics if I can find the little bugger again lol

Edit: While attempting to get a good pic of the one fry I knew of a second one swam into the frame! 🤩

Edited September 13, 2020 by Travis
Fry pics!

[Ben Ellison]

Mine has been honestly breeding and actually selling guppies 😄 the idea of having fish that actually make more income than they cost me over the course of their lives totally changed my mindset on the hobby. Before I kept fish with no other goal than just having and enjoying them. Now I'm doing that and it's paying for its self! My cherry shrimp finally spawning was a close second. I had tried like 2-3 times to get a colony of shrimp going with no success. This time I started with 12 and currently estimate I'm creeping on 100!

[jerseychef]

This could either be classified as an achievement or stupidity.  I purchased a 75g and a 20L off of craigslist used for a very good price.  The tanks that I thought were going to  be empty were not.  The 75g had a red zebra cichlid and a convict cichlid.  The 20L had another convict.  The convict and the red zebra were not getting along so i threw the two convicts into the 29g at home that was cycling.  I did not want either of these 3 fish but I wasn't going to let the previous owner flush them.  5 days later i completely understood why the previous owner had the convicts separated when I woke up to around 100 convict fry swimming in the tank.  I am currently down to about 40 or so that are still swimming around.  

I guess you could say my achievement was when I noticed them doing the dance shortly after i quickly grabbed the male and separated him.  

[Mr. Ed's Aquatics]

For a long time I wanted Discus, but in my 20's that was too pricey. I finally ended up getting some from my friend when he needed a car more than a Discus tank and I had a decent trade in car that was not going to get me much off my next vehicle so we worked out a trade.

He was pretty sure he had either all males or all females because he had been trying to breed them for profit for almost a year. 

I totally changed how it was set up and within the 1st month, 2 different pairs mated. I was super proud, and made quite a nice sum. Still my favorite fish in the hobby for sure. 

[Eclipse]

Not sure this is an achievement considering I did absolutely nothing, but my pea puffers are constantly spawning.

I've even thrown some into my shrimp tank to control the snail population for a bit. And a month after I removed the adults, what do I find? Pea puffer fry! They're now the size of my pinky nail. I don't even feed them. They eat whatever they find in the tank.

They also camouflage so well, it's difficult to find them in all the plants so even if i wanted to catch them all to transfer to the big tank, I'll have to wait until they're the size of young adults.

[Alison]

Right now I am just happy that everything is thriving and I've had relatively few bumps in the road. The plants are growing like crazy and the fish are happy and sassy.

[Daniel]

Honestly, getting my &^#$%! discus to eat TetraMin.

I've kept and bred discus since the late 1980s. The 2 keys to successful discus is keeping them in copious amounts of clean water and getting them to eat a lot of food. It's fairly easy to get healthy discus to eat a lot if you offer them live foods, so that's mostly what I have done over the years. One of things I loved about my Leopoldi angelfish was how un-picky they were when it came to diet and it was one of the reasons my wife didn't want me to sell those. Especially if I was going to go back to keeping discus!

But on this latest round of discus when they were just babies I started feeding them Vibra Bites and they liked it. Next I started mixing in TetraMin color granules with the Vibra Bites because they're about the same color. They started eating those too! The discus still like the Vibra Bites a lot better, but they eat the TetraMin also, so that is my greatest achievement in fish keeping in 50 years.