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 :D

[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]

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... :D

[CyboRob]

My first tank is a few days over a year old and here it is (old pic but still about the same).

http://www.pbase.com/cyborob/image/73082278/original.jpg

My first saltwater days tank is 25 days old and a mess, just like the tank above was at 25 days ...... lol

[navipro1]

my first saltwater tank was a 20g, with little experience I had back then, I cycle the saltwater for 1 week, bought a scooter dragonet, lived and doing well for 1 week, so I thought to myself, saltwater is EASY, I then decided to buy more, bought 8 fish, then BAMM, nitrite spike, stress induced, all died within a week but my scooter dragonet, he's my favorite =)

[Paul B]

My first tank was in the early fiftees, it was the basement sink. My Father who owned a fish market would bring me home animals that were still alive from the Fulton Fish Market in NYC. Then I graduated to a cut off wine barrel which had a combination of turtles, fish, frogs and fish. Metal cornered glass tank came next with real fish from a store.
I raised many types of fish before they "invented" salt water fish in about 1971.
I had a UG filter then...hey wait, I still use it.
Paul

[vanmo92]

Fish bowl. with a betta in it.

[TitansFan]

My first one was when I was a small child. It was a plain old fish bowl with some gravel. In it went a comet goldfish my father won for me at a local carnival. Looking back on it I feel so bad for those goldfish. There is no telling how many hundreds were killed. Years later after that goldfish had lived its long life of probably 3 weeks, I got a 5 gallon hex tank with tiger barbs.

[jimroth]

After I spent enough time at the pet store with my nose up against the glass of the fish tanks, mom and dad got the message and for my 12th birthday, I got a Metaframe (R) LivingWorld (R) 10-gallon setup, complete with ss frame tank, box filter and plastic plants that locked into a molded base in the tank. And a copy of the Iness Book.
In went the usual assortment of tetras, gouramis, and a corydoras catfish.
After a few months, good taste prevailed and I redecorated it with cabomba and anachris and real gravel. Bigger tanks would follow, but that tank will always be special to me!

[jimroth]

And then I double posted.

[elegance coral]

my first one was ss framed and about 30gl, maybe coloser to 10gl, anyway I thought it was big. My grandmother bought me a pink kissing fish. It would kiss my fingers and I could pet it. I loved that fish. Then my syster got a jack Dempsy fish and It killed my kissing fish. After that I was always trying to kill it. I got home from school before she did so I would take the fish out and pop it around the floor with a dish rag and leave it there untill she got home from shcool. She would put it back in the tank and it would swim off. I'm not that mean anymore. I hated that fish, but I'll never forget that kissing fish my grandmother bought me.

[Silverfin]

My first actual tank I took care of when i was 9; It was a freshwater 10gal with one Sucker, five Sun mollies, and an extremely small catfish. My mollies had over a billion babies after i learned that there was one male and four females. All but three babies lived to be about 1/4 of an inch before they became food for the parents.

__________

I am my Father's Daughter.....reef wise.....

[CPT. MURPHY]

First tank was a 30 gallon goldfish/planted tank. My parents set it up before I was born and kept it going until I was old enough to take over.

CPT.

[sunfishh]

I got my 10g kit when I was 13 years old (1985). You remember these. You had to buy the gravel and heater seperate, but they came with most of the basics. I horribally over stocked it and almost everything died. Somehow I did manage to keep a bleeding heart tetra and blue gourami for a year or two.

[mxpx4318]

my first tank was a 20g I got free from a friend, it was something to do to occupy my time when I went off to college 4 years ago, my first fish were 5 pentezona barbs that all caught ick (something I knew nothing of then) and died in a week. but then I got 5 gold barbs and haven't looke back since, I've gone from that one to up to 4 in the dorm to 8 when I moved off campus and now back down to 2 and soon to get my first salt (well first two, one 30g reef and a 75g fowlr) when I move again.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v607/MXPX4318/20g%20transformed/IMG_0618.jpg


Phillip

[Bri Guy]

I don't remember my first one, I had many FW tanks as a child.

But my first SW was a 12g eclipse, I found these cool anemones living on the rock, so I hand feed them daily, they were so cool...

http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i319/podheadx/aiptasiaproblem.jpg

I don't miss that tank one bit!

[saltpeter]

my 1st salt tank 1990,was a 24" acrylic cube with built in overflow with skimmer . Not knowing that LFS clerks will lie about everything to make a sale, I paid $12a# for 70 # rock and over stocked it cause they said OH Yeah you can do that, After a year it just crashed. Now the cube is my QT in the garage and I never ever go to LFS's !

[xreefermadnessx]

a big kitchen bowl with a gold fish i won from the 4h fair....

[KafudaFish]

In 6th grade won a goldfish at the school's Halloween Fair. He lived for about 3 years. For the first year he lived in an old glass milk bottle next to the kitchen sink. The slogan read, "Drink 3 glasses a day, and be happy, healthy, and gay." It was funny to see the fish swimming.
I have kept the tradition alive, my daughter has always had a 44 gal corner FW tank with a gold severum named "Pai Pai". She is 3 and he is at least 6.

[jksteele010]

First freshwater was a 20T breeder of albino convicts(cichlids) and that was pretty much self sustaining. They would eat their own and the little bit of food i through in there. Then I setup a 75 african for a while, that was a blast(love africans) but now have a 75 saltwater thats just started but no problems, I took it slow enough where nothing drastic has happened. I'm planning a 250 custom right now for around christmas time.