Hi everyone, I'm new (obviously) so I just wanted to introduce myself. I've been in the hobby for about 5 years but the past year I had lost interest, which is why I joined, to keep me interested. I just have a 30 gallon planted tank right now, but hopefully I can get a few more projects rolling in the near future. Just wanted to say hi!
Hi everyone!
- Thread starter DuctTape
- Start date
well ducttape i have to say i am a big fan of yours and have been for many years and i always make sure to keep alot of you around 
had to say it but anywho welcome to the forum and look forward to seeing what you got going on, or plant to have going. hopfully you can find the information you need here. and i have to ask about the planted tank. have you gone low tech or high tech with it?
had to say it but anywho welcome to the forum and look forward to seeing what you got going on, or plant to have going. hopfully you can find the information you need here. and i have to ask about the planted tank. have you gone low tech or high tech with it?Thanks Thyra! And exhumed, not to toot my own horn, but I find myself pretty useful as well . Ya the planted tak is pretty low tech, just has dirt/a little clay capped with gravel. It came with a typical hood light with incandescent bulbs ( because it was kinda old), so I ripped out the incandescent sockets and replace it with a Home Depot 2 bulb T5 fixture. It's kinda overrun with jungle vals but I have some crypts, a tiger lily, and some rotala species (cant remember off the top of my head). It used to have cabamba and amazon frog bit too, but its been through some abuse the past few months so I'm afraid they are nearly extinct .
. Ya the planted tak is pretty low tech, just has dirt/a little clay capped with gravel. It came with a typical hood light with incandescent bulbs ( because it was kinda old), so I ripped out the incandescent sockets and replace it with a Home Depot 2 bulb T5 fixture. It's kinda overrun with jungle vals but I have some crypts, a tiger lily, and some rotala species (cant remember off the top of my head). It used to have cabamba and amazon frog bit too, but its been through some abuse the past few months so I'm afraid they are nearly extinct .I went with the dirt as well for this tank. in my 20 i tried swamp mud. dont recomend it. my val and giant hygro grew great in it. bacopa tended to rot off in the mud. also it outgasses alot. constnatly bubbles were coming out of the mud and sometimes there would be a literal blow out where a big bubble blew away the gravel and everything once it broke free. once i got my 55 i bought some organic potting soil and planted everything in that and it's working great. right now my 20 gallon i've built into a paludarium. still need to edit my signature to represent that. I've also dirted my 30 gallon but have not planted it yet. i want to get rid of my green sunfish and put a couple pumkinseeds in their first.
No but years ago I found out creek chubs are a bad idea. they are jumpers. I catch them for catfish and flathead bait and put them in an old hydraulic fluid bucket. there is a spout about an inch and a half to 2 aches across I put an air stone into for overnight storage. if I don't block off that spout they jump out of it. one morning I woke up with close to a dozen on my floor lol. im a fan of sunfish though. in a year my green sunfish went from about 2 inches to hand size. I got a local lake that has good pumpkinseeds in it like the one in my hand in my pic. want to put a couple of them in that tank and plant it.
I love sunfish as well, do you just feed them mainly flake food? If I had maybe a fifty five gallon I would try them out, but I'm afraid they would outgrow my 30 too fast and I won't be able to upgrade for them any time soon. I was thinking more of a few darter species, some mud minnows, and maybe some brook stickleback or fatheads or something.
I just have the one green sunfish in the 30 and even though he is about hand sized he seems to do fine. i think the pumpkinseeds stay smaller though which is one reason i would like to have them. as fo food i started of with 1mm sinking cichlid pellets till he got to big for those. then i got the large formula new life spectrum foating koi formula. he is a messy eater thoguh cause he seems to grind them up in his throat before swallowing them and he shoots alot of it out his gills making a mess on the sand in the tank. also a buddy of mine had fatheads in his tank. they don't seem to do that well. might have been cause of what he had in with them but they always seemed kinda sickly. my dream though is to have a tank like in a bass pro shop or cabelas. just full of bass and walleye and flatheads. would love to have a tank with flatheads. thats by far one of my favorite fish. so much so i got a tattoo on my upper arm of one lol.
That's awesome hahaha! I think it would be cool to keep a group of gar and some kind of bullhead or catfish. Back when I first started with fish, I caught a little one inch yellow bullhead and put it in a little five gallon tank for a year. He grew almost 3 inches, then I let him go, but they are very interesting to watch.
I wish i could find some bullheads around here. the only place i have caught bullheads is in minnisota up on cass lake. but up there noone fishes for them. they are considered a garbage fish and overlooked. one night there were people catching walleyes off thier docks in front of the cabins using jumbo leeches under a float. i try the same thing in front of my cabin. i didn't catch a single walleye. i did catch about 2 dozen bullheads though ranging close to 2 pounds. the people in the cleaning house looked at me like i was nuts the next morning when i came in with a stringer of bullheas to clean lol. I got a species of catfish in my 2 55's. got to have them lol. as for the gar they are cool as well. hate taking them off the hook cause almost every time they end up drawing blood. I know my lfs almost always have some gar species for sale. the florida gar is the most common but i think they stay kinda small and thats y.
My Dad and I use to fish in a river in northern Wisconsin at night and catch a bucket full of bullheads. BTW did you hear about the man in Kauai who caught a 250 plus pound tuna, got tangle in his own line and in the process pulled his 15 ft. boat over. He managed to get on top, phone his wife, who called the Coast Guard. They rescued him, towed his boat in - with the tuna still attached!
Fishing in the ocean is something else! My parents came to visit from Wisconsin and My Dad was quite a fisherman - we took him surf fishing, something he had never done. He was absolutely ecstatic! They were ocean perch and in spite of all his walleye, northern pike etc, type experience he said he never had a fish fight like that. He had a ball and we had a lot of really fresh fish!
I did some tuna fishing in Aruba when i was there for my brothers wedding. biggest one we caught was about 10 pounds. nothing special but i swear that 10 pound fish fought every bit as much as the 30 or so pound flatheads i catch. and i catch then in a river where they just need to tilt thier head down and use the current to push them to the bottom. so u got that and them physically fighting and a 10 pound tuna could easily outdo it lol. that ocean fishing is a blast though. I'd like to do it again sometime. but alas i live in the midwest. don't get to the ocean very often lol. but we always got the white sturgeon up on rainy river on the canada boarder thats only a days drive away lol,
