Coarse fish (home) aquaria

Sorry if we've had this thread before...

I set up a 200l tank about a year ago. Currently have 6 minnows, 3 tench (not much bigger than the minnows), a couple of 2" carp and a couple of 2oz rudd (the biggest of the lot).

I was warned that the carp would soon grow too big at room temperture, but in fact they and the tench have hardly increased in size in nearly a year, though have remained in excellent condition.

Great and very relaxing to watch.

Wondered if anyone else does/has kept coarse fish in tanks at home (and no, I don't mean for livebaits!).

Ian

Apart from a few fairground goldfish (with incredible longevity in a round bowl) no....

but when I win the euro mils I would have the model weir from the London Aquarium in my shed...........

I kept most UK cold freshwater fish at some stage or other in my youth, plus a few exotics.

Most memorable..shoal of about six small 3-5" perch.. a pair of 6" tiger trout which established territories at opposite ends of the tank..tiny bootlace eels which buried themselves with their heads above gravel..a larger eel which took floating casters off the top via by using the sides of the tank to get there...minnow shoals... and as for more lazy/friendly fish..several 6oz crucians were about as laid back as you get get and quickly fed from the hand. Juvenile Roach and bream were difficult - fish need to be in superb condition and kept in well aerated water otherwise get fin rot/fungus very easily.

Carp need a good size tank really - 4t plus - as they can grow fast. The bigger the tank usually the better the options are. I had great fun experimenting with current - using Fluval external filters to create flowing areas with trailing willow moss over roots and anchored to larger stones over gravel - classic Bullhead and Stone loach habitat is excellent and these species keep well together. Only problem is that some species depend upon live food - eg. Bullhead, perch, pike (a small one obviously), eels, even Sterlet in my experience. This got to be a pain as digging for worms in the depth of midwinter or in droughts when the ground is hard was hard work. Should be Ok if you've got a maggot supply or wormery mind you.

A good tip is to put some domesticated or tame fish in with any wild caught ones - they learn from them to be less stressed and feed more easily. Lots of good cover also helps a lot.

Oh and i forgot to mention probably my favourite set up which had two powerful external filters creating an area of turbulent water and current, in a 6ft tank x18 x18 think, with small 2-4oz chub and barbel + obligatory minnow shoal and some bullheads and stone loach. The barbel were actually shop-bought young "mediterranean barbel" - they had blotching to their flanks..but in retrospect very small ordinary barbel have this. Used to stock tank regularly with freshwater invertebrates too - shrimps, dragonfly larvae (eg Calopteryx) and all sorts but avoiding midges!

I have only occasionally kept cold water fish, but I have kept tropical fish for a good number of years.

The best advice I ever had was that; you keep the water, then the fish keep themselves.

If you feed in worms and other natural food then you have to deal with the waste products from the fish, along with that produced by any uneaten food. In a natural environment these waste products are easily diluted but in an enclosed environment nitrate and bacterial levels can rise very quickly.

If your tank is in your sleepin quarters, don't keep a crayfish with half a flower pot for a shelter; at two in the morning it will decide to rearrange the funiture and clank around like Marley's ghost.

Loach are amazing, the speed they vanish a maggot makes reality look like a badly-spliced film; gudgeon learn to take floating fish-food off the top in a day or so - and change their pattern when they sleep (dark spots on sides, dark bar on head running therough the eye to the snout) and chub spend a lot of time swimming slowly backwards, giving some insight into how the chub "melt" is done.

Thanks for comments,

How did you guys have problems with algae? I have to give the glass a good clean every couple of weeks, and my broad leaf plants & rocks have a fair coating of green/brown stuff.

Is it just a matter of water hygiene? My stocking desnity I think is relatively low, and I'm conscious of not overfeeding. I also only have the light on on a evening when I'm at home. I change about half the volume (200l) every two - three weeks perhaps that's not enough?

I have recently got some watersnails - Ramshorns & Great pond snails and whilst they have helped a bit, it's not been as much as I hoped.

Any advice greatly welcome.

Ian

Keeping the tank out of any direct sunlight helps prevent algae on glass etc. You can also get magnetised glass cleaners pads that can be moved up and down the glass from the outside of the tank. Re changing the water, i try to change this as little as possible as tapster is loaded with nutrients which encourage algae. Also has chlorine and nasties that sensitive fish don't like. Get a good external filter if you haven't already.

I have often thought it would be interesting to get a net full of small fry and let it grown up for a year in a tank just to see what they turn into ie would there be perch and pike mixed in with the roach etc.

The problem is that almost all our native fish grow far to big for permanent tank life only minows etc would be any good for long time though I would like to find some ruff as they don't get too big and watching a stickle back making its nest could be fun .

I kept stickle back in my dads pond for about 12 years they bred every year and kept a farly regular population going year on year , you could see the little teratorys they set up though we had a few dead gold fish over the years who tried to eat the stickle back .

I also bought my dad a tiny mirror carp who out grew the pond in about three years and now lives in a big coy pond his name is shinney.

Nice memories.

Tom Williams "My River" country, upper-middle Hants Avon, early 1970s

Mill in which I was working as a largely unpaid Avon & Dorset River Authority salmon-hatchery egg-picker and learner (free fishing via Tom, a pal of Jack Harrigan who was a pal of my Dad, on whose Estate it was located).

Big, long, river-fed aquarium tank on the mill's ground floor to catch the eye of visiting A&DRA worthies.

Minnows, diddy roach and dace (caught by self), plus a few baby trout and salmon spotties...

At least until I introduced the loveliest, most fin- and tooth-perfect 7-inch pikelet you have ever seen................

He / she was devastating!

Fish keepin is fantastic,trouble is I want some more tanks after reading this thread a couple of days ago.
Not native fish ,but I once kept Oscars from South America Ithink ,very much like a perch but far more aggressive I reckon.I used to hold bait out of the water and it would literally pounce out of water nearly a foot and snatch the food out of the forceps .Fantastic to watch it was a bit of a party trick as well.
kEEPING such fish you need an exellent filter due to high protein diet.Dont get one if you want a nice calm tank it eats the lot in front of your eyes.

dayglowfroggy said:

I have often thought it would be interesting to get a net full of small fry and let it grown up for a year in a tank just to see what they turn into ie would there be perch and pike mixed in with the roach etc.
.

Click to expand...

I got a net full of small minnows from the local river for my garden pond a few years ago.
Of the fifty or so fish, two always swam by themselves, well away from the shoal. When they grew up the two proved to be chub. Both sadly died at about 8 inches long. No idea why, they looked the healthiest dead fish I have ever seen. Other species, the minnows, goldfish, and a couple of small mirrors remained perfectly healthy. Pond now has tench, minnows, bullhead, crucians, rudd, sticklebacks and gudgeon. Only ever see the minnows and rudd though, the rest need to be searched for, long and hard before even a glimpse is offered. Forced to conclude that for most British fish, a tank rather than a pond is needed, if you wish to see your fish.

Nice post saved me some effort suprised there were no pike or perch.

Excellent thread this, well done all...

Hi


Years ago (well over twenty!!) I was fishing the Trent, the margins were alive with fry and there wasn't much doing so I caught some in my minnow mesh landing net, I put them in a bait box with some water with the intention of having a go for some larger Perch.

I put the bait box in shade then forgot about them!!, upon putting my tackle away I realised these fish were still in the bait container so I took them home with me as I had five tanks on the go back then, there was a spare tank always set up so i stuck the four little things (smaller and thinner than a matchstick!!) in the tank...
A few months later I could identify them as two chub and two gudgeon...

Sometime later I looked in the tank and there were just the two chub left...
The greedy beggers had scoffed the poor gudgen which were rather small by comparison...
The two chub were eventually re-homed in a 3'x18"x15" tank which I built into a unit in an alcove, when sitting in the easy chair in front of the tank, you had to get up very sloooowly as sudden movements spooked them real badly, although i had glass lids on the tank they still sploshed water everywhere...

Eventually i gave them to a mate for his pond, they were around 8" and were too messy for me to keep, they settled in his pond fine but ate all the food before his other fish could get any so his koi stick bill went right up


John

When I worked at 'A Northern University' in the early 90's the biology dept kept a number of fish and crabs etc. for research purposes in fibreglass tanks as seen in the aquaculture/fish farming industry.

What was unusual was that the adjacent corridor had a number of large display tanks set into the wall, just as you would find in a open-to-the-public type aquarium. [However, the corridor was restricted to University staff only]. The largest was about 12' x 4' x 4' but was not in use, and was full of rather stagnant water. The other two were about half or a third the size - one marine with an octopus that would occasionally get fed one of the crabs; the other freshwater with a few roach, the biggest of which was well over a pound in weight!

I decided to renovate the largest tank and move the roach into it. Over several days, I drained the water, shovelled out and washed all the gravel, scrubbed the sides etc. On one occasion when standing in the tank, something appeared to move below the gravel. I mentioned it to one of the lab technicians who said - that'll probably be the eel, it's been there for years - we never actually feed it! Not sure how true some of that was, but it certainly was an eel of about 12oz - 1lb!

Anyway, having renovated the tank, incl putting in a huge chunk of bogwood that al ocal farmer had pulled out of one of his fields having hit it with a plough (it took about two weeks of soaking to get rid of the peat staining), I asked persmission from a local angling club (of which I was a member) to take a few fish from their lake for re-stocking.

So in the end we had the eel, the roach, 4 or 5 skimmers about 3-4oz each, a similar number and size of rudd, and a group of about 6-7 small (2oz) perch. The last were my favourites - full of energy and attitude despite being the smallest in the tank. Fed the lot with maggots daily!

One day some of the fish developed a fungus, so we treated with malachite green (a copper based antifungal - previously used extensively in trout farms - now banned). I probably overdid the dose - you couldn't see more than an inch into the water and I was a bit worried! The next day when all had settled, everything had survived apart from ALL the perch - dead! Probably a rather crude, unintentional experiment of the relative susceptibility of coarse fish to copper poisoning.

Left the dept a year or so later - no idea if anyone else took on the upkeep!

Ian

Ian

In the old days before Malachite green (i still have some somewhere ), old copper pennies were used for treating (i think) whitespot and as you said, fungal infections, i never tried the pennies myself as i had the chemical:wh


Cheers, John