Brhino
07-28-2010, 07:24 PM
A mostly pointless rant.
I've been keeping fish for seven months now and I've been a member of these forums for the last five. Obviously, my experience is very limited, but I still try to help people even newer than me when they have problems. I'm able to do this because of my obsessive interest in reading all about everything related to the hobby and a good memory for things I've seen and read. I can't tell someone how to get their bolivian rams to spawn or what kind of deficiency their amazon swords are experiencing, but I understand all the newbie mistakes and their solutions.
Every time I read someone's thread that's a variation of "Help! My six goldfish in my five gallon tank are not doing well!", I took pride in the knowledge that I was doing things the "right" way with my goldfish. I got them a large tank that would accommodate even their full-grown adult sizes. I used proper filtration and maintenance routines. I paid attention to their diet. I constantly asked for criticism and suggestions for improvement. While people all over the world would be shrugging their shoulders and replacing dead goldfish every few months or years because they didn't know or didn't care about the proper way to care for them, my fish were going to grow large and become old because I wasn't like those people.
And then one of my goldfish got sick.
Identifying and treating fish illness is a bit more involved than the basic beginner stuff I have mastered. Still, I did as much reading as I could, got as much advice as I could, and took what actions I thought were best based on the information I could find. I may not have done everything exactly right, but it wasn't for lack of trying. I felt frustrated because almost every description of any fish malady includes a statement that the disease is brought on by poor water conditions, improper feeding, or the like. There are no common goldfish diseases that are described as striking without warning in well-maintained aquariums. And yet, that's what happened, unless I made a critical mistake that neither I nor anyone else has noticed yet.
And then the goldfish died.
Strictly speaking this is the fourth fish in our care that has died out of the twenty we have purchased in the last seven months. The other three all died within 14 days of introduction, which was distressing to my fish keeping ego but somewhat more understandable. This time is different. The fish lived and thrived in my care long enough that its unquestionable that whatever lead to its death was my doing. I took in a fish with a reputation for hardiness and longevity and ended up killing it. Some people will say "these thing just happen", but in my mind that saying is used far too often (in life in general, not just in fish keeping) when the reality is that more intelligence and more diligence could have prevented the problem.
I love my aquariums. Money and available space are the only reasons I don't have a half dozen more. But at the end of the day, if I have to chose between being a fish keeper that is not able to successfully care for his fish and a person who doesn't keep fish at all, I would chose to not keep fish at all. Today I'm wondering if it's a choice I'll have to make some day.
This isn't a surrender. I'm sure we'll get a new "replacement" goldfish. My very first canister filter is on its way here right now, which (in parallel with my HoB filter) should raise the filtration on the tank from "acceptable" to "excellent". I'm just depressed that I've tried so hard to do everything right but achieved results worse than many people who have done things very very wrong.
Thank you to Scrup and Spardas for providing advice, and to everyone else that offered sympathy and encouragement.
I've been keeping fish for seven months now and I've been a member of these forums for the last five. Obviously, my experience is very limited, but I still try to help people even newer than me when they have problems. I'm able to do this because of my obsessive interest in reading all about everything related to the hobby and a good memory for things I've seen and read. I can't tell someone how to get their bolivian rams to spawn or what kind of deficiency their amazon swords are experiencing, but I understand all the newbie mistakes and their solutions.
Every time I read someone's thread that's a variation of "Help! My six goldfish in my five gallon tank are not doing well!", I took pride in the knowledge that I was doing things the "right" way with my goldfish. I got them a large tank that would accommodate even their full-grown adult sizes. I used proper filtration and maintenance routines. I paid attention to their diet. I constantly asked for criticism and suggestions for improvement. While people all over the world would be shrugging their shoulders and replacing dead goldfish every few months or years because they didn't know or didn't care about the proper way to care for them, my fish were going to grow large and become old because I wasn't like those people.
And then one of my goldfish got sick.
Identifying and treating fish illness is a bit more involved than the basic beginner stuff I have mastered. Still, I did as much reading as I could, got as much advice as I could, and took what actions I thought were best based on the information I could find. I may not have done everything exactly right, but it wasn't for lack of trying. I felt frustrated because almost every description of any fish malady includes a statement that the disease is brought on by poor water conditions, improper feeding, or the like. There are no common goldfish diseases that are described as striking without warning in well-maintained aquariums. And yet, that's what happened, unless I made a critical mistake that neither I nor anyone else has noticed yet.
And then the goldfish died.
Strictly speaking this is the fourth fish in our care that has died out of the twenty we have purchased in the last seven months. The other three all died within 14 days of introduction, which was distressing to my fish keeping ego but somewhat more understandable. This time is different. The fish lived and thrived in my care long enough that its unquestionable that whatever lead to its death was my doing. I took in a fish with a reputation for hardiness and longevity and ended up killing it. Some people will say "these thing just happen", but in my mind that saying is used far too often (in life in general, not just in fish keeping) when the reality is that more intelligence and more diligence could have prevented the problem.
I love my aquariums. Money and available space are the only reasons I don't have a half dozen more. But at the end of the day, if I have to chose between being a fish keeper that is not able to successfully care for his fish and a person who doesn't keep fish at all, I would chose to not keep fish at all. Today I'm wondering if it's a choice I'll have to make some day.
This isn't a surrender. I'm sure we'll get a new "replacement" goldfish. My very first canister filter is on its way here right now, which (in parallel with my HoB filter) should raise the filtration on the tank from "acceptable" to "excellent". I'm just depressed that I've tried so hard to do everything right but achieved results worse than many people who have done things very very wrong.
Thank you to Scrup and Spardas for providing advice, and to everyone else that offered sympathy and encouragement.