in my previous video you saw how my daughter and I set up a 15 gallon cube in the kids bathroom
— Gamer Girl's first fish tank. And then at the end of the video I said you better cycle your new
aquarium so that your fish won't automatically get poisoned from their own waste tutorial over here
so what are we gonna do while we're waiting for all that beneficial bacteria and those live plants
to grow research in fact once we determined how big of a tank we could get remember bigger
is better. Gamer Girl and I immediately started looking into what types of fish we could fit in it
as you probably guessed she's very attracted to GloFish so we started doing some research on black
skirt tetras and zebra danios so basically I was online on the computer she was sitting behind me
and I looked up kind of the top five articles on each of the animals and as you can see the general
consensus on the Internet is zebra danios can go in a 10 gallon tank and black skirt tetras in a 15
gallon tank this is what is so hard about telling beginners to do their due diligence and research
online first because a lot of the times internet can be wrong so how can you tell I even pulled you
guys to see what GloFish you thought could fit in a 15 gallon tank and this is what you said
thankfully in the comments many of you mentioned there are new
species available as GloFish now so this is what Gamer Girl decided
oh what is this so it's a picture of all the fish I want okay why don't
you tell me first about the GloFish x-ray tetras why do you want them
but they have a stripe and the color is cool like the rainbow colors yeah yeah what about the Julii
cory catfish why did you pick those I like them because they are silver with stripes it fits in
pretty good and so why do you want a mystery snail because they're very colorful there's so
many colors of them yeah what color do you want to get green purple blue red or yellow and tell
me about all this research that you did what did you write first how big each creature gets
I first wrote down how what the size say and then what did you write
the Fahrenheit of the temperature the temperature how warm the water has to be and then what did
you write as if I write this the pH and then what's the last category tank the tank size yeah
that's very good so are they all compatible with each other uh I think so yeah good job you did
really good research thank you thank you after that I called a bunch of the local pet stores
and fish stores to see what availability they had for these fish because nobody's got time to
drag little kids around from store to store all of the pristella tetra GloFish at Petco
looked pretty healthy and active they all had the slightly rounded bellies that we want to
see so we ended up bringing home a school of six — two of each color. We were also going
to get the mystery snail at the same time but I was surprised to hear the Petco employees stop
us and say maybe we should wait a week or two to let the biological filtration catch up. My
usual acclimation process is to basically just float the fish bag in the aquarium for about 20
minutes so that it matches the temperature inside the tank and then I just pour out all of the fish
store water in case it's kind of gross or icky and then I put the fish directly into the tank
since this is a brand new tank with brand new fish I could basically quarantine them in the 15 gallon
Cube and I personally like to use preventative medications kind of like vaccinating a new cat
or dog that comes home so that I can get rid of any of these really common diseases that
fish tend to bring home from the store so things like ink or tapeworms I use Maracyn which is a
broad spectrum antibiotic ParaCleanse for internal parasites and then Ich-X for a fungus and external
parasites if you want to see how that's done I've got the link down in the description below
a week later we went to another store our local fish store and we got a blue mystery snail named
Snowy and I just flopped them directly into the tank with the tetras I don't tend to quarantine
invertebrates just because they don't tend to share a lot of the same diseases as vertebrates
like fish the local fish store also had a school of the false julii corys that we were looking for
so this time I actually printed out a list of questions for Gamer Girl to ask the store
employee so that we could check you know are they healthy and doing well how long have you had them
are they wild caught or captive bred you know I've had problems with that before in the past
and in this case everything worked out okay but if anything had if the fish had looked bad or if I
didn't like the answers to any of the questions we would have left and looked somewhere else
now because I had already begun the quarantine process in the 15 gallon tank I can't now get new
fish and then put them into the same tank halfway through the quarantine process because then they
won't have gone through the same medications right so I ended up setting a separate 10 gallon
quarantine tank and then did the same three medications I talked about before. Once the
tetras completed there four weeks of quarantine and then the corydoras finished their four weeks,
I was able to take all the Cory catfish and then add them into the 15 gallon main display tank and
the reason why we want to do this every time you get new fish to quarantine them separately for — I
personally do it for four weeks — is because we want to observe them make sure they're acting
healthy they're eating well they're not displaying any kind of weird symptoms like this you know
white spots on them or they're not acting weird and they're all huddled up in a corner because if
you add those new sick fish basically to your main tank now everybody's gonna get sick and you don't
want to spread that disease around you don't have to do anything special for the quarantine setup in
fact I usually use a clear plastic container as my quarantine setup and I've made a simple tutorial
over here on how I do it as well as how exactly I dose the prophylactic medications that I use
unfortunately I ran into some unusual issues while quarantining the false
Julii corydoras so I'm gonna say that for another video for those of you who are
interested hope you will take time to enjoy your aquariums and I'll see in the next video