this is not a story of me going into Petco to get some cat food and then impulsively buying
an aquarium full of fish no when my friend saw that my toddler son really liked her aquarium
she offered to buy him a betta fish and i said hmm let me do some research and i ended up buying it
a filter a heater and the biggest better tank i could find hi my name is Irene with girl talks
fish and after i got bitten by the betta bug i basically needed to get more fish and i decided
what would fit would be a 20 gallon community tank so basically fish that are peaceful and
can live with each other but there are so many options when you go to the pet store
or oh my goodness the local fish store how do i know i'm making the right choices they're gonna
be compatible with each other be able to live in the same environment so i had already suffered my
first untimely fish death by this point my goal as a beginner was to cram as much fish knowledge
as possible into this brain and avoid making any more mistakes first came the incredibly
long research phase not necessarily by choice but because i was kind of gradually over the course
of two months buying an aquarium here going to craigslist getting an aquarium stand there
slowly collecting the heater and all the equipment i needed and during that time every time i'd go
to the pet store i would see some new fish that i'd never seen before and i would go home google
it and then i kept an excel spreadsheet and record down things like what is the minimum tank size and
number of fish that need to be in a school the temperature you know that kind of thing
i guess YouTube quickly figured out that i was looking for fish care guides and so it started
just popping up all of these species profiles into my home page and that's how i found out about a
lot of different species i had again never heard of but now i'm like oh i want this i want that you
know and i would collect all that information and then put it in the excel spreadsheet
once i had amassed all this information now it was time to start filtering out fish based on kind of
my needs so obviously i'm trying to put them in a 20 gallon aquarium community tank so they need to
be able to fit in this tank size and get along with everyone and then i heard a good piece of
advice was to try to get fish some fish that will swim at the top level at the middle level
and at the bottom level of your tank so that you don't have kind of empty areas of your aquarium
so i thought okay that's a really good idea um another tip i found out online was also to not
get fish of all the same color so i feel like it's really easy to get maybe like all red fish or all
blue fish and you take them home and they really blend in together so i really wanted to make sure
okay these fish are of contrasting or kind of complementary colors on the on the color wheel
once i had figured out my list of fish that will swim at different levels of the tank and they have
different colors and don't all look the same then because i was a beginner you know i didn't know
how many fish that you could put in an aquarium i was told you know the forms were all yelling
at me saying don't go by the one inch per gallon rule and i'm like oh no what do i do so there is
a website called i'm probably not saying it right "Aq Advisor" aqadvisor.com which i feel like you
know again it's not comprehensive but i feel like it's a pretty good starting point at least for a
beginner you just enter in your tank size enter in your filter and then it will kind of give you
a percentage amount of how full your aquarium is and the goal is to not you know stay below 100%
capacity and then the final step of planning was basically kind of acting like an interior
decorator so i basically started off by sketching what the fish would look like in my aquarium and i
started off doing drawings at first with the different colors and trying to approximate
the sizes but then i quickly realized like oh you know every time i can make a troll like you know
if it's not the right fish i'm gonna have to erase it or solder over again so i just ended up taking
pictures off of the internet and then putting them into PowerPoint, Microsoft PowerPoint so i would
roughly approximate the size of the fish and then if aq advisor.com told me oh you can you need six
of these and 11 of these i would copy paste that many images and then move them around the tank and
then see which combo basically was the prettiest i would say um my kind of two limiting factors were
obviously what does it what looks good but also what was available at the pet and fish stores at
the time so i would kind of call around and find out hey you have this and that
and i was willing to drive quite a ways in order to get that perfect combination of my dreams
now after all this painstaking research i did can you spot some of the mistakes i made
i can already spot three off the top of my head so
for example let's go to this page over here where i tried to pair a betta fish
with von rio tetras now i have never actually personally kept von rio tetras before but after
many years of experience i can look at this combo and warning bells are already going off in my head
first of all if you've ever seen these tetras in the fish store they are super fast little buggers
and i suspect if i paired them with a long finned betta fish like i have in this picture
uh that betta would probably get out competed for food during meal times and anytime i dropped in
food the von rio tetra would eat up everything and the better wouldn't be too happy about it
the second red flag i see is actually something from a recent video i made about fin nipping
fish and that was from you guys when i was doing my research and i read all your comments i now
know that certain tetras such as von rio tetras can sometimes nip long finned or slower fish so
that would definitely be something i would have to watch out for if i were giving advice to past
newbie Irene i would probably tell her maybe consider getting a betta fish with shorter fins or
just like an entirely different centerpiece fish all together that has short bins and is super fast
another suspicious uh combination would be this one which i actually did try so the dwarf gourami
green neon tetras and albino corys and what i found out is not all dwarf gourami
males especially are community fish Peyton Manning is a flame dwarf gourami that i have had and he
relentlessly bullied and pecked at and chased by poor albino corys who are so derpy and
never hurt anyone so that was definitely a lesson learned because everything i looked
at said that dwarf gouramis were coming fish so okay internet is not always right
once i switched him out for Pikachu the honey gourami which tends to be a lot more peaceful
everybody was fine they were doing great until the cory catfish started having lots and lots
of babies and then the bioload or waste amount in the aquarium skyrocketed i was having to do
tons and tons of weekly water changes in order to get the nitrate levels down
and not you know poison the fish in their own waste and so i realized oh when Aq Advisor
says that something's at 100% capacity it's probably better to under stock my aquarium
and go you know like 75% capacity which is a really hard lesson for beginners to learn because
they want to see a tank full of pretty fish right not you know emptiness everywhere
unfortunately all that preparation did not ultimately save me from going through some
really painful but really valuable real world experiences um i definitely discovered that
wow just because somebody says something on internet does not mean it's true research is
not bulletproof and sometimes you just gotta test and see things for yourself in order to know
what's gonna work for your aquariums that being said talking to some really experienced veteran of
fish keepers has been a lifesaver for me so if you are feeling discouraged in the fish keeping hobby
don't give up you know i've put together kind of a short playlist of some of the foundational
beginner-friendly tutorials that i think will hopefully be really encouraging for you and help
you get on the right track take time to enjoy your aquariums and i'll see in the next video