"Share a story from your past that got you into native fish"

[quote name='Elassoman' date='Feb 14 2009, 05:47 PM' post='53930']
It is funny to see the similarities of most of our stories.

i agree with you boys will be boys as are tomgirl right.

One day he called me up from the pet shop excitedly: "THEY'VE GOT NATIVE FISH, CAN WE GET SOME?!!!"

Well, you're lucky - you've got rainbowfish for natives.

oh boy where do I start...

Well a guess to start with me, I am a native Wisconsinite. So, I have spent probably 1/4 of my childhood "Upnort" ...(thats a secret place we go on the weekends ha ha ) Anyway, most of my life I have been hangin out with my father, who taught me most of the basics when it came to fishing, hunting, hiking and what not...Over the yrs we would enter into local fishing tourneys, fish common lakes and some not so common....In time I came into my own styles and preferences and such...I am a very basic fisherman...I like things simple...I dont own a boat but have 3 tourney trophies all of which came from a rented 14' Aluminum with a 9.9 on back...More often than not I like to just grab my small box and pole and I hike it...to me there is something about walking in the woods and finding that perfect shore spot that no one has been to in yrs...and you can always tell how often its used by the crap the idiots leave behind...But fortunately, my beloved Menominee River is huge and offers alot of places for me to explore...And like I said before, my setup is simple...a small box with some hooks and sinkers, pliers, couple Johnson silver minnows and a couple floating jointed rapalas...My pole has always been an ugly stick with a $12 zebco 33 ha ha...
So, one day I was walking thru this Pet Shop in Appleton with mt daughter...just burning time and showing her some fish....and there was this tank that had little 6" Northerns in it....I said "are you sh***ing me?" ...I, at the time, didnt know they could sell those there...Or it never crossed my mind....I talked to the guy and he basically said all I needed was a license and whatever I had would count towards my bag limit as long as I had it...(There is prolly more to it, but how often does the DNR come door to door?) So, I plopped down my cash and bought a setup and the fish....since then I have been hooked! To me, in my own opinion, having gamers is rewarding....I have had goldfish and "standards" before and they are so boring compared to gamers...And like many might agree, they seem to all have different personalities! Ya know what I mean? Like knowing when its time to eat, "playing" around the tank actively, etc....I dont know, Its just different....Since then I have had a northern, a tiger muskie, bluegill, crappie, LMB and SMB's, sunfish and perch...Cant say I have been successful with all as I have had a few "learning curve casualties" ha ha (like forgetting the cage off my filter inlet and having a crappie sucked up the tube and having the face ground off in the impeller) But it comes with all new territory I guess ha ha...But its nice to try to recreate the northern habitat and watch the native fish, especially after a long day in the city and I cant be "Upnort" ....it gives me a lil Peace

thanks to all for sharing your memories from days gone by!

I have always been fascinated by nature and wildlife. As a kid I loved running through fields catching grasshoppers and watching birds. I also enjoyed fishing, my father got me into it at an early age. I went to college and got a BA in biology. What got me into the idea of keeping natives (which is something I have thought about for a while as it is where fishing meets observing wildlife) was a friend who kept a large Jack Dempsy that he fed moths and crickets. That cichlid looked and acted so much like a sunfish I reallty wanted to get an actual sunfish. Which is why I first came here wanting sunfish before i got hooked on darters.

I grew up in Allentown, PA, and a childhood friend and I got into aquarium keeping at roughly the same time. During a summer drought, we noticed large numbers of fish trapped in pools in the nearly-empty Jordan Creek. We grabbed nets from home, filled up our garage-sale 5 gallon tanks and fired up some corner bubbler filters. He ended up with some Fundulus diaphanus, I ended up with johnny darters and baby bullheads. The bullheads were hilarious - every day, I swore they must have jumped out of the tiny, nearly-bare tank, but they would magically appear at dinnertime.

My fish were all returned to the creek by autumn, to make room for more exotic stuff, but a few years later I saw some Heterandria formosa and that was it. I was a die-hard NA fish enthusiast.

Edited by lampeye, 06 July 2009 - 12:58 PM.

anyone else care to share a time from there past?

Hmmmm. Well I used to go frog catching a LOT. All the time, and I mean ALL the time. I would try to catch minnows at the beach, but deep down I was a reptile/amphibian nut. One day while catching frogs at the lake, I realized there were many kinds of fish at the beach I usually went to. I hate to admit it but many were the fish that died in my pails and tanks before I learned to oxygenate the water. I just thought that pet store fish were pets, and native fish died if they came out of the wild. Finally I kept some rock bass for about a year, and the habit stuck. I learned that there were far more fish all arouond me than pike and walleye and other common game fish. And they were a lot closer than I thought. This summer I caught a YOY burbot barely 5 minutes from my house. Another year we had a bit of a carp infestation in town. All the ditches were teeming with small carp. Bizarre. Its these kinds of instances that keep the interest going for me. I never know what to expect. You go into a pet store and you know that you will see goldfish, tetras, and cichlids every time. You go to a nearby creek and you might find darters one day, shiners another, sunfish the year after.....

and i was always busted for watching "minnows" while fishing.

When I was in high school, I would always go to this lake by my house in southern NJ to fish or study the herpetofauna. My uncle got me a minnow trap, which I'd set up and catch baby bluegill. I don't know how it came about, but one day I had the realization that I could catch some baby bluegill, put them in a tank, and keep them. So I did just that. Sadly, I knew next to nothing about fish at the time, other than how to properly introduce them to a tank. I never could get them to feed on prepared foods(I even let white bread float in the tank...which may have did them in?) and wasn't persistent in collecting scuds from the pond for food, and they died in about 2 weeks.

At that time I just about gave up on fishkeeping. My experience before that was a tropical fish tank that lasted less than a week, and losing pet goldfish after thinking I needed to perform a full tank cleaning(didn't know about partial water changes). The only fish I had after that was a Betta who lived for about 2 years.

Then entered senior year of college(August 2009). I had a new student for a roommate and he rekindled my interest in fishing. I had 6 tarantulas, a colony of hissing roaches, and other various inverts at the time. I eventually got into crayfish within a month, and had a tank set up for them....a small 2.5 gallon kritter keeper. My roommate liked the tank and suggested I get baby bass or bluegill for the tank....and at first I was reluctant to do so. We tried collecting more crayfish with a minnow trap baited with a bluegill that died from swallowing a hook. The first time we checked it, we found two, tiny bluegill that were just under an inch long each. I figured what the heck, the fish were so darn small I may as well try keeping them. I added them to the tank, separated them because they fought, and swapped the airstone I originally had with a small filter. I got freeze dried bloodworms, but the bluegill always spit them back out, so I collected scuds and other small aquatic invertebrates from the pond of origin to feed it(the other bluegill went in my roommate's 5 gallon tank, where it showed the resident male betta who's boss by nipping the fins). The bluegill were so much fun I decided to try more fish, and now I have a bluegill, green sunfish, and banded killifish.

do not feel bad about all of the fish you kept as a youngster that expired
I think it is just part of growing up one must see and live past this stage of life
in order to grow up and live in the stage your are now in.
if you read the others posts most if not all of us have been there!

Edited by CATfishTONY, 03 January 2010 - 09:59 AM.

maybe one or some of these posts could be filler work for or AC MAG,

I grew up on the Perkiomen creek in eastern Pennsylvania. I spent most of my time by the creek moving rocks looking for critters. The Perkiomen is a good trout & small mouth bass fishery. Rock bass are common. I used to catch hellegramites, eastern red salamanders, black nosed dace, long nose dace, tesselated darters, cutlip minnow, creek chub & banded killifish. There was another minnow species I dont know the name of. After our developement did some creek work the one year, I hadnt seen a killi there again. I wrote the fish commission and our development got fined since it did cause a fish kill. Our fishing holes were also swimming holes & it'd be fun to monitor our trout population while snorkling. My brother was in charge of watching me but in the 80's little brothers werent cool, so basically the creek was my baby sitter so he could go with his friends while mom slept (worked 3rd shift & dad was a trucker & not home most of the time). I was always dragging something home to try to keep.

interesting i did not have time to properly take care of my siblings because i was in the creek playing.

I love reading all the stories!!
I vaguely remember keeping a couple goldfish - family pets, not mine really - when I was a kid, but mainly I started in college. My freshman year, the coolest bio professor in the world let us play with all his "pets" the last day of the semester, and one of them was a giant millipede. I decided I wanted a giant millipede, he/she was big, cool, ate greens, didn't need much room, and the legs felt funny when it crawled on my arm. Dr. Crowell said I probably couldn't in a dorm because other students would likely complain if they found out (sissies!). But the craving had started for a dorm-legal pet. Fish were legal, and my friends and I ALL got insane about fish all at the same time. We traded guppies and danios, carpooled 40 miles to Petsmart on Saturday nights, the works. I had a ten gallon with tropicals, a half-gallon with a crab, and a bowl with a betta, all in my very small single. I have had fish constantly since, about eight years now. I decided to delve into keeping natives just, uh, 48 hours ago, when I told my brother that I'd had my two big goldfish both die and thus had 60 gallons to play with, and he said, "Why don't you set up an Illinois tank?"
So now I'm here getting started!
Cecily

For me it started when I was 6 or 7. My parents always kept a couple of tanks around the house and I would go and fill them up with native catfish, tadpoles, minnows, and whatever else I could catch. My parents have a permanent image of me waist deep in water net and bucket in hand. Now I've moved beyond that, a bit at least. I study marine biology and am currently interning at an aquaculture facility. I've set up an aquaponics system and am looking into fish brooding. I still spend a few hours a day with a net and bucket in hand, only now I have seine and cast nets too. Life is good.

-Shackles

For me it started when I was 6 or 7. My parents always kept a couple of tanks around the house and I would go and fill them up with native catfish, tadpoles, minnows, and whatever else I could catch. My parents have a permanent image of me waist deep in water net and bucket in hand. Now I've moved beyond that, a bit at least. I study marine biology and am currently interning at an aquaculture facility. I've set up an aquaponics system and am looking into fish brooding. I still spend a few hours a day with a net and bucket in hand, only now I have seine and cast nets too. Life is good.

-Shackles

welcome to NANFA,
Good luck with your aquaculture setup.

I have been fishing for everything since I was really small, then last year I decided to build my mother a pond in the backyard as a surprise for her.I was tryin to figure out what I wanted to ut in the pond and I was highly considering natives. I then bough some goldfish the night before I was going to construct the pond and she went into my room and discovered, to her surprise a rubbermaid container with a dozen goldfish in it. I told her they were my new pets; as I didn't want to give away the secret of the planned pond and the next day she bought me a 20g tank (too small for a dozen goldfish) but then she discovered the pond and I had an empty fish tank. I decided to put a pumpkinseed in it. that's that.

I have always loved animals and am currently a Zoology major. I had fish on and off when I was younger. Bettas in those tiny containers and tiger barbs stuffed into a 5 gallon tank. While at college my fiance and I decided that we wanted pets so we went out and bought the largest tank we could have in the dorm (a whopping 10 gallons lol). We filled it with guppies and a couple cory catfish and went along happily. We ended up switching schools in December and being out of the dorms I upgraded to a 15 gallon tank that was given to me and put our goldfish into the 10 gallon tank.
Well not being able to have any other pets and always wanting to learn more about animals led to hours and hours of research. From there MTS (multiple tank syndrome) kicked in and I upgraded the fancy goldfish to a 29 gallon tank, got a 55 gallon tank that was first a South American tank and is now inhabited by Jack Dempseys (An electric blue male and a couple regular females. Hoping for a pair.) and a few other fish. The South American setup has been moved to my newest tank that is 120 gallons. The 15 still has guppies in it along with a few black kuhli loaches and the 10 gallon now has a betta. Somewhere along the lines I also got another 10 gallon tank where I am breeding cherry shrimp. I've had these setup for awhile and was fairly content with it (plus I'm outta room lol).
So that my journey into fish keeping in general lol. Recently I have been thinking about adding a new tank and wanted to do native fish. I have fished since I was really little and I love how sunfish and bass look, but I know I can't do a tank large enough for them right now. So while looking into different species of sunfish I discovered that there were pygmy sunfish that could be kept in smaller tanks. So begins my journey with North American natives

A long time ago in a land far far away (sounds like the beginning of Shrek ). Well maybe not "far far away", but definately a long time ago, I moved from Kansas City Mo to Springfield Mo to live with my father (Mom and Dad were divorced) and I had no friends and was severly depressed at being away from my old neighborhood (we had a movie theater,fast food joints, Papenfuses hardware, basketball courts and my old friends all within easy walking distance in the city) to Springfield where all that was less accessible. I would ride my bike looking for things to do and many times would end up at a creek that ran through the middle of Spfld Mo. looking at the fish that collected in the pools, and watching how they would interact with the crawdads and bugs swimming around. While down at the creek one day I saw a kid wading out into the middle of it catching crawdads, I went over to talk to him about the crawdads and fish and found out his name was Danny, and that he was new to Springfield too. Danny was from the Ozark hills and knew alot about fishing and catching and eating crawdads.....I being a city boy, did not, and we became fast friends. We soon met another kid named George who kept Oscars and would feed them crawdads out of the creek (I had only kept goldfish, and had only seen Oscars and other fish in a aquarium at the doctors office). I got the idea to try and keep several different natives in a small 10g fish tank my Dad had in the garage. Of course I knew nothing about water parameters, proper temps or food (I tried to feed the sunnies goldfish food) and they all died; but even though my fish had died......my love of fishkeeping was born. Later in life after years in the army (stationed from Cali to Washington DC) and a failed marriage I decided to get back into fishkeeping and kept some Convict Cichlids and Betta. Later I sold my convicts and Betta before a move so I could get some Oscars (fish I had wanted since childhood)I loved my Oscars and had them several years before we had an Icestorm caused poweroutage that killed my Oscars even though I put their tank about 5ft from a fireplace and put a minnow bucket aeriator in it (and yes I admit I cried). I went fishing several months after the Ice storm in a local lake and caught a Green Sunfish on a lure almost as big as it was. This gave me the idea of keeping Native Sunfish instead of Cichlids, doing research on my greens is what brought me from Monster Fish Keepers to Nanfa last year.

Edited by wargreen, 10 July 2010 - 07:07 PM.

Its really great to hear your stories; and welcome to NANFA Fatman, Shackles and Cecily.