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

I first got into fish when I moved off to college. I took a single male betta with me, you see. He lived in a small tank, so naturally I was like, "I want to give you more room." I put him, his name was Archer, into a 10 gallon. He looked lonely, so I bought him some gravel. Then I dropped a few aponogeton bulbs in (Walmart, $2). Well, if you are familiar with aponogetons, they are some of the fastest growing plants you could ever get. That bulb shooted up into a plant in a week. Every day I could see a change. It was fascinating.

Well, the fascination started. I moved on to a tank with a betta and two female swordtails and a male swordtail. They looked too crowded in there. So when I saw a 55 gallon tank on craigslist for $25, I was like, "!" ... "mine!" and bought it. I had to decorate that 55 gallon tank, you see, so I gave the swordtails and betta some plants, and then the plants had to have the proper substrate, so I started learning about rooted plant growth and settled on kitty litter, and then the plants had to have lights and CO2. . .

Well. Then I got snails, from my plants. And then I got assassin snails, water fleas, and other watery tagalongs. But then I got leeches. Grr. And I tried raising the salt content (turned the tank not only brackish, but to full salt water. You could see wavy light when you stirred the water, lol). But the leeches still did not die! They! Had! Babies! So, instead of going down the track of chemical warfare on those goshforsaken leeches (I was all ready, with the Levamisole HCl), I looked at my plants and my invertebrates and decided to try a different track instead. I didn't want to wipe everything out. So I looked into loaches. Too big. I looked into cichlids. Perfect, nice and small. I joined the OCA to get some Neolamprologus multifasciatus, thinking they'd eat leeches.

But then I saw darters on aquabid one day. They're so cool! The way they sit their backside on something and then prop themselves up with their little arm/fin things. And look at you, defiantly. And so the native fish love began. It turns out there's all this stuff you can collect. Bettas come from Thailand and swordtails come from central america. So what interesting things could be living in our waters? I went to Japan and saw Giant Salamanders. I watched videos on Lake Tanganyika and the shell dwelling colonies that live there. I've seen angelfish pounce upon unsuspecting neon tetras from their murky vertical stalked plant hiding spaces in the Amazon River system. But what's living in my own backyard? I had no idea.
So I looked up darters. And I found out. And I'm glad I did.

I keep fish because it's nice to have something to love. I can't have a cat or a dog, my friendships are transitory, and I was recently severed from everyone I knew and loved and packaged up and sent away to an unfamiliar environment like a parcel. My life is not by any means comforting, and I have to move to a new residence every eight months. Everything I own. Goes to a new place. With new people who do not care about me. So I take my fish with me. I experiment with them, trying to keep them as comfortable and happy and natural-environment as I can. When they breed, it makes me happy. It tells me that they are living full lives, just as they would if they hadn't been tampered with. They, at least, are secure in this strange transitory lifestyle that I have, where nothing is constant. And it's true; nothing is constant. Today is the last day at my internship, and Sunday I'm packing up everything I own and moving back to campus, saying goodbye to all the nice people I've met while I worked here and going off to a strange new dorm room with strange new classes, teachers, and class mates. But my fish are coming with me, and they will be happy, and eating and breeding and living just as they always do. So I'll be happy, too.

That's why I keep my fish. *sniffles*

Edited by Okiimiru, 13 August 2010 - 12:23 PM.

Now wait a minute Oki: So you've only been keeping fish a couple years? You've learned more about fish, behavior, disease, plants, lighting, filters, cation exchange capacity, etc, etc in those couple years than I did in 40. I also traveled back and forth during college years (MA to NC) with various fish, maroon-bellied conure, gold tegu, and savannah monitor (arranged with Zoo Dept to keep the lizards). Fortunately I had tanks/cages left at home so only the animals had to travel, not tanks & cages. I caught a few killies and baby bullheads as a kid with a butterfly net on family outings to MA/CT lakes and beaches, but I never used a seine until I got to college and took classes with Joe Bailey, John Lundberg, Henry Wilbur, Dan Livingstone.

Okiimiru, I think it's interesting that you got into native fish by buying them. It sounds like you went about learning the same way I did, by reading everything I could get my hands on. I like to be prepared before I start something. I was also lucky enough to have somebody reliable to help and advise me when I got into trouble.

Now wait a minute Oki: So you've only been keeping fish a couple years? You've learned more about fish, behavior, disease, plants, lighting, filters, cation exchange capacity, etc, etc in those couple years than I did in 40.

Aw, shucks. *blushes* Well, I still kill 'em often enough. There's always more to learn. But yeah, my 55 gallon tank celebrated its one year anniversary three months ago.

I learned so quickly by hanging out on yahoo answers in the fish section and reading the questions. If there was a question I didn't know the answer to, it got me curious, so I'd look up the answer using google. And then I'd answer it.

Okiimiru, I think it's interesting that you got into native fish by buying them. It sounds like you went about learning the same way I did, by reading everything I could get my hands on.

Yup, I'm a book worm.

And yes, I did purchase my darters instead of wading and collecting them. Before I joined NANFA, I was actually against wild fish capturing because I thought lifting them out of the water and poking them was cruel. (the CWRU ichthyology class goes "sampling" and messes with fish for kicks. Those poor fish. They shock the whole river. A lot.). But I guess if you take the fish home and give them a life just the same as they would have had in the wild, but with less of the getting eaten by predators part, then it's not mean to go out and collect them.

I still don't feel right about collecting a species that can't breed in aquariums, though. That's why I can't keep most saltwater fish.

I've come a long way, though. This week I'm going collecting for the first time, with someone who took the ichthyology class and learned how to use a seine.

Edited by Okiimiru, 13 August 2010 - 02:58 PM.

I must say, i do enjoy this thread. such a wide range of how we all got started in this hobby.

When I was very young my mother kept a lot of tanks, exotics. Mostly what I remember about them is how relaxing the water sounds were and some of the excitement when they got certain fish and some aquatic frogs. I spent most of my time outside though, exploring the woods. Spent many hours on my knees next to a creek with my nose a few inches from the water trying to see everything there. At that time I could even see microscopic bugs, including amoebas, without any magnifying glass. About the time I was 8 I got Peterson Field Guide to Snakes from somewhere and fell in love with snakes. Up until then I was intensely interested in learning details about any critter I could imagine interesting questions about, but snakes started my pet keeping. By this time all my mothers fish were gone and many of the leaky aquariums made excellent snake cages.

My parents tried to discourage my snake hunting and told me all sorts of horror stories about snakes, but by this time I could often identify snakes by the sound they make crawling through leaves. They told me about a supposed common king snake that was highly territorial, aggressive, and poisonous that would chase my mother out of a berry patch some years before. Little did they know that I could only dream of finding such a snake and telling the world. Though with what I knew about snakes I could probably come close to saying what really happened, which did not involve poisonous king snakes but no intentional lies either. Then one day I caught an Eastern Glass Snake (legless lizard) and walked up on the porch with it while my dad was fixing the screen door. He looked up and said: "Johnny, what have I told you about catching snakes!?" I said: "This is not a snake, it is a lizard." I turned its head toward him and said: "See, it blinks." Never heard another word about catching snakes .

About the following year I started reading some of my mothers old aquarium books and informed my parents I wanted an aquarium. I think they hoped it would get me off snakes, but I wanted to learn about these fish I could not find locally. Mostly danios, zebras, and neons with some angels at one point. After about a year the tropicals were gone, so I took some window screens, which never stayed on the windows anyway, place them in the edge of the pond and waited till after dark to go back and lift it. It always came up loaded with fish that was very difficult to catch during the day. I had previously spent many hours after dark with a flashlight on my knees watching these fish. This is how I figured the window screen might be a good way to catch them. This is when my tank first became a native tank and, except for a few that would die pretty quick, they did better than the tropicals ever did.

About the time I was 10 I remodeled the barn in back with stuff from the junk pile. It was cool, it had power, a flat sunporch on the roof where I often slept, and a front yard fenced in with corrugated metal sheets. No gate, I just stepped over the fence. My aquarium was moved down there along with lots of snake tanks, old refrigerators used as holding tanks, rat and mice tanks, box turtles in the front yard along with toads. A nightlight over the yard drew bugs that I could sit and watch the toads munch on. Snakes started coming to me, including a black racer that was my favorite at the time. It was my private zoo.

Once I reached my teenage years I started being choosier about what I kept, and as I got older I started opting more for providing habitats to get stuff to come to me rather than keeping them for pets. I love the sound of the frogs singing outside my front door as I write this, and the green anoles hunting the bushed around them. I am not put off in the least if I wake up with a snake in by bed either. I love natives for the very fact that they are part of the same environment I am, and I can watch and learn what makes them tick. But now I want to try to put some of the things I have learned in practice and learn from that, and keeping some native fish plays into that. Not to mention the fact that fish cannot come to me. So I want more than just to keep them, I want to try to provide a fully functional ecosystem for them. So there is no real hurry in collecting them as yet, their environment comes first. I am still happy with a flashlight and nose next to the water just watching what goes by.

That makes Mywan a very interesting fellow.

Well it's not natives, but it's fish which led me to ichthyology.

When I turned 3 my babysitter took me to a local reservoir and taught me how to catch small bluegill and what not. So, after I became obsessed since my family didn't fish(my older brother did a little though) I had to learn on my own, which I believe facilitated my learning. When I was 4 years old I already owned my own rods and reels, I was using a '7 Shakespeare Ugly Stick combo. So when my family and I were in Ohio visiting my Aunt, my cousin took my to a small dam on the Muskingum river and I threw out chicken liver and worms and landed my first catfish, a 2 pound channel. I kept returning and catching cats, and one day when I was 9 years old I was using a '9 rod with a 8000 size spinning reel and 80 pound Power Pro(about 300 yards) I snagged something massive while bringing in my bait, it ended up spooling me. I assume it was a paddle fish or gulf sturgeon.

I am 64 now but I still remember when I was 7 years old and walking through the overgrown vacant lot which at that age was a jungle with ragweed a lot taller than I was. I came across a log and was climbing over it and all of a sudden I saw these two garter snakes (did not know what they were when I was 7 but still remember what they looked like today) poised on a branch and looking right at me. I turned tail and ran as fast as I could back to the the edge of the lot and then, I could not resist - I went back to see them again. From that moment on in my life I was an observer, collector and raiser of anything I could get in a jar or cage or wash bucket. Frogs, caterpillars (learned early that certain types like certain plants and what they changed into), tad poles, fish when I went fishing with my Dad, snakes, turtles, etc... If it looked ugly, dangerous, colorful or interesting I was studying it.

When I got to High school, and my first true biology class I was flaber ghasted. This teacher actually got paid for doing what I had done all my life for fun. I knew at that moment I had to go to university and get a biology degree. I ended up taking every undergrad class I could handle and then went into the grad classes cause I ran out of undergrad classes. Finally, got a BS in Zoology and minor in Botany and when I graduated that was when I actually asked the question - now what am I going to do with this degree. I had actually not thought of that until then as I was having too much fun. During my school years I had through my capturing and observations actually extended the state range maps and found small pocket populations of some species. Funny that someone talked about crayfish. I remember them being everywhere. There was a pond where I could put a piece of bacon on it and throw it in the water and catch crayfish all day long one after the other. That pond was in pretty poor condition too. Not so today. Where did all the crayfish go? Same for several species. I used to see lots then, even in towns but not now. Feels empty compared to what I saw back in the 50s and 60s. It could be I was simply a lot closer to the ground back then and saw more but I don't know.

Raising fish began for me in high school. I had several ten gallon tanks and always kept them near the window so the light would make the plants grow. Did some collecting locally too when I saw a rainbow darter the first time in a muddy brown water puddle in a creek. I thought what the hell was that red and blue thing? Later got married and kept a lot more tanks. I think the most I had was eight 10 gallon tanks a 30 gallon and a home made 50 gallon. Then I went to Florida and snorkeled all day and caught lots of saltwater stuff. Next trip I had battery powered air stones and foam boxes in my back seat and brought back enough to fill 5 10 gallon tanks that I had started before I left on the trip.

Well, that is the brief of it but it occupied a good portion of my life. Then things settled down. Got kids and we all had a lot of fun catching and raising lizards. Everybody is grown now and I just retired in 2010. I have dusted off my old hobbies and things are starting to look new again. I feel like a kid that has no longer the need for adult supervision and I can do what I want.

Usil

Edited by Usil, 07 September 2011 - 09:07 PM.

I started when myself and another fourth grader decided to stop beating each other up and become best friends. His favorite hobby was stompin around in creeks and streams and catching anything he could get with his hands, net, or on a hook. This fast became my favorite hobby, though I was never as fast with my hands as he was. Our favorite stomping ground became a section of the Little Salt Creek south of Effingham, IL. We would, as most, ride a couple miles out on country roads, to ATV trails, to beaten paths, and spend whole days (sometimes longer) just enjoying the beautiful section of the creek.

This particular part of the Little Salt Creek was very unusual for the Effingham area (and generally the Central Illinois area). In a mile stretch under the small expanse of deciduous forests, it had a curious amount of terrain changes. On the east side of the creek, rocky 20ft cliffs rose, alternating with rocky hillsides. The west side was marked by scattered openings in the trees, making small grassy flats. The stream itself had a sandy bottom, giving way to gravel in some places, and by the cliffs it was mostly flat pieces of shale and sandstone. It went from quick, narrow shallows and wide riffles to deep pools.

Our first priority was always herping. We caught ratsnakes, garters, northern watersnakes, rough greens, and ringnecks. We caught several species of toads, frogs, and the occasional slimy salamanders. We caught fence lizards and lined skinks. It was quite the area for herping.

We had our fair share of fish, though. I had dealt with reptiles and amphibians before, but I had never been introduced to native fish other than game fish and the fish you use as game fish bait. Out of this creek we caught at least two species of darter including orange throat darters and possibly rainbow darters (they all got called johny darters at the time) and at least one species of madtom. We caught small iridescent sunfish which were probably longear, but we called them rock bass. We caught creek chubs in our pantlegs on more than one occasion. We also caught what I would estimate as at least another dozen species of minnow or other schooling fish.

Really it was the darters that did it for me. I'll never forget their colors even if I never see one in the flesh again. I regularly inform people that we have more impressive fish in the streams we pass daily than what's in the tanks at their local pet store. I was a tropical keeper before I started spending my summers in creeks. I hardly even glance at tropic fish or setups anymore.

Josh H

it has been a joy reading all of the different angles on how each of us got started with native fish!
thank you to all that have shared a little piece of your past.





it's a two part story
1- were did all the crawfish go.
2-share a time frame from your past.

Share if you will what got you started in
the ways of the Outdoors and Captive Care.
for myself it was the
"The Lowly Crawfish And The Muddy Creek Gang"
A memory of days gone by.
other Boys were playing Baseball or Cowboys and Indians
but not our gang we had a fort by the local creek
were we made our club house
with a pond in the center
hand dug by the Muddy Creek Gang
In those days we had little concern for the value of Life.
One of the rules to be a gang member
Was to eat a live Crawfish
Plus you had to have a 5 gal Bucket
A Hand Made Net
A Red Ryder BB Gun
And Sling Shot hand made of course.
and no girls allowed.
Now on to the point of this thread.
In those days we would catch 4 or 5 different kinds of Crawfish some had small claws others
had robust claws for fighting some stayed small all year yet others got to almost 6" in size
now a days in the same area these creeks/streams have one maybe two kinds of crawfish
I wonder what has changed is it dirty water or maybe a more aggressive transplant.
this lowly crawfish set me on a path of the outdoor way of life
with out this little mudbug in my past I may have been a whole different person
so with this said I tip my hat to the lowly crawfish and its sacrifice
for this rite of passage in my past.
one of the lords stewards of the outdoors.
Just trying to keep his fish alive

Tony

Crayfish:
I mentioned about the crayfish in my story. I was very young, say about 5 or 6 and my Dad used to take us to the Soldiers and Sailors home that had a pond in it. I used to tie bacon to a piece of string and throw it in along with lots of my friends and we would all catch dozens of crayfish within an hour. We would just wait till the line moved and pick it up and there would be 1 or 2 crayfish holding on. This was a pond that was not pristine and certainly as like any pond I have seen today. Just today, I don't see the crayfish.

I have also been walking along clear creeks in the 60's and 70's and observed crayfish walking along the bottom of the stream. I never see them today.

Ponds and creeks still exist. Where did they all go to?

Usil

Edited by Usil, 10 September 2011 - 03:30 AM.

i might as well share my story. it all goes back to my brothers turtle...

about 22 years ago, when i was four, my older brother saw a small turtle for sale for like a dollar at a local flea market and wanted one, so my parents got him one and went and got an old ten gallon to keep it in. they put sand on the bottom and piled it up on one side so that it sloped into the shallow water. after a while of feeding it some kind of floating pellet, i started to see tiny red worms in the sand. they would wave left and right, almost like wheat in a field. i thought they were waving at me it wasnt long before i was spending more time with my brothers turtle than he was.

i remember spending a lot of time looking at those worms, wondering what they were. i thought they were plants, but i had never seen a plant that suddenly vanishes when you touch it. eventually, i stirred the sand up to try to see what they looked like, even the part that was in the sand. i was fascinated by the way they wiggled and then crawled on the sand.

when i asked my dad about them, he told me they were worms and that they were probably there because the tank was messy. he also told me that he used to feed them to fish "way back in the day". two years later, still being fascinated by them and having played with them quite a bit(and asking my dad lots of questions), i got my parents to buy a fish so that i would be able to feed them to something. i wanted to find a use for the little guys. i kinda felt like i had money but nothing to spend it on.

it wasnt long before i wanted another fish, but i had a betta. my dad told me that you couldnt put two males together, but got me a female. i was eight then, and i had figured out that i could keep the worms alive if i just left them alone in their own tank. i still thought they just popped up out of nowhere, and hadnt thought about feeding them. i had been keeping my beta(old man by then) in the tank with the worms. the turtle had been moved to a larger tank, which never had worms in it. i fed the betta some type of fish food, cant remember what.

anyway, my dad gets the female betta as well as some type of stem plant. elodea? not sure. what i do remember is taking the fish and putting it in a pickle jar and floating it in the tank with the betta. nobody told me about acclimation or anything, my eight year old brian just thought they should have time to get to know each other first. for about three hours i sat and talked to both of them, admonishing the male for flaring at the female, telling the female that she didnt have to be shy when she put her head down, etc etc.

i went to go eat dinner and turned the lights out. when i came back, they seemed to me(at the time anyway) to be behaving a lot better, so i released her into the tank. what funny is that for all the attention i paid them while the female was in the jar, my sleepy little self just released her, turned the lights out, and went to bed. it wasnt untill i came home from school the next day that i saw the eggs(the male always had a bubble nest... never knew what it was for). i ran around the house yelling that my Bluefish and Redfish(yea, i was origional back then ) had babies.

eventually, my father informed me that the parents would kill each other and eat the babies if i didnt seperate them. so i moved them into pickle jars and left the babies in the tank. the male died soon after(old age? water quality? dont know...). the fry survived quite for the first couple weeks, and then i started losing them. i would try to do a head count and noticed that i kept counting fewer and fewer each time. i freaked out, thinking that the worms might be eating them, so i stirred them up and tried to remove them. i eventually saw the fry eating some of the smalles worms, so i made that a daily practice. i would pick a small portion of the tank and stirr the sand up to send the worms wriggling. i managed to raise 20 or so to adulthood, out of the hundred plus that i started with. lots and lots of plants and that magic little red worm...

ive been hooked ever since. the biggest part of the hobby for me is finding foods that i can grow that can keep fish happy, in much the same way as i did when i was a boy: by complete accident.

I've been keeping tropicals since I was 5, and fishing since I was 9 or 10. As a kid my fishing buddy and I would spend nearly every summer day in Philadelphia's Pennypack Park. He would stop by my house on the way, and while riding our bikes the mile and a half to the park we'd decide if we wanted to go fishing, or if we wanted to catch fish. Catching fish was usually pretty easy if you didn't mind sitting out in the sun on either side of the dam and fish the eddy pool along the bank, as Sunfish, Carp and Bullheads were all plentiful and looking for whatever came over the falls. But there was a really sweet fishing spot a quarter mile upstream that was shady and had a rock sticking out of the ground that acted as a natural fireplace, but we rarely caught anything there. Anyway I digress, because we were out to catch fish one day, and were getting skunked for once. When we decided to give up, I reeled in my line and suddenly I had a fish on. It didn't take long to get a good enough look to realize that I had no idea what was on the end of my line! When I got it up, I saw a long,thin brown fish with a few markings on the side and some nice ruddy red fins. I knew by looking at it that it was a Pike/Pickerel of some kind, but at the time I was only aware of the big 3 so to speak, the Pike members commonly considered gamefish. I also noticed when I removed that I hadn't actually caught it, but rather had snagged it perfectly under its chin! We checked it out for a while, speculating as to what it actually was, and let it go. The next day I went to the library (this was too long before the internet to mention) and using a field guide ID'ed it as a Redfin Pickerel. Ever since then I've just had a passion for learning about fish of all kinds. This incident also started a long running friendly disgreement with the current head ranger at the park, who when I related this story to him told me categorically that Redfins had never been found in the Pennypack watershed in any official survey. We went back and forth on each other for a couple of years, until one day he came up to me and said they had just shocked one several miles upstream from where I caught mine 30 years before! Now if I could just find another one.........

Subrosa, well done on the story.

i really enjoy looking back on the timeline of someones story.
this is a very good posting idea IMO.

im only 13 now, but when i was younger 6-7, my family always went to this one place on vacation where their was a creek and lots of crayfish, we still go there and i have been hokked with the idea of catching my own fish and keeping them since.