Love of the hobby

[Paul B]

Getting into this hobby was easy for me. My family owned a seafood business and I grew up playing with dead fish so it was natural for me to start a tank. Of course at 2 or 3 years old I needed a little help.
On fridays my Dad would bring me to the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan which was the place that supplied seafood for all of New York.
The place was huge and the ships would dock there and the fish would be off loaded right into the street. There would also be huge sea turtles that were (unfortunately) destined to become soup.
Anyway, every once in a while in that mountain of fish you would find some small animal still alive like a crab, shrimp or even a seahorse.
My Dad would let me take those animals home and put them in some water. I only had fresh water so nothing lived more than a few hours but at least I got a taste of how amazing it was to actually take a living piece of the ocean and transport it to my home where I would stay up all night watching and probably trying to feed it.
I had more luck with the freshwater animals like catfish, eels and diamond back terripins. At least I could keep those animals alive.
In those days even a lot of the common freshwater fish we have now were not for sale.
I remember my facination when ever I would go to an aquarium store and see something new. Fish were originally sold in toy stores and called "toy fish"
There were no strictly aquarium stores because even the freshwater hobby was not common before WW2.
There were also no plastic bags so fish came in those little cardboard containers that Chinese take out places sell rice in.
When saltwater fish came out in 1971 I was in total awe and the only fish were blue devils. Imagine seeing a blue devil when for my entire life the only blue fish I ever saw was a blue gourami or a neon tetra. Blue devils blew my mind and I had to have them.
I would sit for hours starring at them just as I did when I was a todler looking at a dying crab in a glass of fresh water.
To this day I am still facinated by anything from the sea, especially something that I have never seen before. Thats the main reason I started SCUBA diving, that and finding lobsters. Now, at my age I have seen just about everything you can see related to the hobby but I still frequent stores in the hope I will find something new.
In a store I don't look at the dozens of yellow tangs, the schools of surgeon fish or the angels, I look behind the rocks and in sumps for the rare specimin that came in with other things and no one knows exactly what to call it. That is what I am looking for.
I have a few fish in my tank now that I don't know what they are and they are my favorites.
I am even more facinated by crustaceans. I put on my magnifying glasses and check out the shellfish (yes I look very wierd, it's a good thing I am married because this behaviour does not attract a lot of supermodels)
Hermit crabs are extreamly cool, they go to great lengths to get to obscure places looking for food even though they would probably do better just sitting on the bottom.
They hang up side down and seem to be struggling just to stay put. But I can see where they are coming from, we humans scale mountains just for the fun of it and do wierd things to attract a mate. They are such facinating creatures and so much more advanced than we are in certain traits.
I still have no idea how they find food but they find it all and never make a mistake. I have a bunch of them, I don't know how many but if I drop in a few pellets or a piece of clam and I see it on the gravel, in about 10 seconds I see all the hermit crabs change direction and head for the food. It will most likely be gone when they get there but how do thay do it? I doubt they see very well and the water in the tank is swirling all over the place. How do they know what direction it is? It goes right over my head and this is the stuff that keps me up at night.
I am amazed by all of this stuff. Why don't fish crash into the glass? It's their lateral line system but imagine having a radar system like that. A school of tangs can instantly dive into a stand of acropora coral and not one of those fish will get a scratch.
Maybe it's me but I love this stuff.
How do you people feel about this hobby? :high5:

 

[Frankie]

Great read Paul. It really brought me back home. I may not be as old as you (41) but i have similar memories of fulton st and finding the stuff that no one wanted. I saw my first star fish there! Your making me ache for ny lol! Though 76° today here in the south makes my bones happier ;-)
Tobay beach was my child hood. Sometimes Jones. I can still hear the transistor radios everone had back then and my mother yelling at me for playing with jelly fish in her tupperware. Lol! The movie Jaws is very similar to the times and why it is one of my favorite movies.
Once, the under tow got me and a life guard had to come out to get me. I had to have been pulled out half a mile or better that day.
I dont know who was more scared, my mother or the life gaurd!
Growing up in Syosset there was a lfs next to marios pizza on Jerico turn pike. The owner would charge a quarter to feed the sand sharks for us. He didnt last long and by 1979 i found one in hicksville that was good. By 1982 i had my first fish tank with an undergorund filter full of baby oscars. Man they grew fast!
Two years later, if you lived on long island and had oscars you can bet they came from me. My world revoled around school, avoiding my dads hand and getting a ride to the lfs to get rid of fish!
By 14 i would take my moped to the fish hatchery in cold spring harbor. Got chased out of there a lot!
My favorite place to be was oyster bay and catching flounders. Never kept any but would disect a few out of curiosity.
I guess no matter how hard life was, we all have good memories tucked away in our heads.
Thanks for sharing yours! They remind me of the good ones i tend to forget.

Frank

Sent from my SGH-T959V using Forum Runner

 

[Krish]

Living on an island surrounded by beautiful water my whole life and genuinely loving the ocean itself draws me to the hobby. When I hit the beach, I'm in the water with goggles on 95% of the time. I could stay there all day. Love it!! Also, I love catching fish for my tanks and just collecting stuff in general. Before I even had a saltwater tank, I would catch stuff just for the hell of it and then release them at the end of the day. Guess you can't help but to love the hobby living where I do.

 

[Paul B]

I also live on an Island but it is quite different from where you live Krish. I have been all through the Bahamas as well as most of the Caribbean and South Pacific. I love them all for different reasons. In the Bahamas I remember spending an hour throwing baby burrfish back into the sea as they were getting stuck on the sand at the surf line. In Aruba I remember watching beautiful copper sweepers hiding in overhangs in a foot of water. They are beautiful red fish with the shape of freshwater hatchet fish but I have never seen them in the hobby. The South Pacific is home to much larger animals like whales, manta rays and very numerous sharks, so numerous that it is hard to jump off a boat without hitting them.
Here on Long Island where I live we would not compare our water with the tropics as it is dark and the visability in the Sound where most of my dives are is measured in inches. It is usually about an arms length.
The diving here is very different from the tropics. In the Caymans with the strong current, there is no swimming involved. The current just carries you effortlessly over the reefs. St Lucia has fantastic wall dives that go down to 900 feet deep.
Martinique has underwater canyons with narrow passages that rise 60' on both sides of you.
New York waters are much different. We have much more life here than any tropical sea but you have a hard time seeing it.
Our ocean beaches on Long Island resemble the tropics with long wide sand stretching over 100 miles.
I find the beaches in the Long Island Sound much more interesting. The Sound is an estuary almost 80 miles long. It was formed by a glacier and the bottom is mud. Surrounding the entire Sound on the rocky beaches are huge boulders, some as big as my house. The bottom of the Sound is made of these things that were carried with the ice from the far north.
The mud supports one of the largest fisheries on earth. All of the worlds major fisheries come from northern waters because of this mud. It houses the smallest of the food chain. If I pick up a handfull of mud from a beach on the Sound it will be absolutely full of life. In between almost every grain of mud you will find copepods and a myrid of tiny organisms that are the young of something else. If you remove a glass of water and hold it up to the light you will see all sorts of things swimming by.
The tropics, with the crystal clear water is like a desert with almost nothing free swimming. If you pick up a handfull of sand on either an ocean beach here inNY or anywhere in the tropics you will usually find nothing.
Of course I like diving in the warm clear waters of the Bahamas better than NY diving but for different reasons. Being an aquarist I want to se the beautiful animals I have in my tank but being a sort of adventurer I also like NY diving because almost everything that was throw or sunk here, is still there and most of it has never been discovered or seen by anyone. Most of the diving here is virgin diving so you are very liable to find something.
Of course you have to practically crash into it to find it.
Once I was diving here with my dive partner and the visability was about a foot. We hit a wall, a rusty steel wall. We tried to go up and we hit a rusty steel roof. Eventually we realized that we had swam into the boiler of a ship that had sunk in 1903. It was a sidewheeler that was carring dates.

 

[Fishnewbie]

Great hobby it is.

 

[mcdonaldjosh7]

My parents used to keep some goldfish in a 10 gallon tank. Eventually, they all died, and I always grew up hearing the stories of my father day dreaming of getting a real fish tank. I always wanted a big tank (big in my mind was 55 gallon or so). Then, one day, when was probably 13 or 14, I went to a closing bookstore and they had a 10 gallon tank setup, taken down, and for sale. I bought it for $8, and was anxious to setup my tank. After to talking to the "trustworthy" employees of pets & pals, I discovered I needed many things before adding fish (such as a heater, new Carbon catridges, etc). $100 later, I had my own tank setup. My first two fish was a silver dollar, and a red tailed black shark. It wasn't long before I had this tank stocked with 5 -6 fish, including a 'tire track' eel, catfish, and many more fish. Not more than a month later, I had to have more. So, I went on craigslist, and found a 55 gallon tank. I bought the freshwater setup for $200, and it included 3 fish. I gave two of the convict cichlids away, and kept the Leopard Pleco.

This kept me happy for about 6 months. I added fish, (most notably my prized Electric Blue Jack Dempsy) and bought more and more equipment for the tank. Then, I saw saltwater. Oh my, that was a quick catch. I was being funded by a paper route at the time, and knew I would have to work pretty hard to get and maintain the tank. I decided to go for it, and made my first mistake on the first purchase. My 'friends' over at aquarium paradise sold me a 72 gallon tank, for $800. No equipment, no canopy, just tank and stand. I did trust these guys at this point though, so I saved up my paper route money for 3 months and purchased my tank. Now that I look back at it, I am fairly surprised they would charge $800 from a 14 year old boy getting into the hobby, making money off a paper route, but no matter. I have a saltwater tank now, so I can't complain

The tank sat empty for a few months, as I acquired the needed supplies for the hobby. I purchased my first animal, a moray eel, and asked them to hold it, which they seemed happy to do. I finally got the tank filled with water in September of 2009, and bought some damsel fish to cycle the tank. The tank cycled, and I bought some dead rock off a nice man with a much bigger tank than me and added it to my tank, and then picked up my eel.

I progressed through the hobby, upgraded my wet/dry filter to a skimmer, upgraded my freshwater lights to VHO Lights, then 2x250w MH. I added corals, more fish, and watched my tank evolve. Truly is an awesome thing, holding a piece of the ocean.

I am 17 now, and still dump money into it. It is my favorite hobby I have ever gotten into, and I hope to continue it for many more years.

Like this if you actually read through all that!

 

[Paul B]

I used to love it when the freshwater fish would spawn but I really only tried to breed the wierder ones. I liked to breed betts's with their bubble nest and some of the mouthbreeders. Angelfish with the slanted piece of slate or flowerpot you had to put in there.
Then it was fun to try to "make" different color guppies by putting together the color's you wanted. Almost like painting.
That always facinated me. Then I would design all sorts of wierd devices to seperate the fry from the parents.

 

[Krish]

I used to love it when the freshwater fish would spawn but I really only tried to breed the wierder ones. I liked to breed betts's with their bubble nest and some of the mouthbreeders. Angelfish with the slanted piece of slate or flowerpot you had to put in there.
Then it was fun to try to "make" different color guppies by putting together the color's you wanted. Almost like painting.
That always facinated me. Then I would design all sorts of wierd devices to seperate the fry from the parents.

It's funny you should say that about the angelfish. I had 2 pairs of angels (freshwater) and the only place they would lay their eggs was on a fake plastic plant I had in there and always the same one :lol:

 

[Frankie]

Paul, you would love my new home Charleston SC. I live on an island here called James Island. Basically Charleston is a group of semi tropical islands. When you see it from the Ravenel Bridge it reminds me of the swamps from Lord Of The Rings. After Hugo blew through here back in 89 it pretty much cut down the tree lines and is similarly flat like Long Island. Im told the trees were huge before that happened. There is a stand near my house that reminds me a bit of the Pine Barrens out by you.
Most of the water ways here are similar to the Sound. Mud bottoms with tons of life. Most of my fishing up there was in the sound. No place better to get stripers in my opinion. I miss the fishing up there. Much better. Down here you need a boat to get out to the big fish.
They have Red Drum here close to shore that are fun to catch though. The large ones look like dinosaurs.
The beaches are very similar except the sand is much finer and Palmetto Palm trees are native to the area.
charleston is known for the tomatos where LI was potatos.

72 degrees today!

Frank