re: Who here has an aquarium? What size is it?

I use to keep a ton of fish tanks for both research and enjoyment but ended up getting rid of them. Just got tired of all the maintenance. Now I just have one tank that houses a native tarantula. Low maintenance and fun to watch.

When I did keep fish all of them were native species that I enjoyed studying. I had a pretty bad arse creek simulator made of two 55 gallon long tanks. One tank simulated a deep pool for chubs and the other was a shallow rapid for rainbow darters. Darters are some of the most interesting fish I had. I quickly learned that at normal room temp the creek fishes lost their brilliant colors so I devised my own water cooler system from a mini fridge so the water temp was in the 50's and the fish kept their colors.

My other tanks I used to learn game fish habits to apply to fishing. One of the most interesting things I learned was with black bass in my 250 gallon tank. I had collected a entire ball of bass fry at the lake and raised them. I feed them all sorts of live prey. Even though all the bass came from the same fry ball several grew much more quickly than the others. From what I observed these that grew more quickly were less active and only ate the largest prey I introduced to the tank. The smaller bass were more active and would eat anything I introduced to the tank.

Blue catfish prefer live bait. During the day when the light was on they would not leave their caves for any type of food other than injured live prey. I believe it was the vibrations given off by the blue gill, shad, ect that got them out of hiding. Oddly store bought stink baits seemed to be their least favorite. Applying this to my jug fishing worked wonders. I started using live bluegill about 3-4 inches in size and absolutely slaughtered the catfish. The bluegill put up a struggle on the hook that minnows/goldfish don't which made all the difference in the world. I went from catching a few catfish on my jugs to bringing in a boat load of large blues regularly. Largest yet was 96lbs and G&F said it lost a lot of weight before I had it weighed... He is hanging on my wall now.

Had a lot of fun with the tanks and learned a lot. I would still have them if I didn't have so much going on. The most time consuming was catching the food.