Thanks for the invitation to join. Hello to all! I also am a member of aquaria central, aquamaniacs, and age of aquaria. I think I joined one or two more but lost track of them along the way. AquaTopia's looks are very impressive; my compliments to the originators. The idea of working with facts and first person experience instead of anecdotes appeals to me too. As for fish, I started in the hobby about two years ago, when my teen son brought home a small turtle. I felt so sorry for this turtle that I went out and bought a 10g for him to live in. Well, he died before I could get the tank set up (my apologies to all turtle lovers) so I went back to the LFS and bought danios and tetras to populate the empty tank. (I listened to the store owner who assured me these fish would survive cycling). Amazingly, all but one fish did survive. I haved learned a lot in the intervening months, and now have a 75g waiting for the stand to be complete that son number two is building. When it is set up, I am doing a fishless cycle with plants. The list of fish going in is small so far. I am interested in a peaceful community tank of small to medium sized fish from bottom dwellers on up.

I feel especially grateful to these four danios and five black skirt tetras that have been with me so long. Watching their antics and caring for their needs got me through a stressful year.

Welcome debishooked. Thank you for the compliments on the forum. We are still just getting started really. We're not even started on the saltwater fish fact sheets, much less the invertabrates. I'm also positive I havn't covered every disease, though I think I hit most of the common ones, and a couple of the oddballs. In addition, the layout may be changing shortly. I've been toying with the idea of moving the link buttons from the left side, to the right side, so that people running lower resolutions can read the forum without scrolling over. Or possibly putting them on the bottom.

Anyway, reguarding the turtle, don't feel bad, it sounds like you were doing everything you could to help it. Trust me, in my younger days I have done MUCH worse. For example, I have always loved to go fishing. I thought it would be a great idea to keep the smaller fish in an aquarium to learn more about them, so I put a small bluegill in a 10g tank, and it grew big over the course of a year, and despite the cramped quarters, it was a generally successful experiment (if you ever fish for bluegill, try some SPAM as bait, they seem to like that more than anything else I tried, they were even willing to eat it out of my hands, when they wouldn't come near me with anything else). Anyway, a year later I decided to add a flathead catfish to the mix (yes, add this in with about a 9 inch bluegill in this 10g tank). So I caught a small one, about 10 inches or thereabouts. That night I went to bed, heard a great spashing about, woke up the next morning, there was no bluegill, and the catfish was so fat, I thought it was going to die. To this day I don't know how it managed to eat that bluegill, which was so much bigger than the width of the catfish's mouth. At any rate, that was probably all for the best, because doing 50% water changes every 2 days, wouldn't have been enough for the two of them in the one tank. So the catfish lived in there for about 6 months, and wouldn't eat anything other than that bluegill, and nightcrawlers. It kept growing though, and got to about 15-16 inches before I decided I simply had to get rid of it, so I let it go back into the lake I caught him from. Thinking back on it now, i am still amazed that neither fish died of poor tank conditions (although one could make the case for the bluegill). I had absolutely no equipment, a tank and a lid. No filtration whatsoever, no dechlorinated water durring those 50% water changes every two days.

Anyway, that was a long time ago, and I have put that past behind me. I am a changed man, and I can say that I have paid my debt to fish society. :)

wouldn't mind seeing the 75 when it is done sounds pretty cool