so come on people how long have you been keeping fish? and dont say longer than you care to remember me i have been keeping fish for about 35 years now started of with goldfish in the bowl then realised it want big enough so got the tank the discovered the different types of fish then contracted mts (multiple tank syndrome) i know i was a lost cause but hey i have had some fun and hardships along the way

I started keeping bettas when I was in grade school (5th grade?). I then got a 10 gallon aquarium and had that until 11th grade I believe. I got out of fish because of money and moving, until this year (12 years later). I finally have a house that is well insulated. Now the temp. in the tanks will stay regulated. I got a 50 gallon for a steal and overloaded it. I then got a 29 gallon and put some of the fish into that. Then I found a 135 gallon and off loaded more fish to that. I was given a 20 gallon and its my quarantine/hospital tank. I have had some devastating losses, but I learned from them.

and since then it looks like you have been bittenby the catfish bug! i know what its like as it has got me but dont feline sorry for any one who has been bitten by the bug

I got into it in early '92, after a few years of thinking 'that'd be nice...'

My little 2x1 (24x12) did ok, I usually kept 'pairs' of fish. Bristles, Corys, Neons, Mollies. The 2 Angels were a big mistake.

Have wanted a second tank since '93. Didn't get it until about '03 when the Cory's began to breed.

I suffer from MTS well and truely now!

I won a goldfish on a fair when I was around 14 and bought a small tank for it. Was told to get a filter for it by me mam and the local pet shop didn't have any so went down to a newish fish shop that had opened in town and got bitten by the bug. Before I'd left school I was working weeknds in a local fish shop cleaning tanks to pay for the hobby and had 4 tanks of tropicals and a 3' marine tank in my bedroom, the goldfish was passed onto my nan who ket him going for about 12 years.

15 years on and I'm still suffering from MTS, and now the wife is reading my magasines, looking at the marine tanks in them going this is nice can we have one... I never really wanted to be rich you know ..

Wow, and here I thought I was a tank veteran at 7 years! LOL I'm inexperienced compared to you guys. I started out with goldfish, but now have a tropical tank with a particular fondness for loaches. Different types of tetras are my dither fish of choice, since I don't kill them off as quickly as other species.

I have what I think is quite an attractive setup with fake plants, but someday I hope I can convert to live plants without killing them all.

so come on the rest of you dont be shy drop in and tell us how long you have been in the hobby

and i still class myself as a learner, even with the amount of years i have, as there is so much to learn

So now we have a few new members that have just joined, how about answering this post ?

We had a fish tank when I was young, like grade 3 - 5, which we shut down after a very young and naive me, put ditch snails in the tank which gave the fish some disease which made them fall apart while they were still alive... my sister apparently still has nightmares of watching her fish's jaw fall off...
The tank was shut down until I was in grade 7 or 8, and I decided to set it up again. I wasn't allowed other types of pets so I set up the fish tank. First I had some koi babies, they caught something and their skin grew over their gills, they died obviously, but I learned from that experience to boil the lake water that came from our tap! Since then I've kept guppies, killies, silver dollars, loaches (big favourite), gouramis, tetras, plecos, gold fish and a whole bunch of others. We had a breeding pair of angels, but the male was a dud We also had breeding silver dollars (lots of free food for the rest of the tank), we found they come into breeding condition after eating roughly $50 in plants I kept fish from grade 7/8 up through university (kept a 2 and 10 gallon in my dorm) until the great tank explosion of '04, a 55gal blew out and besides causing major damage to our apartment we lost a lot of fish Then we had some sort of false fungus wipe out our other tank just before we moved, so we shut everything down for a year and a bit, then I started up again last week So it's been roughly 10 years with a 1 year break.

Gosh it sounds like you have had some trying times with your fish and exploding tank

yeah when the tank blew my b/f came home from work first, so when I got home the tank was sitting in our driveway with no front in it John had gotten all the still living fish off the floor and popped them into the 35 gallon we had runnign at the time. We lost almost all of our fish though, it was terrible, really disheartening, one of the reasons we didn't set up a tank in the new apartment. The only saving grace was that we lived in a basement apartment, so there was no damage done to units beneath us. I had a good cry when my clowns and ID sharks died, I'd never been able to keep ID sharks until we got the 55 used from some people who already had them in the tank. The biggest was almost a foot long

That sounds scary. I don't know what I would do if I came home to one of the tanks busted. My wife would kill first and then make me clean it up. What caused the tank to burst?

I have always been interested in fish, since I am a fish (i was a competitive swimmer, so fish were always my friends). My parents had a 100gallon tank when I was younger. They had an exotic salt water fish. I was in awe of that tank my entire childhood. I had a small (20-30 gallon) tank in my room that eventually got broken, and the fish went everywhere. I didn't have a tank again until college, and have been at it hardcore for about 7 years. During my comeback, I started with African Cichlids, and now I am into the agressive American Cichlids/Hybrids, with random bottom feeders. No crazy story. I just love fish, and looking at fish.