10 Things Fish Keepers Should NEVER DO

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[Mspassionatevoice]

caring about all life doesn't make you a softy. It makes you a good person. Never feel ashamed that you care about living things.

[keenawireheart]

Great advice. One thing to add to the "Don't feed your fish bugs you find outside, " is that some may have stingers without seeming like they do and some may also carry internal parasites. You don't want a parasite living in your beloved fish.

[rosiechristo]

Me walking up to betta's tank:
"HEY PRETTY BOI. MOMMA LOVES YOU. HI! YOU SO HANDSOME.

[Prjm]

Side note. Some sponges have chemicals in them from the factory to prevent freezing/ hardening. We work with 3m company and most sponges do have chemicals within them. Rinse and rinse a lot before using one out of the bag

[rentblop]

On #6: You can't stress this enough. Releasing ANY pet into the wild where it does not belong can potentially destroy the ecosystem of that place. It's not just the aspect of intrusion but your pet can also introduce diseases to that area and the native fauna even when cohabitation with other species theoretically would be possible.

[berated]

You can actually tap on the glass right before feeding and this can train them that tapping means food. MD Fish Tanks does this with almost every one of his tanks.

[BigFishLittleFishAquatics]

That moment when someone in your family tap on the glass and you try to remain calm telling them not to do it again...ha ha

[theknittingrev]

"You have no idea where that worm has been..." Why does this sound like dating advice my mom gave me in middle school? 😂Seriously, great video. I am so guilty of tapping on the glass of my office tank when my betta is randomly harassing his shrimp friends. 😬I am working on myself daily. It's a process.

[janmargelowskyakacrittermo]

I had to LOL when Lisa said you never go anywhere on vacation. That hit home for me. I have fish tanks, dogs, cats, birds, rats, guinea pigs, snakes, and two 4 ft lizards, so, no, we don't go anywhere either!

[d.w]

I do cleaning for a living and the overspray tip is very important to remember. BUT - it is always advisable to spray product onto your cloth instead of the area and a good practice to get into for your household. For another example, did you know that spraying cleaner into your microwave can potentially break it? Always spray onto your cloth and then wipe :)

[dylantan]

Ok so I confess that sometimes(rarely), I give my tank a nice single tap. Its a final resort to test my fishes’s health, healthy fish tend to react one way or another based on their character but unhealthy or sick fish make no movement. Fish those out straight into hospital. Especially those internal diseases that show no external signs til its too late. Lucky I keep corydoras and tetra, don’t think its wise to do with a oscar.

[IceMadn]

I use those pill organizers for daily food feeders when I have a fish-sitter. They work great!!

[cuddleswithcavies]

Number 3 - Trust no one. Me: wait, isn’t that just general life advice? 😅

[ErrorintheAbyss]

The only people I trust with my tank is my grandma and dad, they know what they’re doing.

[amandah]

Confession: I once accidentally murdered an entire tank when home alone in the middle of the night dealing with a whitetail spider. I'm extremely spider phobic, I can't even look at pictures of them without panicking, and whitetails are not only aggressive but they're also quite deadly. This one was on the wall getting close to my guinea pig cage and so I started spraying it with bug spray. Evidently, some of that spray got into my 20L tank and I didn't realise because I thought I was far enough away from the tank. Within 2 days my baby albino rainbow shark died (I was growing him before moving him to my big 90L tank) and all the corydoras fish died. To this day I still feel awful that my panic and excessive spraying killed all the fish in the tank and that was 3 years ago. I'm a big softie too.

[heathershell]

Pork chop comes to me when I gently tap the glass. I only do it when I feed him so he knows there's food waiting for him. While I do agree that hard tapping, even when used to train, or tapping just to gets it's attention, isn't good for the fish, you can use it as a training tool if done correctly.

[StrangeAlleyCat]

Honestly- I’d hire that cleaning service you mentioned. Owning up to their mistake and certainly learning from it? Yes!! Everyone makes mistakes. It’s how they handle them that’s important. (I don’t even have an aquarium and I’m not in the us. I just loved that)

[niyl]

Earlier this summer:
I said "a pinch of food, you can skip a day or two, rather feed less than more, they will max eat from the plants if they are really hungry, they won't get hurt".
When I came home the entire tank was fully brown with algae and I got a demonstration of what a pinch means to some people, it was enough food for 4 days at once. Plants and this algae prevented a major and very deadly ammonia strike (bless elodea) but I still needed to do the daily 30% water changes for a while, and scrub the algae off too.

[toddratson]

A few years ago I had my lfs bring in 12 cpd for me. I decided to to treat them with Paraguard. They weren't showing symptoms, I just wanted to speed up their quarantine. I misread the instructions and dosed near 5 times the proper dose. Needless to say disaster struck. I realized my mistake about an hour later and despite multiple 90% water changes, I lost all but one fish. So, #11 Read the instructions on medications very, very carefully.

[crowmask]

when i was on vacation, i told the security guards in my apartment if they could take care of them! surprisingly they were all alive and still looked healthy!