I'd like to introduce myself, as I'm sure I'll be quite active on the forums from now on.
My name is Sebastian, I'm from Koper, Slovenia (but I'm gonna move to southern Italy relatively soon). I've been "playing" with fish tanks for quite some time, as I started when I was only a kid, with a 54L "community" tank where I kept a lot of species. Too many, perhaps. And yeah, incompatible too (out of my mind: goldfishes, gouramis, bettas, a large pleco, black widow tetras, neon tetras and guppies... maybe even more, can't remember them all...). These were times when it was virtually impossible to find much info about the species, and the folks working at the LFS were the only (altough incompetent) source of information.
After all my fishes died (who knows why
), I converted the aquarium to a turtle tank and when my turtle overgrew it, I just put it in the basement. Now my turtle is a big beast in a big tank... and she's the reason I went back into aquariums. As cruel as it may sound, I got the idea to breed swordtails as live food for her... BUT... when my tank was ready for fishes to get in... a friend gave me a dozen rummynose tetras... and a few plants... I started admiring them and completely changed my mind (the turtle will have to eat her prepared food & veggies for the rest of her life...).I didn't want to do the error I did in my first experience, so I wanted to keep only fishes from the same habitat. So the idea of a biotope was born... I had some glass in the basement, cut it, and made myself a larger tank. Then I added an Ancistrus dolichopterus, and my first cories - three wild C. paleatus!!
Soon after their introduction, they started spawning. The first batch was gone within minutes, but made me love these little catfish.
Now, after reading a lot, after a lot of trial and error and after putting a tank in every possible corner of my house (I wish I could have a large tank, but since I'm in an apartment of a 200 years old palace in the old city center, I really can't think of anything that heavy. I don't fancy the idea of finding myself and the tanks in the store below...) I consider myself a good fishkeeper (actually, I even got a job as an aquarist in my LFS in the meantime), and am starting to become a "cory breeder" (while I'm writing my C. panda are still spawning... 14 eggs so far, but that's another story...).
That's it for now, I hope to read all you guys and girls soon, and even if there're a lot of people that have an immensely larger knowledge and experience, I hope I'll be able to be helpful too!
Thanks (expecially if you read all I wrote
)Cheers,
Seb
