PlanetCatfish.com

Yup another one-question survey! I'll start...

My first cat was a Liposarcus pardalis pleco I got when I was 11 (nearly 13 years ago). I named her 'Peppered Pizza' and she still lives with me today, in a 75gal with a one-eyed oscar. She's 13" long now and quite healthy, I never had any health issues with her.

I guess after a while I found myself more fascinated by her than the other tetras and whatnot swimming around my tanks and thus began the catfish fascination!

Hi!

My first cat was a common Ancistrus when i was around 9-10...it jumped from the tank one night and was half dried when i found him in the morning...tossed it back in and it lived for a couple more years...then i lost interest in aquaria...

The first catfish that I remember buying myself was a Tiger shovelnose over 30 yeas ago. The first fish I owned were a Blue gourami and a Kissing gourami which I inherited from an old fishkeeper living in my apartment building.
Mark

Hi,
My first catfish was a Platydoras costatus which i bought at 3cm when i was 12.Now he is around 19cm and still lives with me.

First catfish was a common plec, but that's not what got me into catfish. It was a Channel Cat that made me understand how awesome catfish really are, and subsquent, more expensive purchases followed!

my family had fish when i was young but wouldnt let me have a plec so now im older i have lots of plecs my first was an L076.

My first catfish that really caught my attention (actually obsessed about) occurred several years before I ever got into the organized hobby or had 20 plus tanks of catfishes. Although I probably had six or seven aquariums at the time!

A LFS in the area I grew up had a Synodontis flavitaeniatus that the owner brought in from her tank at home to add to one of the displays at the counter. She had kept it at home for thirteen or fourteen years by this time.
From the moment I saw the fish, I immediately began asking the price. I was quickly told â??Itâ??s not for sale.â?

A albino channel catfish that my father bought when i was a baby I now keep the same fish in my fish house.

An i still look at it an think "you started all this".

I started getting into catfish not too long ago - last August. I often take office mail to the post office across the street and there next to it used to be a small store that carried fish, among other things. I was completely enthralled at the bronze and albino cories' energy and cute little faces. They were so tiny, yet so fast-moving and curious. So I started out with an albino cory, a panda and a peppered. They have all since died, with Mr. Whiskers, the peppered and my fave cory, dying not too long ago of an internal bacterial infection.

But I now have 12 other cories and they frolic together in the new tank with other catfishes, tetras, barbs, and loaches. But my cory cats are still my favorites.

panda corys were my first catfish

Mine was a Red tail catfish!!

My first catfish was a pleco, and then a channel cat. But I think what fascinated me about catfish was the fact that they are so diverse. Things like shovel noses, redtails, electrics, even blues are so beautiful and fascinating. I one day will have a tank large enough to hold several giants, like redtails and tiger shovelonose.

Or better yet, go the cheaper way and put them in a large indoor pond!

fall 1974:
two cory's: 1 C aeneus and 1 C paleatus.

been hooked ever since

Well, I guess the common plec is the one that sucked me in. I have wanted one for years and years and it was the one non-negotiable species when I set up the community tank.

Looking at other "freshwater tropicals" that interested me, I started noticing that a heck of a lot of them were catfishes of one sort or another. Pictus, "sharks" (the catfish versions of which I have decided against for various reasons), the plec herself... I was directed here when I started asking some online questions about common plecs (like, "is wood just a tank decor option, or do they actually need it?") and, as you know, asked my questions here.

In between looking for answers, I started looking in the Cat-eLog. Oh, my goodness. Look at all the fishies! Pretty fishes, "interesting looking" fishes, fishes that look like they swam out of the Devonian into the tank!

I expect I will concentrate on the diversity of suckermouths for a while yet (with occasional excursions, like, I would love to find a place to fit in a group of glass cats) but gosh, I love them all!

To put it another way... First I got a common pleco. Just a small one, to clean the algae in my tank. Then I came here, but I was just a social pleco keeper. I picked up a few raphaels, but just to keep the plec company. I knew I could stop any time I wanted to. But of course I wanted to get some bristlenoses before I stopped. And the cories were so cute, you know? And...

Obviously, I am becoming a catfishaholic. Did I tell you my local PetsMart has some "rubbernose plecos?" Pictures from small quarantine tank to follow.

My first catfish were two juvenile Corydoras aeneus (bronz). When they matured, they formed a perfect couple. Later on, the male died. The female is still with me.

Elspeth wrote:
To put it another way... First I got a common pl*co. Just a small one, to clean the algae in my tank. Then I came here, but I was just a social pl*co keeper. I picked up a few raphaels, but just to keep the plec company. I knew I could stop any time I wanted to. But of course I wanted to get some bristlenoses before I stopped. And the cories were so cute, you know? And...

Silly you, don't you know common plecos are gateway cats?

Ok, that was a bad 'marijuana as a gateway drug' pun, lol!

My first catfish was a C.aeneus yes a single fish, but it was many years ago long before catfish study groups and the internet and i did not know better.

what got me into Catfish was a raffle at one of the big London Tropical fish exhibitions where I won a synodontis and joined the Catfish Association of Great Britain, it was probably back in 1977-78.

Since then I have kept, collected and bred a number of cats of various species and sizes, some of which I would not keep today, I don't have tropical ponds!

Steve

My first catfish were some Mystus bimaculatus and Silurichthys indragiriensis I had to keep to observe feeding behavior (about 10 years ago).
Strange as it sounds, I had stumbled into catfish because they were the only group of fish other than anabantoids I was vaguely aware of (my first choice was actually anabantoids, but that's another story for another time...).

what got me into catfish is a strange story. as a child i actually grew up on a catfish farm. we had farm ponds set up and stocked for people to come onto our property and spend there leasure time fishing, and more importantly paying my greatgrand parents to do that. go figure. that was what caught my interest when feeding them one day and saw the most unusual fish in the world at the time to me as a bright young and sassy 3 year old, it was an albino channel cat. that right then started my love affair with catfish just over 3 decades ago. that would have been around 1972. when my parents divorced, i moved to a new state with a wonderfly strange new father who felt it was absolutly necessary to have a fish tank in the middle of our living room. well little to my knowing so there was a little brook behind the house that had these crazy little tiny catfish in it that liked to hide under the rocks. well i found as a very young lad that noturus flavapinnis will live quit well in a 20 gallon fish tank and that it would start a love affair with a type of fish that would make most romantics jealous. that was over 30 years ago and now i keep catfish of all kinds from every part of the world. i find catfish to be amazing. there behavior, the way they go through there courtship. the caring for there offspring. to me there is no other fish that warrents take space. after meeting a fellow hobbiest paul turly (Its your fault) i continue my love affair and try to spawn different species to return to other hobbiest. more importantly it has given me the opprotunity to pass along to my 11 year old daughter the same passion for catfish as i have, she regularly goes to fish club meetings, collection trips and has actually spawned a pair of bristle nose on her own. She now asked me if we may go to events and she always on the look out for new species of fish to add to our tanks. her newest addition to her tank is a mystus luecophasis. a fish we found at a local fish auction for a mere $4.00 us dollars. i've rambled long enough, but catfish has given me a passion like no other and a healthy outlet for me to share with my daughter. please get your childern involved and pass your knowledge along to the next generation.

ken walker

my first catfis was a blue eye pleco. he was lovely.

i have had just about every catfish that nz can have and a few that we cant.

Mine was a Dianema urostriata. Over 8 yrs old if i remember correctly back in the 80's.




G.

My first catfish was the two Bumblebees I had which both died recently. I found it to be the tap water which I now know to be contaminated with heavy metals. Needless to say we don't drink from the tap anymore, and are sticking to the creek water (straight from the mountain) for putting in my tank. Now I have 8 Cory's and 2 Bristles. My pride and Joy.

in my first round of fishkeeping my first cat was an Pimelodus pictus, that was around 1985, when istarted up again in 97 the first fishes i bought was Heteropneustes fossilis and Microglanis iheringi, i sold the H.f some months ago and the bumblebee is still live and kickin' in my tank

mallemalle

A LFS in the area I grew up had a Synodontis flavitaeniatus that the owner brought in from her tank at home to add to one of the displays at the counter.

There is an old fish book with S. angelicus and S. flavitaentatus in one picture, I used to really dream about these fish. Read the cotm on the former for a little more details. When I first asked I was told these fish were about £200 each! That was in 198something.

I think my first catfish was Platydoras costatus but Pseudomystus siamensis soon thereafter.

Oddly my interest in catfish came from a blasck shark and horse face loach that my dad and friend had. My Dad knows nothing about keeping fish but it was his small aquarium in the kitchen (circa 1977) that might be to blame..........

Jooks

My first fish was a small, at least to start , Hypostomus punctatus. I got it to keep the algae out of my all important swordtail tank. Not long after that, I had to upgrade from my 15 gallon to a custom 50 to keep the fish that had caught my attention.

That's actually not what got me started though. I got a pair of albino corys to eat extra food out of the fry tank. I won't use the "S" word, but they were there to be janitors. Eventually, they grew to be bigger than any other cory, including barbatus, that I've kept since. The female was slightly larger than 4 inches SL. After about a year of feeding them leftovers from the livebearers, it happened. They laid eggs everywhere, and I was hooked.

In kwalker's tradition, I've just recently started letting my son have some range in the fish room. He's shown an interest in the fish since the day he came home from the hospital. Maybe it was the fact that his crib was directly across the room from a 55 gallon community tank, but he's always liked to watch. On his fourth birthday, I let him have one of my tanks to pick out his own fish, just in case he didn't want to follow in my footsteps with catfish. A week or so went by, and he couldn't make up his mind what to put in the tank. I started showing him some of the corys that weren't available, or even known, when I was starting out. With no direct intention, I mention it to Fishnut2 that he was just starting, and the rest is history. He recieved a box of supplies and 4 breeder pandas less than a week later. Now, I've got somebody to take to the fish shops with me, and actually interested in hearing my long-winded fish lectures Larry Vires

Larry,

My son, Rusty -- now an Admin of this forum -- also got hooked on fish at age four. We have an old video somewhere of Rusty at four giving some visitors to our home an authoritative tour of the fish tanks. Though he likes talking about fish more than he likes doing grunt work like changing water and cleaning filters, he's still a great help and I probably wouldn't be as deeply into this hobby as I am if I was doing it on my own.

And oh yes, our first catfish was an albino channel cat. Not too long thereafter, we acquired a Synodontis eupterus, which we still have.

Dinyar

Back in 1983 when I was 7 my first cats were C Aneus and Paleatus. I have been quite surprised by cories as I have had many that have lived well over 10 years.

Well i think my first catfish encounter was a siamese(sp) algae eater in a 14 gallon tank i had. I got the tank because i am alergic to pet dander. Started off with like a gallon bowl that my mom got to keep me entertained with 2 goldfish. Later on that night my dad went out and got me a 14 gallon so the fish would live longer then a week. Kept a variaty of different fish, always with a pleco or siamese algae eater, dad wouldn't elt me get catfish though he thought they were all agressive. When i was about 11 i believe i got 2 small iridescent sharks. They grew to be bout 10 inches each, had to get a bigger tank, the 56 gallon i got a couple months ago, due to size restrictions and money i could not get a bigger tank. Right now i have 2 Iridescents and 1 albino pleco, the pleco i got when i ws 13, i am now 15 and he is now about 10 inches. I'd say the Sharks got me into catfish.

First catfish were the peppers, then bronzes, then pandas, then albinos, then greens, then.......cories are the most lovable fish going. I am now the proud mother of a dozen baby albino cories. I also have 4 oddballs I call the "weirdos" because i'm not sure what they are. I've had them for years. They're sort of hunched sinister looking catfish with a thick girth and they like to hide. Worms will bring them out tho.
Sadly i lost my first 3 peppers which involved a dojo loach. I will NEVER ever again have a fish that can crawl out of the tank at night. Too darn unnerving.