My New Pet

[RedHeron]

I dug my old 75 gallon aquarium out of the closet. Spent a couple weekends creating a new 3D backdrop out of foam block and quick-crete. I set it up so that water flows (although rather slowly) from left to right, with an overflow headbox (disguised as a boulder) on the left, and pick-up filters (not so disguised) on the right...all this to mimic an eddy in a small creek.

Why go through all this trouble?
Notice the color of his eyes!





My wife named him Norman Bates...well, because he's psycho. After giving him a few days to acclimate to the tank, I put 10 goldfish in there thinking he would eat on them as he got hungry. Nope...he ate 6 of them (which was all that he could cram in his gullet), and then proceded to kill the other 4 just for the heck of it. It also didn't take him long to swim up the flow coming out of the headbox and get stuck in it...so I had to build a screen over the discharge.

A couple interesting things I've witnessed already:
-He will actually wrap his body around a rock to hide.
-Goldfish are easy...but I've put wild baitfish in there that are smart enough to run and hide. He will actually hunt these baitfish, nosing around crevises in the rocks like he knows they're there. I assume he smells them or senses their vibrations.

[deadringer]

That's pretty cool man, but when you show up with the new world record, we'll know where it came from. lol

[wetinaline]

Very cool. I gave my dad a small bass out of the south river last year to put in his small fountain in his back yard. He eats worms out of my dads hands. Keep us updated on Norman, would love to do that kind of setup myself.

[Va Larry]

Very cool, looks great. I have a 50 gallon setup in my garage. Don't use it any more except to tune suspending lures, but it's still up and running. At one time it was in my living room. It served as a bait tank full of small fish I caught. I had a baby smallmouth in there for a while. It was the most aggressive fish I've ever kept. It would run across the tank to nail my finger if I stuck it in the water.

One day I feed it to many crickets. It stuffed as many in its stomach, gullet, and mouth as it could before rolling over dead.

[mookie]

love it. thanks for sharing

[BuckTerry308]

Really cool set-up! Thanks for sharing.

[lilpdriverrat]

Way cool setup Lance. How did you get that shelf rock to look like that? Very realistic. Just how I would want my aquarium to look.

[dmurf2005]

Awesome idea!

[boykinsbuddy]

Check your regs...got the right permits...just saying...

[patrick reif]

20 years ago I put a small gill in a tank with several Oscars and ciclids. The smaller bluegill dominated the tank, and I had to release him back in the stream he came out of.

wild fish are wild fish, and they behave like something wild.

worth thinking about.

[lilpdriverrat]

Over the years I have had several bass in aquariums. I found that the key to their survival is to only feed them small amounts at a time instead of putting a bunch in there at a time. It is more responsibilty having to catch, buy and feed everyday but it was the key to them not overeating and creating too much waste in the water and poisoning themselves.

[RedHeron]

Thanks everybody.
Boykinsbuddy, by my best interpretation of the law, I'm good. He was caught legaly on hook & line and there's no size limit for bass in AL. The only bass you can't keep is shoal bass.
Patrick, I don't expect to put anything else in the aquarium. I hope he stays wild for a while, actually.
Hal, I'm now wishing I had taken some pictures of the process. I basically went to Home Depot and got a 4'x8' sheet of 2" block foam insulation (the pink kind). The tank is 24" deep and 4' wide, so I cut the sheet into four 2'x4' pieces, stacked 3 of them and glued them together, so I had a 2'x4'x6" block of foam. I took the other 2'x4' piece and cut, stacked, and glued it into 2 different blocks, one for the "headbox" boulder and the other for the shelf rock in the middle. The shelf rock in the middle was the easiest to carve because I used the individual 2" sheets as the "layers" of rock. Otherwise, carving was done with an electric filet knife, a steak knife, a hobby knife, and a butane lighter. I coated it all with 3 or 4 layers of quickcrete grout that had been dyed different colors, brushing it on with a course brush and making sure to let previous layers show through to give that worn and speckled look of natural sandstone. Normally, you would have to soak such a creation in the bathtub for a couple weeks to leach the acidic toxins out of the concrete, but our city water comes from a limestone aquifer and has enough buffering ability to keep the pH at 6.75 - 7.0 without leaching it. A little acidic, but within acceptable range and only a little below the creek I caught the fish in (7.0 - 7.25). Norman has been going strong for 3 weeks now, so he must be ok with it.

[MOsmallies]

Very cool... I had a similar setup in college. One year I had a spotted bass, 3 long eared sunfish, and a rock bass. Surprisingly, the rock bass killed all of the other fish within a week, so we kept him by himself for the rest of the school year. The next year we just put one spotted bass and some crawfish in the tank and they all did fine. Once I got out of college I had a small channel cat for a while. There's not many things cooler than building your own version of your favorite stream habitat. I would literally sit there for hours just watching them. Keep us updated on how big he gets.

Paul
MOsmallies

[ol' Feller]

Wow! I'm impressed! Very nice work! (And a lot of it from what I'm looking at)
I'd love to see how long a few crayfish could hide in there, I'd bet they could make it 3 or 4 hours...would be fun to watch 'the hunt'!

And all this time everybody thought you wuz just shopping at BPS.

[turkey]

that is AWESOME.

as a kid, i always loved catching any kind of wildlife and keeping it around for a while. my grandparents taught me to eventually put them back where they came from after i enjoyed them for a little while. used old horse troughs for snapping turtles...i would set it up like a pond and toss them some bream and such in there. the only problem is you couldn't see through the sides! always loved having aquariums for the other snakes, turtles, fish, etc that i caught.

that's a super cool set up and be sure to keep us updated.