# ???



## mermaid (Jul 22, 2005)

ok... i captured a little yellow fish... its a atlantic triggger fish or something... and well i wanna know what the chances of survival are... cuz for one thing we have red tide, and i dont have a salt water aquarium set up so i guess it was pretty dumb for me to take him home :-\ but we all make mistakes right? but anyways... if he does make it, which its not looking too good right now... how long would it take to cycle a ten gallon tank for him? hes just a little guy like maybe a centimeter long... and i know a ten gallon would be unstable and everything but do i really need live rock and everything? argh i feel like such an idiot
but he is so cute! 
im thinking if he survives till monday to get my marine science teacher to take him


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## TheOldSalt (Jan 28, 2005)

If it makes you feel any better, my first saltwater tank contained a Black Sea Bass & a Fudpucker Triggerfish, both of which I caught on hook & line while fishing.
The tank was a standard 5 gallon metalframed jobbie.

They lasted a whole week, as I recall. 

A little 1 cm filefish or trigger can live in a 10 gallon tank for at least a week & then some, I'm sure, even without any live rock or anything. LOL Heck, even the simplest sponge filter will do the job. 

If you brought enough seawater home with you, you might be able to keep the little guy alive & lively all weekend without any effort in some plastic container which is shallow but has a large surface area, like a plastic storage box of the type you see entire aisles of at WalMart.

If you want to keep him, then a 10 gallon tank will work for a few months, but triggers grow large & quickly. If it's one of those little yellowish-brown filefish like you find in clumps of floating Sargassum seaweed, though, then it will only get a few times larger than it's current size, and as such it'll be able to stay in that tank for a long time.

As for cycling the tank, you can do it the slow way or the fast way. The fast way involves the use of either *Bio-Spira* or *Stability*. I'd recommend Stability in this case, since it's cheaper, easier to find, and you don't have to use it all up very quickly to keep it from going bad. Follow the directions of the label, and your tank will be cycled & safe in just a few days.


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## mermaid (Jul 22, 2005)

bad news... the little guy didnt make it through the night  
i guess ive learnt my lesson bout bringing fish home from the beach lol
i still would like to have a saltwater aquarium but i guess thatll happen sometime down the road... thanks for the help though


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## Yankee boy (Jun 5, 2005)

sry to hear that..all the kids at my school give the fish they caught to my marine science teacher  she has a spiked burrfish with a bull minnow in a tank with a starfish.


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