Madness said:
It's sad when people are compelled to leave the hobby. Either the stress of the effort or the cost of upkeep are a big deal. I mean, who can get bored after they have invested so much?
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Someone once asked me, '
When do you have too many tanks?'
My reply was, '
When keeping them becomes a chore.'
I took my own advice in that regard some years ago, when my fish room had become a chore. I had always maintained about a dozen tanks, but that expanded dramatically when I decided to start an angelfish breeding program in which I was crossing wild-caught Peruvian stock with line-bred black angels in an attempt to increase the heterozygosity of the black angel gene pool, and thus reinvigorate the line. Long story short is that the experiment was a qualified success, but the
black x WT progeny so produced were so aggressive that it was impossible to keep mated pairs an anything less than 4-foot tanks. Angelfish behaving like cichlids, imagine that! It's the old genetic dilemma- select for one trait and you never know what will co-segregate with it. In any event, the crosses did produce some stunning fishes.
As that experiment wound down, I reconfigured my fish room and started keeping both riverine and Rift Lake African cichlids again, after a long hiatus. Soon
Tropheus dominated my collection, and with so many different
Tropheus populations to chose from, one never has enough tanks! I eventually settled in at about 25 tanks, and was producing enough
Nanochromis and
Tropheus fry to cover the costs of the whole operation. But it eventually became a bit of a chore.
At that point, about 15 years ago, I down-sized to ~12 tanks, and have maintained that size ever since. Yes, the tanks have gotten larger as I started keeping sandy biotope Tanganyikans, but so far I have resisted the urge to go to 8-foot tanks in order to keep things like
Cyathopharynx. For me, the current fish room is large enough to maintain an interesting collection of fishes without the maintenance being a chore. I do tend to let things go a bit in summer when most of my time is spent outdoors, but it sure is nice to have a fish room to fuss with during the cold season. I suppose every person's comfort level will be different, which is one of the great things about this hobby.
