How to catch fish in an aquarium / fish tank - by Pondguru

Hello, I'm Richard from the Pond Guru channel and in this video I'm going to show you how to catch fish in an aquarium. And it won't just be fancy goldfish, because any fool can catch these, it's simple. Most fish aren't that simple. Now don't worry about the lack of air in these tanks. Yes, they are under gravel filters driven by air, but I've turned the air pumps off so that it's a little bit quieter in the shop. In here we've got tetras, and in here we've got tetras as well. And a fighter in each tank. Obviously the fighters are really easy to catch, you just put the net in and half the time they swim into the net. Tetras are different. Now when trying to catch the smaller, more difficult fish, which of these nets would you use? A fine one or a coarse one? And that's what I mean by fine. The holes in it are fine. And with the coarse one, you can see through it a lot better. The holes are bigger. It's a lot easier to catch smaller fish with the coarse net. And that is because if you've got a fine net, you're swishing it through the water, the drag on here actually pushes the fish out of the way. So it's difficult to catch fish with a fine net. A net with bigger holes will go through with a lot less drag, so the fish won't be pushed out of the net. You should be able to catch it a lot quicker. These two tanks have got similar fish in. And there's a similar amount of them as well. I'll try and catch some of those with the fine net, and I'll try and catch some of these fellas with the coarse net. See how easy it is with each net. As I'm chasing them, they're always one step ahead of the net, and I've got to kind of drag it up the side to trap them. I did manage to catch a couple there. Now these fellas in here are actually a slightly quicker variety. These are a sort of tetra. But that is a hell of a lot easier. Look at that. There's, oh, how many's in there? Six. There's definitely not as much drag. When I'm whipping that through the water. There's another three. Really easy with a coarse net. Now, of course, there will be times when you're trying to catch fish and they're going behind your ornaments into the plants and a net will just not catch them. So what do you do in that situation? You can, of course, use two nets. You have one on one side of the tank and you drive the fish towards the other net and then you trap them, lift them out. It's quite effective, but it does tie up both your hands. The other option is to properly trap the fish with a bottle trap. This is just made by cutting the top off a plastic drinks bottle, putting a few little slits in here just so that this fits in nicely and doesn't buckle. Poke two or three holes in there so when you put it in the water the air can get out a lot easier and I'll show you exactly how to use this. Before I put it in the tank I'll just say I do prefer the square bottles because they sit nice and flat on the bottom and you can get them right up to the side of the tank. So when you're driving fish in, really they've got nowhere to go. They've got to go through this little funnel and get stuck in the trap. Stick that in there. There you go. In no time at all, we've caught four fish. And all you do is just transfer them to a net and remove them from the tank. Using a bottle trap is awesome in a Malawi tank or a Tanganyikan tank where you've got a nation of rocks. Put one of these in, chuck a little bit of food in, leave it for half an hour and your fish should end up in here, making them easy to remove to a net, to a bag and another tank. It's a great invention. Now behind me we've got a beautiful pleco, that's a blue phantom pleco and we really don't want to try and catch that in a net. They've got spines here, they've got spines on their pectoral fins and when you get them When you get them in a net, they tend to go... Like that, just split out all the spines, the dorsal sticks up, it's got spines on, you really want to try and catch them in a bottle, obviously it isn't going to fit through there, so all you do is just put that part of your trap in the tank, drive your plec in, and then you can lift it out, and I'll show you how to do it, so we'll get the bottle in, nice and tight to the side, boom, there we go, plec's in bottle, plec's out of bottle. But you can see how that worked, the plec went straight in, all we've got to do is put our hand over it and lift it out safely, without damage. Because an expensive plec like that does not want to get stuck in a net and have to be cut out of it. Now when you get a really big plec and you haven't got a suitable size bottle, what do you do? Get a suitable size bottle. Very difficult to catch a plec, but you can do it with your hands. The main places for the spines are out the side of the cheeks. The dorsal and the pectoral fins, everything else is pretty easy to get a hold of and plecs are generally quite rough so you can get a good hold of them with your hands. This is a technique I would not recommend if you're not used to handling fish because you can get spiked. Ideally what we're looking to do is put our hands over the dorsal fin so that it's clamped down and get our hands around underneath the pectorals so we can lift it out without getting spiked. There you go, we've got the dorsal fin flattened down by our hand, thumb one side, fingers the other side of the fish, now we simply just lift them out, it's best with two hands, there you go, away from all the spines, perfectly safe, but that's quite difficult to do, and I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner. Well there's a few short tips of how to make catching fish in your aquarium much, much easier, and less stressful for the fish, hope you've enjoyed this video, if you have... Please click the thumbs up button and share it with whoever you think might benefit from it. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe and I shall catch you next time. If you want to see more videos like this, check out the aquatic playlists on my channel because there's hundreds of videos on there. Thanks very much for watching. Boom, there we go. Plex in bottle. Plex out of bottle.