Adding Fish to a Fish Tank

"O.k. Main, main thing with any part of setting up a tank is conservative. I'm not conservative. But we want to be conservative in how we do all these things. In transporting the fish to your tank, think conservative. You don't want to just get the fish, obviously, and just dump them in there. A couple of reasons. Main one being that the temperatures have to be the same. So what we're going to do, we're going to take that fish bag, float it in your tank. And one quality about water is that it changes temperature very slowly so that works in our advantage in this hobby. So we're going to take the fish bag, float it, open it up, and do nothing other than just let that bag, with the fish inside this bag, float in your tank. The water that they?re going to go into for about twenty minutes. Now, obviously, if you have a lot of, if you have a much larger amount of water, you're going to maybe make that forty-five minutes because that's just more water. But for most purposes, fifteen, twenty minutes. You're going to want to float that bag right there. What will happen in that fifteen, twenty minutes is that this temperature inside the bag will get the same temperature as the water it's going into. Now after about fifteen, twenty minutes it's a good idea to take some of your water that it's going into and just put it in. I might be better to have a cup, but if you're going to use your hand like I'm doing here, just make sure your hands are clean, obviously. So that allows the fish to get used to the water that they're actually going to be going into. Again, we're just doing the conservative thing here and kind of breaking the transition down into little pieces here. So after this has been floating about a half hour, very important point, get a little net. Don't just dump the water into the tank. This is especially crucial if your just starting out. Because while those fish where in that bag, ammonia is building up, some of their slime was coming off. So that's probably not a good idea to just dump the water in. So what we usually recommend is just getting your net out and, again, keep conservative. Just net them in there and as quickly as possible just right into the water. Just like that. It's o.k. if you get two or three, two fishes in. That's fine, of course. And there we got some happy fishes in there, and they're going to quickly acclimate to that environment there that you've set up. So, there we go, happy fishes."