Whats the funniest NewB thing you did?

Along the lines of water and electricity not mixing....

Though not a NewB to fish keeping I did manage to make a big booboo.
I was fiddling with the light on my nano and accidentally dropped it in the water. It's was a 15 watt fluorescent light....I got shocked as did the entire tank. I acted fast grabbed it out and turned the light off at the switch.

I thought I lost all my corals (not that I had much) but they made it through (even the anthelia which admittedly looked pretty dead for a while)...but everything made it fish and inverts alike. Big relief for a stupid mistake...

Still a bit new to SW but when I'd just started getting corals I was trying to keep a loose Kenya tree upright, so I stuck the base in a shell...that base then started to just melt away...I took it out and it has recovered since then...can't even tell it had ever been truncated...lol

 

Me: Can I keep this Clarkii clown with my 2 Percula clowns?
LFS: Sure, they are the same type of fish. They'll get along just fine.
Me: Sold!
Next day: two Perc clown funerals hosted by the clean up crew....

 

LFS cannot be trusted. i bought my first 12gal aquapod. after the tank finished cycleing i decided it was time to add some fish. went to the lfs and told them i had a 12gal and wanted to add 2 fish. as we're talking we walk by the awesome 120gal tank. so of course i ask if i can have 2 of those fish in that big tank and will they be ok in a 12 gal nano. he says sure they're small arent they?! went home with 2 powder blue tangs. needless to say 1 didnt make it for very long. the other has been relocated to a friends 90gal. Thanks LFS.

 

I read that coralline can be redish so when this redish/brown stuff grew in my tank after my cycle I was so excited only to realize it was diatoms...

 

when i first started i put everything the sand the dried rock and then i proceeded to fill it up with well water that we have because i thought i could just poor in the salt after i put in the water so i filled up the entire 55 gallon tank.then i called my fish store to asked them what do i do next and they said to drain it out because i was not supposed to do that apparently lol

 

Yeah agreed most fish stores can't be trusted. A local fish store new i had just started my tank, and I was in to buy my second fish. Keep in mind my tank was only 4 months old and to be honest I didn't really have a clue to what I was doing. And I saw a really cool powder blue tang, And I asked him all the questions, and he said it would be fine to put him in my tank and he'd survive... Well lets just say a week later I flushed 70 dollars down the toilet.

 

I got a 20 gallon tank, stand, 2 bulb light(no name), canister filter (ehiem 2213), glass top, live rock 15 LBS and live sand (x2 15 lb bags) total cost from my LFS 876.00!!!!!!! no joke talk about getting me good on that deal LOL and to top it all off the told me to start cycling my tank with 6 blue damsels..... DO NOT LISTEN TO THE LFS IN VALDOSTA GA!!!!

 

When I did WC on my 29, I usually would take off the lid to the tank, and put the lght resting on the corner of the (top) tank. One time, while doing a water change I wasn't paying attention and I bumped the light. Of course, it couldn't fall behind the tank..it had to fall INTO the tank. I immediately turned it off, pulled the light from the tank, and dried it off. Thanks fully, it worked again. I also had just one fish, a CB angel. I bet that scared her a bit :haha

 

i grabbed a gallon of what i thought was my r.o. top off water and dumped it in a 55g reef....then as i watched all my fish sh*t themselves i realized that it was a gallon of the concentrated calcium i make myself....can you say DUMB!!

 

This isn't something I've done, but when I was at a local pet store that sells marine fish, there was a woman talking to an employee about setting up a 20 gallon aquarium. The guy told her that she would need to start by adding 6 yellowtail damselfish to the tank, which she would leave in the tank for a month, and then be able to keep with even more fish, or return for "a little credit." Then he told her that it would be fine for her to keep a blue tang in it, basically saying that "While they get bigger, you probably won't have to really worry about it for a couple of years." Then he told her that she could get by with only a cheap filter, and that things like live rock and protein skimmers were only for specialized tanks like reef tanks.

The only good piece of information he said was, "You might want to have a bigger tank than a 20 gallon, but only because you might want more fish than a 20 gallon can hold." According to his logic, though, I could have 18 damsels and 3 blue tangs in my 60 gallon tank. I guess I'm set for a while.

While I understand that this advice might have been considered good advice about 30 years ago, before all sorts of advances in marine aquaria had been made, today it really seems like terrible advice, even to a second-time beginner like myself.

I can only hope he was an ignorant employee and not the owner.