Will lead hurt my fish?

[zahc]

I got this cushball thing, that I wanted to put in with Brutus like an anemone thing. It had a hollow core, so I cut a slit in it and put a 1oz barrel sinker in it so it would sink. Do you think that will  dissolve and slowly poison him? It's mostly sealed up in the rubber.

[TarpleyG]

Why don't you use a stainless sinker instead?

[zahc]

I seem to be short on stainless sinkers. I could use a big hex nut I guess.

[onions!]

Use a rock.Stay away from limestone & you'll be fine.Cheap too.

[charby]

you named your fish?

[zahc]

Yeah, he's an immature shovelhead catfish.

[charby]

Yeah, he's an immature shovelhead catfish.

Another name for a Flathead Catfish right? If thats the case better add a few live goldfish or guppies for a snack for it.

Charby

[zahc]

Yeah shovelhead, flathead, same thing. I rescued him from the keel of a pontoon boat back when I worked at Seneca Lake. I put him in a coffee cup. He was about two inches back then, now he's about six. I just put two goldfish in his 50 gallon tank, took a shower, and they are both gone. I haven't found anything that I can put in his tank that he won't eat or try to kill. All he does is sit in his sewer pipe all day unless there is food. A very boring pet.

[CatsDieNow]

A friend of mine had an (essentially) floor to ceiling homemade aquarium that took up the length of his living room wall.  It was made from inch-thick surplus plate glass from a shopping mall construction project.   Country boy that he was, he kept it stocked with bass and bluegill and not some frilly, sissy fish.  The bass would eat the bluegill.  Both kinds of fish would attempt to escape periodically, and whenever you came accross a fish on the carpet, you had to throw it back in.

Brutus needs some bluegill friends.

Aren't most sinkers made of tugsten, bismuth, or some other "green" metal nowdays?

[zahc]

No, they are still largely lead. I prefer tungsten sinkers for bass fishing because they are denser, but they are almost a buck a pop.

During the summer I keep a mesh minnow trap in a closeby pond and feed him baby bluegills or whatever that catches. It's frozen over now, so it's goldfish till spring. He likes the live ones a lot better, they are much harder to catch, sometimes it takes him days or weeks to catch a particularly quick specimen. Storebought goldfish are unbelievably dumb; I imagine that's why wild live bait works so much better than store-bought minnows.

[charby]

Nature of a flathead to hide unless its time to feed. If you wanted something more lively should have put a school of fathead minnows in the tank instead of the flathead.

I used to smallmouth fish this river while I was in Univ of Northern Iowa, every beer can i saw on the river bottom I would pull up and dump the water out looking for a small flathead. A couple trips out and I found two for the bottom of my tank full of S American Cichlids.

when you flathead gets bigger he will need bluegills for substance, goldfish will only be appetizer.

[zahc]

Don't your catfish eat the cichlids? I even tried putting other catfish in there and he harrassed them till they died.

[charby]

It was a few years ago since I had fish, but the tank had 20 convicts in it and up to several hundred fry, convicts are like rabbits.

The flatheads left each other alone and the cichlids alone, my convicts were 3" in size the flatheads were maybe a skinny 2" Had them together for over a year when one day I came home from long weekend and all my fish were floating upside down. No one else was home that weekend and none of the clocks were blinking so I am clueless how the fish died.  I always check the various chemical levels of the water, etc.

I cleaned up the tank, threw away all the rocks, dead fish, heater and filter. Bought all new stuff except for tank and hood, filled the tank up, waited a month and go some new fish (no cichlids, silver dollars, tetras and other weenie fish), I had them for 9 months and needed to move across the state for a job so I gave my fish to a 5th grade classroom who lost their last fish to old age and the tank and accessories to a friend of mine.

Charby

[garyk/nm]

"Will lead hurt my fish?"
OK, since no one else took the bait (hehe);
I guess it depends on the velocity.

[Harold Tuttle]

i use lead free pipe solder to keep things down in my tank

[Guest]

If it causes brain damage, how are you going to know? He'll quit doing advanced calculus?