My pet bullhead kinda urgent

[Landon P 0]

recently I have been trying to raise a bullhead. Got him out of my bait bucket on Thursday. He is in a 5 gallon bucket that has rocks, sand, sticks and a cave. I have an aquarium air rator in the bucket also. Water temp is around 50 degrees. When i checked it out today the bullhead was on the top of the water ( not normal at all) and was swimming very erratically. He has a big grey spot on his gills extending downtime body a bit. Also put a minnow in as a tank mate. Minnow is fine. I have only feed them once on Tuesday with fish flakes and I didnt give them very many, maybe 2 or 3 that i had crushed up. Anyone have any idea what happened and how I can fix it? 

[Steeldrifter 0]

Combination of a couple things there Landon. One is is ammonia. Fish waste creates ammonia, then the ammonia turns to nitrite, and then that turns to less harmful nitrate which is then removed by weekly water changes and fresh declorinated water is then added to replace it.. That's called the nitrogen cycle in the aquarium hobby. Without any sort of cycled media in a filter, then you have no means of transforming the more harmful ammonia & nitrite into the less harmful nitrates. The other issue is stress. Fish get stressed pretty easy especially when they are in too small a container. A 5g bucket is way too small for any sort of time frame over 1 day for a fish like that, if you plan to keep him you'd need to move him at this size to at least a 20g long tank, and then when he's bigger a 75g-90g. But the main problem at the moment is the lack of a cycled filter. That's probably where 90% of the problem is coming from right now.

[Meeshka 0]

Another issue might be it may be illegal to remove live wild native species from home waters and keep them in aquariums.  It is here because there is such a fear that it will be dumped into a water body that it dosent belong.  We have that with perch being introduced into many of our stocked trout lakes.

[Landon P 0]

46 minutes ago, Meeshka said:

Another issue might be it may be illegal to remove live wild native species from home waters and keep them in aquariums.  It is here because there is such a fear that it will be dumped into a water body that it dosent belong.  We have that with perch being introduced into many of our stocked trout lakes.

I got it from a bp when I went to get minnows. Somehow he snuck in.

[Bill_729 0]

5 hours ago, Meeshka said:

Another issue might be it may be illegal to remove live wild native species from home waters and keep them in aquariums.  It is here because there is such a fear that it will be dumped into a water body that it dosent belong.  We have that with perch being introduced into many of our stocked trout lakes.

You can do whatever you want with legally caught fish in Indiana as long as you don't release them into public bodies of water (at least that is my recollection of the regulations).  I have no intent to do anything of the sort, but those are the rules.

 

[jcozzz 0]

On 9/23/2020 at 1:00 PM, Meeshka said:

Another issue might be it may be illegal to remove live wild native species from home waters and keep them in aquariums.  It is here because there is such a fear that it will be dumped into a water body that it dosent belong.  We have that with perch being introduced into many of our stocked trout lakes.

No offence but perch,a native to central north america is the "invasive fish"in STOCKED trout lakes?Here in Illinois you are allowed to keep native fish for aquariums.I have seen bass in pet stores.

[Guest]

 

Kinda in Mikey’s territory....Very curious to onlookers.  When you photo with this IPhone it saves the location.  Pretty nifty!