Play Video

Aquashella Dallas 2019: Let’s Look at All the Cool Fish

By Prime Time Aquatics on

Jason: Hello everyone. This is Jason from Prime Time Aquatics. In this video we are going to be looking at Aquashella Dallas 2019. It was a fantastic weekend and my favorite thing about the weekend was meeting you. Thank you so much if you had a chance to stop by, if you didn't, we're going to be doing Aquashella again in Chicago in August, it's going to be a lot of fun, hope you can stop by then. If you're new to the channel, consider subscribing. We do a lot of science-related fish keeping topics, water parameters, how to breed fish, with 60 tanks in our fish room, there's always something exciting to look at.

This was the line on Saturday morning. You could see Jay Wilson, he's trying to get everybody hyped up. It was a long line, went on for on and on way past our field of view.

I would highly recommend if you're going to go to Aquashella in Chicago, definitely think about doing the pre-ticket sales, buy the tickets ahead of time just because it's a busy event.

This is what it looks like when you first walk in, it's cool, it's similar to what was happening in Chicago last year, but they changed it up a little bit. Always looks great when you walk in, it's just a really coll thing to see.

You could see here they got the little Dallas insignia here with the Aquashella sign, very cool thing. I'll give you a real quick tour here, we'll speed things up and then we'll take a closer look.

[music]

Now that we've got that quick look out of the way, here we got L.R.Bretz Aquatics, LRB Aquatics. Right here we have this cool dinosaur display, a lot of stuff for the kids, it was definitely a family-like event. Here we got Mike from AquaPro's, he is doing a demonstration on some of his cool hardscaping abilities. Then we look over here, they had mermaids, the kids got to take pictures with mermaids.

Here's our YouTube booth, it was the Fishtube booth. A lot of people hanging out there, they had pictures and everything. There was a kids corner for face painting and all kinds of stuff. This is a really cool tank, this is a display tank with some cichlids and we've got some silver dollars in here as well, just a really relaxing tank to look at.

I enjoyed this one quite a bit, it was set up kind of close to the floor, looked to be, I don't know exactly what, but probably somewhere around 150 gallon or so, maybe bigger. They had electric blue acara in here, just a really nice aquascape tank. It was just a cool looking mix of fish. Now I wouldn't necessarily put electric blue acara with mbuna cichlids in fact, I definitely wouldn't don't do that long term, but it was nice as a display as you can see here.

I'm really liking that lighter background, I may have to try that on a tank or two. This was interesting, it was a big giant circular tank, we can see here with hundreds and hundreds of neon tetras and they're all kind of doing their thing schooling. It was really interesting and they did this all weekend long. There were also some really pretty rams as well as you can see. They showed off some really nice color with this lighter substrate.

It was just a very nice tank. I would say it was probably of my favorite tanks to look at throughout the entire week. I went back here a number of times just to check it out and watch the fish. Again you can see these rams, they are absolutely beautiful, they're showing off great color, really nice use of the aquascaping materials that they had. Again, one of my favorite tanks. Just take a look at these fish.

[music]

This was really cool, this was a flowerhorn competition. A lot of different types , there were some color variations that I hadn't seen before, really pretty fish. Now I know some of you may not be into flowerhorns, you may not be into that large nuchal hump on their head but the colors were really interesting, the personalities were pretty cool. Again some of these variations I hadn't seen before, this was a really pretty fish here. Again, just take a look at some of these fish, they're really nice-looking.

[music]

These were some cool-looking fish, the Chinese high-fin banded shark is pretty awesome. This is a nice looking cichlid here. A lot of variety, a lot of things to see. More fresh water than there was in Chicago last year. This is kind of interesting, so here the betta that we're going to show you, it was actually quite expensive and when I first heard the price that this betta was commanding, I was kind of shocked.

What's interesting about it, if you take a close look, what do you see? If you notice, the tail fin is actually split, it's a split fin so it almost kind of looks like a fancy goldfish from behind. I'm not exactly sure if this is true, but a number of people were saying this was valued somewhere around $7,000, or at least maybe the pair was valued at $7,000. This is the female, then I'll show you the male here shortly.

Not sure if I would spend that kind of money on any fish at all. Here you can see that just temporarily put these fish together, so we could see them both, we can see their display and then they went right back into their original original tank. This was a nice cool looking display tank here, nicely aquascaped, relaxing to look at. I thought it was, again it's a nice looking tank.

Here we have that same tank, but from the side. What's interesting about this as you're going to see in a moment is it's actually two tanks in one. This is the other side, it's a saltwater tank and then you could see them both together. That was very interesting, side by side, you've got a fresh water and a saltwater setup. If you're into shrimp, they had plenty of shrimp for people to see, in fact, they had a shrimp competition as well.

Now, this was a large tank, these fish were for sale, again large monster type fish, you got the pacu, and the parrot cichlid, the arowana, the shovelnose cat, we got a couple of oscars down there as well. Most of these fish are far too large for the average fish keeper, but it's pretty cool if you're into the larger types of fish. You see the knife here, pretty cool. These fish were on the larger side, this was a pretty big tank.

This was the Custom Aquariums display, this is a really cool display, there's a part of me that wants to do something like this in the near future. Maybe have some type of lizard or frogs in that upper part there. This was nice, some nice tetras, you got some angelfish there. These were really cool displays as well. I really enjoyed the dragon bloods and the peacock cichlids, oh I'm sorry, the OB cichlids in this tank with some yellow labs, nice mix of colors.

Again, I'm liking that lighter background, what's really cool about these displays is that background changes colors. Might not be for everybody, but I think it's kind of interesting. Here was the other tank that they had set up. I'm curious, is this something that you would be into? This kind of background with the changing colors, is that something you would do? Would love to hear your opinions down in the comment section below, if this is is the type of tank you would set up or would you prefer something that's a little bit more natural? I did like the black neons, I think they're a very underrated fish, something I really enjoy looking at. We've got some black neons in our fish that are super super old, they live a long time, a nice mix with this angelfish. Then here we see again from the side there's a lot of depth going on here. This is the other side where the angelfish were kind of hanging out a little bit.

Again, love the mix of fish. This is another smaller display tank, like that one a lot. Again, got some smaller tetras in here, there's some rummy nose. Then over here this was another Custom Aquariums' display tank, this was a saltwater tank. I really like seahorses, I think if I was doing saltwater I would probably lean towards something like this. Probably not the best thing to start out with.

I'm not saying I would do saltwater, but they're really cool-looking. This tank was interesting, another large circular tank, it seemed to be the theme where there was a couple of large circular tanks then of course we just saw that large hexagon. Again, we've got some rams in here, we've got some tetras. What was interesting is the rams, it looked like a pair had been forming in the, there was a kind of a depression in the rock area back here. I thought I saw them trying to breed at one point, which is kind of cool, something you don't see every single day.

Then this was a nice little display, I like the size of this tank. I asked the vendor if they knew where you could get something like this and they said the tank was no longer available. It's really cool, I like the aquascape, it's a really long tank but skinny and not very tall, so it would be very easy to work on, but you still get a decent amount of surface area.

All right everybody, that was Aquashella 2019, appreciate your watching. If you like this video, share, subscribe and we'll see you in the next one.

[00:10:28] [END OF AUDIO]

About Prime Time Aquatics

Prime Time Aquatics is dedicated to those who love fresh water fish and invertebrates. They cover how to care for and breed fish, review products, answer general fish questions, as well as, give best practices in fish keeping.

View More

Connect with Prime Time Aquatics