Very early on I found fish clubs, where you had people who had been keeping fish for decades before I started, and folks who specialized in certain types of fish that were almost never seen in stores -
KILLIFISH!!! But I also loved the other types of fish. Pretty much everything fascinated me. The books told me where the fish came from, but the people I met told me how they lived in the wild. Some of these people actually went and collected fish, you see. I guess I lucked into meeting the right people at the right time.
Most of the people I knew were big water changers. However, these were people who bred fish. The general consensus among community tank people was that once a month, and then only if it looked dirty. I think the fact that community tanks actually can get by with fewer
water changes caused this attitude. The limits quoted for
Nitrates these days are from the Marine hobby, where the fish really are much more sensitive to those chemicals. In FW, the tolerance can be nearly 5-6 times as much for most of your common species, without harm.
The term "nitrogen cycle" didn't even really enter the freshwater hobby until the 80s or early 90s. It came in with some of the Malawian
Cichlid keeping. Someone had noticed the similarity between these and Marine environments. Marine keepers were already "cycling" their tanks with
live sand and
live rock before overloading them with fish. Malawi tanks, with their lack of vegetation, presented a similar opportunity. How it managed to spread to the community tank hobby I do not know, but in a relatively short time everyone was convinced that it was necessary. I suspect that the advent of the Internet was somehow related. (IMO, it was not and is not always necessary.) It was in the late 90s that they first started marketing bottled bacteria for FW. It had to be kept refrigerated, but the marketing said it would "instantly" start the cycle in an aquarium. Some tests showed it doing just that; others, not so much. Again, there are other factors that probably made it work inconsistently.
Both then and now, the most important route to knowledge is people. Back then, the really good people were fewer, but more widespread. With the Internet, there are perhaps too many people, and it is difficult for the beginner to choose the right path. You will have to go down a couple of them for yourself to see where they lead. If it leads to fortune, you can learn from it. If it leads to disaster, you can learn even more.
