Angelfish!

Oh dear, I've done it now - I stopped by the LCS (local chain store) and saw that they had a tank full of juvie angelfish for sale, and there was this one extremely cute black-and-white marbled fish in there... so I bought it! I can think of several reasons why I probably shouldn't have (I have a lot of fish already, I have neon tetras, angelfish get bigger than I was going to limit my fish in this tank to, adult-size-wise) but the cuteness swayed me. This is why it's a bad idea to apply the retail therapy urge to pet stores. I should go buy shoes instead, but they're always more expensive and I can never find any good ones. So it's a new fish! I'm already suffering a bit of designer regret, as the black on this fish will assuredly make it blend in to the background in my tank, but I'm hoping the white marbling will give it enough pop to really make a statement. I should have gone for one of the white ones instead, but they just didn't look as adorable as this one. I have him in quarantine for the next month in anticipation of whatever outbreak of hideous disease this fish is no doubt carrying (actually the tanks there looked pretty good; the store is on a "good" side of town). He seems to be taking everything in stride and doesn't look stressed at all, which is an excellent sign. I might let him off after three weeks if he doesn't start showing any symptoms of parasites or ich.

His body (minus finnage) is about the size of a quarter - way too small to eat any of my precious neons and otos. Hopefully by the time he's grown big enough, he'll be so used to eating pellet food with the rest of the fish that it won't ever occur to him that a neon tetra is a nice snack!

In cichlid news, I have one of the cherry red zebras also in quarantine to recover from excessive fin damage. I'm hoping to bulk her up as well - only the dominant one has put on enough weight after the transfer. I'm hoping to find some more saulosi, so this fish will stay out for a while in anticipation of going back in with a larger group.

I'm afraid I'm too tired/lazy to post pics tonight, and in any case the QT isn't a pretty tank.

Puddles

Last night I got bit by the meddling bug again after reading through a thread discussion on flow, and decided to switch my 75g XP3's position back to paired intake/output. Unfortunately the hoses now sport a Hydor ETH heater, and getting them to play nicely under the tank was difficult. So difficult, it turns out, that I woke up this morning to a moderately-sized puddle on my living room floor. Let's hear it for polyurethane-sealed floors! So after towel-mopping and a quick check of the canister (leak mysteriously not apparent), I went off to work, and came home to another moderately sized puddle on the floor. Now I had time to really investigate, and found that I must not have gotten the quick-release seated correctly, because water was leaking slowly out the power cord hole. Two hours and a major canister cleaning and hose adjusting later, I think I've solved that problem, but now one of the joins on my Hydor is slowly dripping. That should be a lot easier to fix, at least! I'm sure it got a little loose while I was twisting things about. The hose barbs are not very secure, unfortunately.

On the planted side, various stems have come loose after the last trimming and need to be replanted, and the crypts are doing their best to fill in as a carpet - I'm pleased about that, since they were looking terribly sparse for so long. But they seem to have grown their root systems to the point where they're happy now! I ought to give them a Flourish tab or two next time I'm armpit-deep in that tank. I think the crypt spiralis heartily approves of being moved from "under" the Amazon sword to its own spot on the back wall - I haven't seen any more leaves shed from that plant at all since the move. I need to do another drastic H. pinnatifida pruning - I hate having to cut down the large stem that Tex Gal shipped me, but I suspect it's necessary for the plant to recover from the neglect I subjected it to. I'm planning to move some things around a bit to give it its own "patch" to grow in! The ozelot sword is responding well to the harsh pruning I've been giving it - the leaves are coming in thick and fast, and it even appears to be starting a new flower spike. I harvested a baby plant off the end of the first one, although there are still three baby plants on it, those haven't grown any roots yet that I can see. They may need to be touching water before they grow roots, but I don't want to cut them from the parent plant before they've rooted - catch 22.

Shrimps!

A week or so ago I added three amano shrimp to this tank, but didn't see carapace nor antenna of them afterward, so I was thinking that they got eaten by the other tank denizens. Today I was pleasantly surprised to find two of them chilling on the filter outtake after a water change! I'm happy to know that at least those two made it, and it gives me hope that the third is hanging around somewhere I just can't see, too.

The other piece of news about this tank is that I'm thinking I'll make an effort to more consistently clean the filter sponges. Planted tanks are huge waste producers, and I don't have the "full system" - sand doesn't do much for you in waste-recycling capacity. I may have to pick up some laterite and seed the substrate with it as an informal experiment.

On the cichlid front, I managed to use the fish trap to catch the socolofi! The clever little nuisance was so wary of going in to get the tasty treat that I had to leave it in the tank overnight, and he even managed to escape the first time I went to grab it! But then I managed to get it out with him in it, so now he and the bullied acei are ready to be rehomed. Hopefully the community will be better for those two fishes' absence - the male saulosi has already colored up quite strongly! That particular fish was just too aggressive and territorial for my setup. Now I just need some more saulosi females, I need some more yellow to balance out all the orange from the red zebras.

Pleco grotto

This corner never comes out well in full tank shots, since it's shadowed by the ozelot. I picked up this nice piece of driftwood from my LFS, to give my starlight bristlenose someplace to sleep! This keeps him from trying to dig his own spot somewhere I don't want him to. A lot of other fish like to swim through the tunnel when they can! The craggy surface proved the perfect place to glue down some java fern - eventually the wood should be nearly completely cloaked by the leaves. They would probably grow a lot faster if I pruned the ozelot back more often!

DIY lid

So on my 20L fry grow-out tank, I mounted the HOB filter on the side, rather than on the back of the tank. The main reason for doing it this way is to encourage a tank-long flow pattern; the full length of the 20L water column wouldn't be stirred very well by a single back-mounted HOB. And since this tank is on the bottom of my 55 stand, it's far easier to access the filter if it's on the side rather than the back. But that means that all the commercial tank tops won't fit - they're all configured for back-mounted hardware. Enter the wisdom of the internet: the DIY side-opening lid, constructed from a piece of plastic molding and your choice of clear flat stuff from Lowe's. I ended up going with acrylic - I would have preferred polycarbonate (Lexan) but that stuff's more expensive, and unfortunately it looked like Lowe's was out of a lot of their stock options when I went shopping, so in order to "waste" the least amount of material when I got the panels cut, I was pretty much stuck with the Duraplex. It's a little thinner than would be optimal, I suspect, but as long as I don't try to rest things on it, it should hold just fine. For added stability one could glue down the tracks, but that also means you'll have a hard time getting the thing off if you need to, so that's right out.


Oh yeah, I also added a thin layer of sand and some rock hiding places, since the fry are from two different batches and the little ones need hiding places from the big one! Half an hour after install, you can see the lid trapping humidity - hopefully this will drastically cut down on water loss through evaporation this winter.


Now all I have to do is figure out a background for this tank...

Pruning

Did some pruning this week, while doing water changes on the 75 and the 10g quarantine. I ended up taking out one on the Amazon sword plants and putting it in the 75! That tank gets a little indirect sunlight from north-facing windows, and it has a T8 and a T12 for lighting. I gave the transplanted sword a good pruning and tucked a Flourish root tab under it, but that's all the TLC it will be getting. I'm hoping that as the only plant in a tank full of fish, there'll be enough nutrients with just the root tab to sustain it. Since African cichlids are diggers, it's not practical to plant a tank with them. Everyone liked the new look - the large plant softens the barren look of the rock "reef" and makes the colors really pop. Barring a few exploratory nibbles it looks like the fish will coexist pretty well!

While trying to adjust to a new work schedule, I ended up not adding the fertilizer to the planted tank. Most of the plants did okay, but not the H. pinnatifida (large serrated leaves, center background) - major potassium deficiency showed up. Hopefully properly dosing the tank in the morning will help it come back! I don't want to lose this plant, since I got it from another aquatic gardener. In the meantime, the java fern was busy reproducing, so I'm hoping the little plantlets will eventually grow into a huge, awesome mass for me.

Three acei fry now live in the 20 long underneath the planted tank - with a 13" base, it's a perfect size to go under the 55g on the same stand. That gives me more options, since the 10g is too small to comfortably grow out those fish, and I need the 10g for quarantine! Although the second-largest acei male is still there - I may trade him in to a nearby store (only one that gives you anything for trade-ins, although I really wish the closer store would give something for trade-ins, their quality is a lot better!). He's a lovely fish, but the Tank Boss really hates him. Bossfish is fairly timid when observed by people - but he comes out just to harass this smaller fish if they're together in the same tank. It's a shame, but they just don't get along. Tiny McTinyfish is actually at least two and a half inches now - pretty big! I think he's about three years old - slow grower due to competition for food from his parents, no doubt.

Speaking of cichlids and personalities, my German blue ram male divorced the female to pair up with the golden morph female! I dislike this outcome, since I want to eventually have two pairs, one the classic color and one the gold morph. I tried getting another gold ram, but he was a new fish at the store and didn't thrive - a few weeks later I found him floating. Last week I spotted another one - I may end up going for that one and, if I can catch the female, quarantining them together to see if she might not prefer a male her own color. This sort of thing is why experts recommend buying juvies and letting them pair up naturally, but I haven't seen a source locally. What's even more a shame, is that the German blue female gets a washed-out look to her colors when nearby the male now - she had such beautiful color before. Definitely need to adjust things there.

The baby plants on the ozelot sword plant's flower stalk haven't put roots out yet, but when they do I'm thinking of selling them to other hobbyists, and maybe seeing if I can't keep one as a houseplant! As far as I know, the Echidnodorus species can live both immersed and emmersed, thanks to the seasonal flooding of the Amazon river. The plant is definitely oversized for my aquarium - a 200+ gallon would be more to scale, or an outdoor pond during the summer!

The dwarf gouramis are fighting with each other again - I suspect the pruning and rearranging has altered the desirability of the tank territories and now they're duking it out for the best spot.

Apologies!

Well, things got busy at work and I didn't have much time or enthusiasm for updating. The tanks themselves got neglected for a while, too. Things didn't go too badly - more algae as expected, but not plague levels. The Amazon swords started developing white patches in addition to algae breakouts, and the Hygrophilia pinnatifida really suffered from potassium deficiency. The water sprite got some pinholes as well but not to the same extent. The E. "ozelot" actually grew a flower stalk and has started putting out baby emmersed plants on it. When I finally did get around to the maintenance on the planted tank, I ended up pruning about a gallon-bucket's worth of greenery out of the tank. More needs to be taken out too, though I'm not sure yet how much.

The fish seem to be doing okay - the checkerboard barbs are especially frisky tonight. I suspect the female may be ready to spawn, from the way the two males are acting. The local fish shop actually has some checkerboard barbs for sale, but I decided not to get any, though I'll keep the three I have.

I've also installed two Hydor ETH inline heaters on my two big tanks - surprisingly easy to do and I'm pleased with them so far. No leaks!

New babies

Well, my holding female acei spit her fry - one of which swam into the pebble pile and was rescued, one more we spotted hiding near the rocks, but couldn't catch. No telling if there will be any survivors (likely not) in the main tank, unless some fry have gotten sucked into the canister filter. (Quite possible.) I've moved the baby to the 20 long, still inside the net box due to much larger sibling (Filter Baby) already living there. Normally I wouldn't try saving these fry, but I want to rehome my beta acei male (the alpha really chases him around a lot) and hope that the kids will be female so my m/f ratio will get better. 4/1 is pretty much the exact opposite of what you want!

I tried making a fish trap out of a 2L soda bottle but it caught the wrong fish, and the next fish it caught figured out how to bust out, so I need to tape it together a bit more firmly before trying again. I also bought dorky yellow pond gloves to wear during tank maintenance - my skin's been suffering from the constant immersion so this should help a lot.

One thing about aquariums is unless things are going wrong nothing much tends to happen when they're stable... I have some more fish in quarantine for the planted tank but it will be a while before they get moved over.

New plants from Texas

My first foray into hobbyist trading: I bought two new kinds of plants from a fellow Aquatic Plant Central forum user. The buy: Hygrophilia pinnatifida, and a "gold" variety of Anubias barteri nana.

Cladophora

Add this to the list of "things I wish I'd known before starting a planted tank": cladophora algae is impossible to get rid of. It's the cockroach of the planted aquarium world. You get it, your tank is doomed to have it forever.

Well, I guess this just means that for the rest of this tank's existence, I'll be adding "manually remove cladophora algae during water change" to my list of maintenance chores. The nasty stuff is even growing in the canister filter! Guess the indirect sunlight the tank gets is enough to penetrate the tinted XP3 plastic. Perhaps I should tape some black plastic to the filter to stop photosynthesizing organisms like clado from growing in there. The last thing I need is a reservoir of it!

I'm really beginning to hate Java moss. The clado hitchhiked its way into the tank on that, I think; but honestly it could have been from any number of plants, since I didn't do a dip treatment on any of them. I think when I do a new fish purchase (after my hospital tank is cleared out of the current inhabitants) I'll add a rosy barb and amano shrimp to the purchase list - both those critters will nibble on cladophora, where my oto cats, ancistrus, and nerite definitely aren't helping. I can't even get the ancistrus to eat cucumber instead of munching the Amazon swords! Small price to pay for having a cool fish, though. He hasn't done too much damage to the plants, and seems to concentrate on one leaf at a time.

I fiddled with the filter output and managed to set it so that the surface wasn't being circulated properly towards the skimmer, so this morning when I came downstairs the dwarf gourami had started building bubble nests. (Sorry for the lack of photo - I was busy this morning, and I don't think of taking pictures nearly as often as I should!) Much to their dismay I promptly fixed the outflow so that the skimmer will work properly.

On the CO2 front, I feel like my yeast isn't producing as much as it should be, but I am getting a bit of pearling on the swords so it's not as low as I feared. I've decided to get some Flourish Excel from Amazon to add carbon to the tank, which I'll deliver by spot-treating the clado as part of my control strategy. I did some mental math, and if I restrict myself to using 5mL/day (usual maintenance dose), I'll use up my on-order 500mL bottle in about three months. At $10/bottle, it will take five years of dosing at that level before the cost of the Excel will equal the start-up cost of a pressurized CO2 system. Guess who's not going pressurized anytime soon? I have no idea what the next five years will bring (kids, I hope!) but I can imagine not having a planted tank in that time. After all, I'm mostly in this for the fish, and freshwater fish don't require a lot of expensive equipment! I've set up entire aquariums for less than it would cost for a pressurized CO2 system.

The plants are really beginning to fill in - trim-and-replant on the H difformis is the main contributor. I have a few new plants on their way from another hobbyist that I'll need to find space for - another stem plant (H pinnatifada) and another variety of Anubias. I'll probably uproot some of the difformis in the middle for the pinnatifada, possibly moving the driftwood there forward as well for some more background space. Not sure yet where the Anubias gold will go; I'm also keeping half an eye out for another piece of driftwood for the right side of the tank, which would make a good perch for another Anubias.

Current photo, showing the bristlenose's complete disdain for the cucumber:


At least the otos, nerite, and one of the panda cories appreciates it. Even the blue rams will nibble on the cucumber now and then. Maybe the pleco likes it after it's spent a couple days in the tank; if the pattern holds true by tomorrow nothing but the rind and a few floating bits will be left. But I never see him eating it!

Keeping an eye on things

The parasites in the planted tank seem to be gone - but I dosed again just to be sure. The antibiotic food treatment for the other tank will take a lot longer to show results, I suspect. Ironically, removing the largest of the subdominant male acei from the cichlid tank seems to have reduced aggression quite a bit - and my one female is holding again after quite a long time without breeding. I'm a little worried that I may have some parasites in the cichlid tank as well, from the behavior of one of the cherry red zebras; I'll be keeping a close watch on them try to figure out exactly what's distressing the one that's keeping her fins clamped.

Finally, a pic of the cichlids without that ridiculous purple light (properly disposed of at the county dump's HHW recycling facility):


The holding female acei is the purple-with-yellow-fins fish low in the foreground - she seems most comfortable in that spot, which is odd for a holding female. Perhaps all the better hiding spots are taken! The red fish are not quite so red in person, but otherwise the colors are fairly true. All the fish in this tank but the bristlenose pleco are visible in the photo.

Medication works!

I am happy to report that applications of the appropriate medication to both tanks have caused lessening of symptoms in all my fish - the panda cories are much livelier and no longer have visible parasites attached to their fins! The Parasite Guard made my water green for a few hours but that seems to have mostly dissipated. I'm still planning a second dose according to package directions, don't want to end up breeding any resistant colonies of pests. :P I'm also not going to try dosing my K+traces while I'm medicating, I don't know enough to know whether or not they might react together!

I'm finding it interesting that my H. difformis is growing so much differently for me now than when I had a lone T12 bulb above this tank. (Big surprise, right? LOL) Before, it was growing like a tree (see earlier posts), now it thinks it's a ground cover:


I also have a picture of the algae that's mildly bothering me:


Also no problems with the driftwood from the Cozy Clownfish shop, whether that's because it's a piece marketed for aquariums or because I boiled it before putting it in, I'm just glad I don't have to add "strange things growing on newly added driftwood" to my list of concerns.

Why you should quarantine

So: one panda cory died - symptoms varied but quite possibly due to internal parasites. The other panda cories seem to have flukes, an external parasite - and it took me a long, long time to figure that out. Unfortunately Googling "fish disease" is not terribly helpful. "fish parasite" was even less helpful. But I have figured out a product to purchase - which I'm going to have to use on the whole tank, since my QT tank currently has occupants, and I want to make sure all the fish are treated just in case. In the 75 gallon, I'm dealing with an outbreak of septicemia, which I'm treating with antibiotic-laced food. The likely causes in both cases? Addition of non-quarantined new fish. New lesson: do not buy stock from Centreville Aquarium, it's more trouble than it's worth. I've bought a lot of fish from PetSmart that have been healthier than what I've gotten from CA; every "live" thing I've bought from there has given me nothing but endless trouble. The cichlids are a special case; perhaps I should have done more water changes for them right after I added the new fish (strangely, none of them are showing any symptoms of illness) but I figured using Stability would give my already-established bio filter the boost it needed to handle the new load without trouble.

Note to self: quarantine. Every. Time. I wouldn't be having this trouble if I'd grabbed a couple of Tupperware boxes to use as extra quarantine tanks, I certainly have the extra HOB filters for it! I'm quite upset at myself, because I certainly knew better. At least for the cories, this would have solved my problems. I don't think I could have safely quarantined the 7 new cichlids - I don't have THAT many spare filters lying around, and I'd worry that the stress of being stuck in overcrowded boxes after having been shipped from FL would do irreparable damage.

Thankfully so far the infected fish numbers are quite small; three acei and the cories in the 55. Hopefully with increased water changes and the appropriate medication, I won't have any more losses than just the one panda corydoras. I have invested in another net box to help isolate fish; currently the baby acei is protected in one, and an albino corydoras with swim bladder trouble is in another. I'm hoping to get the sick cory to eat some of the antibiotic food. Unfortunately it wants to float.

Blue rams breeding!

Proof that your animal husbandry is up to snuff: finicky species start breeding for you. Without you doing anything special to make it happen!



The female in front of the breeding stone - eggs are visible on the stone below her.

Rearranging hardscape

I also took off the HOB(!) and moved the CO2 diffuser to the other side of the tank so that the bubble stream would be caught in the XP3's output current. The plants also got some trimming!

Retail therapy

The PetSmart in Gainesville has a nice setup - I was in there last night admiring the bettas (in particular an all-white crowntail male that wasn't albino) but I'm not going to buy a betta (because this would require another tank, which I don't really have room for) but I needed some more ferts for the planted tank. So this afternoon I swung by the Manassas aquarium store, which seems to have at least two names but goes by The Cozy Clownfish online. I suppose a betta will have to wait until a Fluval Chi falls into my lap, then I'm sure it will be fine to have another tank for a betta! LOL Unfortunately Fluval's really awesome small aquarium lines are all enormously expensive. So no plans on the horizon there.

However, I did walk out of the LFS with two new inhabitants for the planted tank: a female blue ram, and a red tiger lotus. The rams appear to have hit it off right away (I was worried that they wouldn't get along, but the store keeps the blue rams separated one per tank, so that may help with compatibility issues.) She's a quite a bit smaller than my male but he hasn't been bullying her and they've been swimming near each other a lot. I doubt any fry will survive this tank but it would be interesting if they did decide to breed!

Plecos love swords

My pleco has decided I don't feed him enough, so he's going to start munching my Amazon swords. D: So I blanched a slice of cucumber and sunk it with a lead plant weight (I don't use them in the tank, but they come with new plants so I keep them for applications like this) but the pleco has not discovered that this new thing is food. Neither has any other fish in the tank so far, but then I just fed them some flake food so they're still combing the sand for leftover flake bits. I've also started tossing the algae discs in after lights-out in and attempt to let the bottom feeders get more of them - the neons love the algae discs too but they're supposed to eat the flakes!

Today while I was doing a water change I also cleaned my XP3's impeller and housing, and I'm hoping that the cleaning has solved my air leak issue - so far it seems to have worked. I've got some silicone lubricant coming in from Amazon, using that is supposed to prolong the life of the O-rings. I certainly hope it will work!

I picked up a cheap T12 bulb at Wal-Mart today, so now the fish don't change color based on where they're swimming. Pics will have to be in a later post. The cherry reds, after I got over how HUGE they are, have really spiced up that tank with their color. They're also not skittish at all, which is great - they didn't need any time to start begging in front with the others at meal time!

New fish!

The bright, bright orange is due to the tank lighting - I added on a T12 lighting strip in addition to the T8 strip already there (18" is too wide for one strip to light the whole tank, and my fish love to swim in the area not lit by the one strip) and that bulb is some sort of plant bulb that adds a bit of purple to the light - and it makes anything remotely orange colored really pop! It's amazing - the saulosi females are yellow under the T8 and orange under the T12. If both bulbs were the same spectrum it would be better - I'll have to check if I can get a regular T12 at Wal-Mart. Trouble with keeping the purple is that I'd have to get a planted tank T8 and those are more expensive - kind of pointless for an mbuna tank too!

Movie!

Not much new going on - actually, more like I've been too busy with other things to do much more than sit and admire the tanks before bedtime. My cichlids should arrive tomorrow, but I haven't gotten a call from the shipper so I'm a little worried.

The planted tank is doing fairly well, although I have a mild ongoing outbreak of black hair algae, that seems to prefer older leaves. As I've run out of the liquid ferts I was using, I've decided to go dosing-free this week and see how things shape up - I buried a half-dozen or so more root tabs in the sand to tide the plants over. I'm pretty sure there's some imbalance or other going on - between the BHA, a couple older anubias leaves yellowing, and the cardinal plant leaves going somewhat pale, I know something's up but I'm not sure what. The crypt appears to have stopped melting - I'm shocked, I expected it to lose all of its leaves, but it stopped short of that point and appears to be filling out a bit. I had pruned off quite a few leaves that were partially melted or hosting a lot of algae, and it looks like all the new growth is coming in an interesting bronze color!


And now the promised movie:

Mystery sword plant

Do you know what I am?

Today I got a couple of shelf brackets and used them to hang my shop light a couple inches above the tank, so that it wouldn't be resting on the frame. (I was in constant fear of knocking it INTO the tank.) Not the prettiest of arrangements, but it works. If I built a canopy, no one would ever know... :D

The last of the electric yellows have been given to my parents, along with the little socolofi - everything is prepared for the arrival of the new fish on Thursday!

New aquascape

Taking the "scorched earth" route for dealing with incipient weird algae infestation; I trimmed the affected leaves. Then I removed some of the sandstone - I may do some more hardscape editing later now that I have some "extra" pieces to work with. I doused the rocks I took out in a bleach solution to remove the algae growing on them, though, so I have to let them dry properly before I put them back in. The melon sword is continuing to put out new leaves at a rate of about an inch and a half to two inches per day!

Metriaclima estherae

The blurry fish is the tank boss, a 6" Pseudotropheus sp. "acei"

Improving my camera skills

I found my camera manual! This sounds like I went and found an actual booklet, which I kind of did, since I pulled out the box full of extra stuff that came with the camera... but the manual itself was already installed on my computer, I just forgot that I had already done that way back when we got the camera. Ooops. Then after skimming through the interesting-looking parts of the manual I discovered (through much trial and error) how to set the shutter speed in the mode wherein the camera fixes the aperture for you. Then I discovered that if I set the shutter speed fast enough, the photo comes out black! So I dialed it up until the leaves closest to the light started getting overexposed, and here is the result.



In the front on the left side of the photo, two cories are hanging out and sifting for food in the sand; one is an albino, the other a newbie - today I purchased three panda cories, so now I have six total. Three albinos and three pandas. Back when I was setting up this tank, I tried some emerald green cories, but they darkened their color to the point that it was difficult to see them against the black sand, so I returned them to the store. Next I bought the albinos - no problems with fish changing color there! I'm hoping that the pandas won't darken up too much despite the black sand and background, since they're bred to be white with the namesake black spots. I couldn't find any good stock at the time or I might have gone with these from the beginning!

How to net your fish

You know how it goes in the pet store - the fish swim like crazy to get away from the fish net! They apparently think that some hideous fate awaits if they get caught. But the store tanks are kept fairly bare so there's no place to hide, and eventually the fish is bagged. Not so easy when you're dealing with 75 gallons of water full of very large rocks! If my fish were scared of the net, I'd never be able to get them. But they're actually not scared, since I don't chase them with it - mostly I'll use my fishnet to help me clean the sand. Since I switched from tan to white, occasionally the fish will dig holes where I didn't clean out all the tan stuff and spit the darker, larger bits on top of the white. Since the white sand is mostly very fine, I use the fish net to sift it and remove whatever tan bits are showing. So they got used to not being chased around by the big blue thing! Then Jonathan made a good suggestion - put an algae disk in the net and catch the fish when it comes to eat the food. I've managed to net four out of the five fish I need to remove from that tank that way - the last guy is one of the smaller fish, and by that point the algae disk had started disintegrating, so he was leaving the big piece in the net for the larger, more dominant fish and going after the bits floating around in the water. I'll make another attempt to net him out tomorrow. The four I nabbed are currently in my quarantine - I'm hoping to rehome a couple of them tomorrow, and the rest on Tuesday. They aren't happy with the cramped quarters but I think they'll deal for the few days they need to be there. Who knows what the baby acei thinks - he's safe in a fry net inside the quarantine tank until the bigger fish leave.

The red zebra has colored up a bit in the absence of the larger yellows - and, strangely enough, the acei dominant male got more aggressive than usual and chased the others around. There are five of them in there, one of which is only about two inches long - the oldest of their fry. I think I'll try to find another large-ish acei (around 4") to put in there to bolster their numbers a bit and spread out the aggression from the dominant male.

Order is in; tweaking filters

Well today I bit the bullet and made my fish order! So next week I'll be having nine new fish arriving. Now to really find somebody to take the 5 extras off my hands. Hmm. Gotta call around the LFS in the area, see if either of them might give me some store credit if I give them these fish!

On the filter front, I haven't been too happy with the surface skimming on the cichlid tank - it appears that having the skimmer "behind" the outflow sets up a surface current that doesn't bring the water by the skimmer very much. It's not bad at all, I'm just feeling perfectionist. Probably a sign that I need to clean that filter's sponges anyway. But since I was in a meddling mood, I swapped around some of the filter pieces and raised the outflow to only a couple inches below the water line, for increased surface agitation, hoping that it would aid the skimmer. Even if it doesn't, more potential oxygenation can't hurt! Especially in the summer. After the air conditioner quit. This weekend probably won't be too bad but it's going to go back up into the 90's next week - and the fish can't sweat to cool themselves down! If it does get too hot, I'll have to run the tanks "topless" until we get the AC fixed. And figure out something for the planted tank, because I can't run the lights without a splash guard!

The XP3 on the planted tank is having its own issues - I've got an air leak somewhere, not sure where yet. It's the one I bought secondhand, so I'm hoping I'll be able to fix it without having to replace any of the seals. I've tried plastic wrap under the priming cap, next will be reseating the quick-disconnect to make sure the o-rings are sealing properly. I'm not getting any water leaking, which is good. Just air getting into the system - and it can't be the CO2, the diffuser is on the other side of the tank!

A face only a fish nerd could love

The inspiration for my foray into the world of planted aquaria: an unidentified Ancistrus sp. - trade name, "bristlenose pleco".

Helpfully displaying his dorsal fin:


The Ancistrus genus of pleco is probably the most popular group among experienced hobbists who are looking for a workhorse algae-eater that doesn't get too big - unlike the monster common pleco, these guys get to be about 6 inches rather than the tank-busting 18+" lengths that common plecos can reach. Also unlike common plecos, bristlenoses will continue to eat algae throughout their lives. I have a "common bristlenose" variety in my cichlid tank, and he's held his own against the aggressive cichlids very well. I'm sure the spines help a lot.



If you've only seen the plecos at the chain stores, you're missing a lot! There are many varieties of pleco much more beautiful than these, but aren't they cute? Much cuter than those furry rodents people keep as pets. But then, YMMV...

Stock list changes on the horizon

Last night Jonathan and I were sitting on the couch watching the cichlid tank, and he admitted to liking the Ps. saulosi that I had before a string of truly unfortunate events ended up killing off all of them. And I'm a bit tired of the yellow labs, so the new plan is to get rid of those four fish, and add in some red zebra females and a small starter-colony of saulosi, somewhere around nine fish total most likely. And I managed to find an online store that sells both! I'm waiting for a call-back from them, actually - they're listed as "closed" on Wednesdays so if I haven't heard from them by Thursday afternoon I'll call back myself. I'm not in an all-fired rush to put in an order as they have to check to see if they have what I want (if I'm going to pay premium for adult red zebras, I want them sexed first!) and I can't be home all day for the last half of the week to accept delivery - and I can't ship things to "work" either, considering my job as a math tutor takes me all over my area. So basically I'm hoping they have what I need right now and I can get them to ship it overnight on Friday - especially since this weekend's weather is supposed to be a break from the 100-degree misery we've been having! The only thing that's going to hurt about this plan is the price - I'm quite, quite sure that it's going to end up costing somewhere in the high vicinity of $100. If only the stores around here carried better stock and more variety! PetSmart has no business selling auratus and kenyi to the kind of customer who shops there in the first place. They should replace those fish with saulosi and find better distributors for the rest of their African cichlid stock! That way I wouldn't have to go through all the trouble of finding online retailers.

As far as the little locally-owned place goes, it's a nice shop but they aren't carrying mbuna right now, and if I'm going to put in a special order I might as well just order the fish myself and have them delivered right to my door. Less stress on the livestock that way, and I get more control over the whole process.

Cardinal Plant

Most of my plant purchases have been impulse buys - not exactly the best strategy when dealing with chain pet stores. Quite a few of their "aquatic plants" are grown emersed (above water) meaning that their foliage will die off in the process of converting to immersed growth, if the plants are even capable of that. I got suckered by a PetSmart potted "Cardinal Plant" - helpfully labelled "true aquatic" - which is a lie. The plants in those little plastic pots are emersed growth - cardinal plants are native bog-dwellers - you can tell by the pretty purple-red that the underside of the leaves have. True immersed growth of a cardinal plant lacks the red pigmentation and is instead a bright green. However, rather than returning the plant, I decided to keep it and see if it would make the transition. The main root mass died away, but I spotted some aerial root growth, so I uprooted what was left in my sand substrate and cut the plant stem apart to form many smaller plants, which are actually putting on the proper bright green leaves of immersed growth. Here's how they look now:



There's still some emersed-growth leaves hanging on, but I read that stem plants such as cardinal plant have to be pruned rather aggressively to maintain good aesthetics. That's certainly true of Hygrophilia difformis, or water sprite, as you can see in some of my previous photos, where they look like trees with bare lower stems. I ended up following the "aggressive pruning" strategy, whereby one cuts off the leafy tops and replants them to achieve nice-looking bushy growth. Since switching to a shop light, I think the growth has become even bushier - the plants no longer seem to be rushing towards the light. (In fact, one of the stems kinked sideways of its own volition about the time that I switched from T12 lighting to T8 lighting.) I hope the higher light will allow thicker growth from now on.

This week in fish

Ooookay, so, maybe I should have remembered to post more often since things happened this week - basically, I found out that an aquarium store in town that had gone out of business was actually acquired by a different fishy enterprise - a "service" company expanded and added a retail side. And that retail side is quite possibly the best I've seen since Pets Etc. in Leesburg shut down! It's small, and the location is hideous (from my perspective) but the tanks themselves are very well kept and it's clear that the people running the show really care about their livestock. I bought a male blue ram for my planted tank.



In the cichlid tank, the sparring between the midranked yellow labs has progressed to jaw-locking stage - but still no tattered fins. The red zebra had been hiding most of the time. As the tank dynamics have changed, I've started thinking about changing the stocklist - the socolofi duo has never been meant for that tank anyway, and two of anything mbuna is a recipe for disaster. So I stuck an algae wafer in my larger fishnet, and the fish totally fell for it. Probably because I've been using the fishnets to sift the remnants of the tan sand out of the white sand, rather than chasing them around. So I waited until the little socolofi swam into the net, and swished him right out and into my quarantine tank. Not sure where he'll go next, but I'll find a new home for him before too long.

Strangely, since I took out the socolofi, the red zebra has actually taken up a spot on the front side of the tank - looks like he took over the territory the socolofi. Guess the little guy managed to intimidate the newcomer even though the red zebra is the bigger fish.

New arrivals

With a larger aquarium for my cichlids, I've been considering expanding my stock list to new species - unfortunately, about all that's available around here are the standard Petsmart varieties, most of which are terrible quality and probably hybrids to boot. But they had a beautiful group of Metriaclima estherae - red zebras. The largest of the group was just big enough not to be dwarfed by all but Tiny, and I assume he's a male - the orange color is rather pale, with blue shimmers on his scales. I'm happy about this, because I'm not really interested in turning the 75 into a breeding operation (and red zebras and yellow labs will crossbreed). I already have one acei baby who's taking up my quarantine tank for lack of other space to put him! Putting a new cichlid in an established tank is always a chancy business, but I've been keeping a sharp eye on them, and feeding more than usual. Next, I'm going to have to put them on a diet! The two middle-ranked yellow labs are still "fighting" - more a ritual display than actual damage. It's ironic that they're not doing each other damage, when the female yellow lab died of her wounds, even after I tried treating her. I did get one spawn from that group - the offspring are living with my parents in a 36" tank. With the way things are going, I'm thinking of whittling down my species into groups of three and adding some variety, if I can find big enough fish. Kinda difficult when most places sell only juvies. The funny thing is, the flying fox is picking up on all the aggression and getting into the tail-chases, which is amusing. Big bad African cichlids chased around by a skinny Asian fish!

In the planted tank, I've added a melon sword - the checkerboard barbs seem to really like it. Perhaps not unsurprisingly for such dark-colored fish, they spend most of their time in as much shade as they can find, which has meant hanging out underneath the driftwood, until now.



I'm going to have to get better at fish photography, as "auto" doesn't seem to be able to get the colors right! The photo makes the tank look much brighter than it looks in person.

Today in the fish room

Today was all about lighting. I decided to pick up a cheap shop light for the planted tank and get some more light in there - reading about various fertilization schemes is making my head spin, but they all seem to need brighter light than I had. Possibly even more than I have with the shop light, but I'm stalking Craigslist for equipment so who knows when I'll be able to nab something good. I also pulled the TopFin 60 filter to reduce surface agitation, and put an airstone on the end of my CO2 line - now I'm getting true misting, and hopefully a lot more dissolved CO2 in the water. Increasing light and CO2 is one step on my way to figuring out a balance for this tank! I also trimmed the stems of the H. difformis, hopefully they'll fill in a bit more with more light.



A small under-cabinet light is providing light for the quarantine - everybody's looking okay in there so far.

For the cichlid tank, I swapped bulbs around and ended up with an ordinary "daylight" T8 for that fixture - I put "aquarium" bulbs in the shop light (one of which is far overdue for replacement) after seeing that the GE daylight bulb spectrum just doesn't work out - it made the greens luridly green and the other colors pale and washed out. I think I'll look for a "reddish" bulb for my older bulb replacement on the planted tank. The brighter bulb makes the background on the cichlid tank less blue-green and more blue, so I like how that worked out.



Unfortunately not all is well with the cichlids - it looked like the yellow labs were breeding, but the males seriously harassed the female - her fins are torn up badly, and she swallowed the eggs. I wish I could catch her to put her in an isolation box, but of course the fishnet is a deadly predator to be avoided at all costs. She's spent a lot of time hiding over the last day, I hope she's found a good spot and recovers soon. She's bred before and this hasn't happened - I think the secondary and tertiary males have been fighting a lot more than usual, and the alpha yellow lab hasn't been breaking things up. The fourth male (assuming I'm right and there's only the one female) has gone back to lurking in the plumbing. I was hoping he'd quit that and find a rocky spot in the bigger tank.

So far, so good

No big problems after going out of town for the weekend - made me a little nervous but everything seems fine. I'm getting a little bit of algae on the plants in the 55, especially the Java moss - I need to do a bit of research and figure out what that stuff is and how to make it go away.

Right after I got back I was certain I'd lost four of the five neon tetras in my quarantine tank - as it turned out, they were only hiding! I was pleased to see them - I've been very happy with my choice of neon tetras so far. The conventional wisdom is that they are a very delicate fish and one should expect some severe losses when stocking them - I've bought more than 30 and lost only two, one of which I think was due to old age. I wonder if husbandry practices have improved, giving us better stock - at least from the stores I've gotten mine from lately. I've been very picky about where I'll buy from: in these big box stores where the aquarium wall is all plumbed together, I check to make sure ALL the livestock is looking good. I have to give props to the local PetSmart - there's two in my general vicinity - and the closest one has some good people taking care of their stuff. The one slightly farther away is a nightmare. They've got a good guy there, but he's only one person so if he's not in, the tanks are full of sick and dead fish and algae. NOT fun.

Despite having been away, I have managed to swing another modification, but not of my two main tanks - the quarantine has finally been moved up from the basement! I managed to entice Jonathan into cutting a piece of 2x4 for me, and with that and one of the spare pieces from redoing the stand for the 75, I've made a little frame for the 10 gallon quarantine underneath the 75, putting all three of my tanks on the same floor. This will simplify caring for them a great deal, and now I won't have to carry buckets up and down stairs! One more thing I need to do for the quarantine, now that it's under the 75, is find a little under-cabinet light for it - I wouldn't bother except I've got the extra Java moss in there, and I do want it to live.

As far as the 75 goes, I think my bigger socolofi has claimed a space on the far left side of the tank as his territory, which is a good thing - the smaller of the two is looking happier more often now that he can be the full length of the tank away from the big one's spot. I've definitely noticed that the socolofi are more aggressive than the acei and the yellow labs. On the mechanical side of things, I'm going to geek out a bit about flow. I think I've mentioned before that I have a Rena XP3, with an off-brand surface skimmer attachment, with the intake and output mounted in the same corner. I had been using the output attachment for high-velocity, turbulent flow that ruffles the surface of the water a great deal, until the center brace on the 55 broke last Sunday. Since I needed to drop the water levels to take stress off the tank walls, I swapped that filter piece out for a different one, meant for use with the spraybar, that comes down about four or five inches below the water line and has a wider aperture. This leaves the surface of the water not quite still - when the lights are on, you can see some ripple shadow effects, but the surface of the water is much, much calmer than before. At first I was concerned that this lower level of surface agitation wouldn't aerate the water enough for the fish - I rely exclusively on surface agitation for oxygen exchange rather than using an airstone, at least in my main tanks. (The quarantine uses an airpump-driven sponge filter, so I do have some bubbles in that tank.) But I've kept an eye on the fish, and it seems that with the "gyre" flow pattern for water turnover, I don't need a great deal of surface agitation to sufficiently oxygenate the water. (The surface skimmer adds a bit more surface agitation itself as water is pulled into the filter, and helps keep the water surface clear of the film of organics that would build up and restrict gas exchange between the tank and the atmosphere.)

I'm really more excited by this than it probably warrants, but my parents have always used airstones in their tanks, even on the one 55 gallon they have that has never had an under-gravel filter that would require them. Maybe it's some leftover teenage rebellion or something, but I find myself absolutely unwilling to use extraneous bubblestones in my own aquariums. And in planted aquariums, a still surface is to be desired so that added CO2 won't be driven out of the water as quickly - although some people will use airstones on planted tanks with fish at night to help oxygenate their water for the animals. My planted tank is in no danger of reaching low levels of oxygen - it's got three filters on it right now, not counting the little submersible filter that's tucked away in the bottom to distribute CO2 bubbles rather than actually filter. (I suspect most of that paltry amount of CO2 is escaping through the excessive surface agitation in that tank.) My experimenting with filter placement in the 55 shows that the gyre filter flow pattern, with minimal surface agitation, that is desirable in a planted aquarium for nutrient distribution is also enough to distribute oxygen in a fish-only aquarium!

One-Two-Three Swap!

Yesterday was an interesting day! Jonathan and I switched out the broken-framed 55 for the new 75 in one evening of intense work. (Not actually hard labor, except for bringing the 75 up the extremely narrow staircase.) I apologize for the lack of candid shots but we were too busy up to our elbows in water for that. ;)

First I hauled all the rocks out of the tank, and siphoned water from the aquarium into our large cooler (this is a handy way to transport fish!) and Jonathan caught all 14 fish and dumped them in. I have a small pile of unused filters, so I hooked up my Whisper 20 interior filter (no media) to the cooler rim to provide water flow and aeration. Then it was a matter of siphoning the rest of the water out and scooping out the sand. Once that was done, I used our small shop vac to vacuum out the remaining sand and water, and we were ready to move the tank! It's been stuck downstairs awaiting cleaning and repair.

Then it was time to dismantle the tank stand and rebuild it to fit a 48"x18" footprint. Jonathan had previously cut four lengths of 2x4 to my measure, and I had stained them to match the rest of the wood. (Putting stain on was like seeing magic! It was amazing!) The screws holding the two framing rectangles were in there so tight that Jonathan's cordless drill made enormous noise as the anti-stripping feature kicked in repeatedly, but they did all come out in one piece. We replaced the four pieces and screwed the frames back together, then drilled the holes to connect the four legs of the stand. I didn't time it but I'd guess it took less than an hour to finish that part! To top the stand, Jonathan cut a piece of insulation board to fit over the whole rim of the stand (unfortunately these insulation sheets are always an inch short, so he cut a strip out of the middle). This will serve to even out potential pressure points between the top frame of the stand and the tank. Considering the full aquarium probably weighs about 800lbs, it's a good safety measure!

Then we were ready to bring up the 75 from downstairs, where I had spent the last couple of days painting the back with a can of blue sample paint. I topped off the dry paint by taping posterboard over the back to protect it from scratches. Carrying it up the stairs was an anxious few minutes for me - it did hit the corner once, but Jonathan said he didn't think it had hit hard enough to damage anything. Thank goodness for tempered glass! We set it down and centered it on the frame, and then it was time to decorate.

I managed to convince Jonathan to set up the hardscape - I feel quite clever about this, actually, since I will be the first to tell you that he is a much better artist than I am. Even if he did compare aquascaping to playing Warhammer! The results of our labor:


Next we added sand. It looks like there's already sand in there because the bottom of the tank is painted, but those rocks are actually resting on the glass. I had washed a whole extra bucket of all-purpose sand in case we needed it, but because of all the rocks we needed far less than I had anticipated. The 55 had had a lot more in it than I thought because the bottom was covered by a plastic grid to help anchor the stones despite fishy sand-digging: the new hardscape is extremely stable alone, and anchored by the sand makes them doubly secure. The downside is that now I will never be able move them to clean behind them! (Not. Touching. Hardscape. Again. This is the third and final rearrangement in less than a month!)

All that was left was to use the Python to fill the tank with water and hook up the XP3 again. The sand did cause a bit of cloudiness despite my thorough washing of the new stuff, but it had filtered out and settled by this morning. The fish went back in after the tank was full (and the tap water treated with Prime) - I took care to match the temperatures of the water in the tank and in the cooler, but didn't bother with matching water parameters otherwise - none of the old water went into the new tank, except what was in the filter. Since none of the 55 gallon lids will fit the 75 (six inch gaps are quite enough for jumpers!) we covered most of the top with plastic wrap, leaving a small gap for air exchange.

I am amazed at what a huge difference those six extra inches of width make - my "Tank Boss", the alpha acei, is a full adult 6" and looked quite cramped in the 55, but he fits in here! Once all the other fish are 5" and 6" it might start looking a bit crowded again but I don't think so. The old, useless "rule of thumb" for 1 inch of fish per gallon really doesn't work aesthetically. A better rule might be "If your largest fish's adult size is half the front-to-back width of the tank, get a bigger tank or smaller fish." A thin, long fish might be the exception to the rule, but my cichlids are fairly heavy-bodied.

Then an amazing thing happened this afternoon - the lids I had ordered for this tank came in far earlier than I had anticipated! They're beautiful -

You can see the reflections of the recessed lighting above the tank here. I could put the 48" light strip back on at this point, but in the spirit of meddling, now that I have glass tops on the planted tank, I put the second light strip on the planted tank as well, so that the whole width of the tank had lighting - and it made a big difference to the color of the fish to have the foreground lit as directly as the back half of the tank! The foreground will still be dimmer simply because the bulb is a T12 rather than a T8, but that's no problem. So I'm going to stick with ambient light on the cichlids for now!

I obviously don't meddle enough

One of my minor pet peeves about my two aquariums is that the second one came with these awful plastic lids, the kind sold as "hoods" in the store. They were really awful when I got them - an ugly brown color. A can of black spray paint fixed that problem, but didn't do anything for the fact that they just didn't fit. Thus why I'm careful to crop them out of my photos. I went looking in my photo folders to show you, and found all of one pic to illustrate:



So you can sort of see that they're not resting flat on the tank frame at all. It just bugged me. So now that I've got a nifty 75 gallon, I had to go order lids for it! (Didn't come with any.) After poking around in the Big Box stores, I came to the conclusion that if I was going to get lids for a 75, I had two choices: the internet or the drive up to the nearest actual fish store, if they even had the proper lids in the first place. So I had to figure out what brand the 75 gallon is, since the framing on these things is definitely not standardized. There wasn't a name on the tank, but there was an anchor symbol (and a warning about not drilling tempered glass), so I concluded the 75 is a Perfecto aquarium, and ordered the appropriate lids from Amazon. Now for the broken 55 (also came without lids) I had bought a pair of Marineland glass lids locally. These lids were just a little smaller than a "perfect fit" but they still worked fine so I gave it no further thought - until now. I decided to swap the lids around - since I'll get rid of the plastic lids with the 55 that's leaving, and use the glass lids on the planted tank. Lo and behold, the Marineland lids are a perfect fit on the planted tank - and the plastic lids are a perfect fit on the cichlid tank! It's like the light swap all over again. (Why didn't I think to do that earlier?) Actually the reason I didn't try it earlier is because the cichlid tank has pride of place on the main floor - it's in the living room - and the planted tank is opposite the kitchen. I didn't want ugly plastic in the living room. Turns out that with the lids fitting, they bother me far less than I thought they would!

Moral of the story: figure out what brand of aquarium you have before you buy lids for it. And if you get stuff secondhand and have multiple tanks, play around with the equipment! ;)

Quick fixes

Today I had hoped to be able to swap out the 75 and the broken 55; alas, it was not to be. Life was too busy. So here's the quick fix for the 55: no blowouts here!



Solved that problem! On to the next - it turns out that the holes on the DIY intake of the XP3 are large enough to trap otocinclus. RIP, little guy. The two down in quarantine completed their two-week assessment/bulk-up period (the QT never gets its algae scraped off, to provide natural food for the Pseudotropheus sp. "acei" juvie who lives there, in case I forget to feed him) so I had to do something to keep them from meeting the same grisly fate. Enter superglue and a fine-but-not-too-fine mesh.



Polka dots! I wanted a black mesh, but such things are hard to find on short notice. Once things stop being crazy around here I'll swap some parts around and spraypaint the mesh black so it won't stand out so much. I'm already painting the back of the 75. There are probably easier ways to get around this, but I like my spraybar intake and I don't want to give it up yet!

A day of ups and downs

Today I got a great deal on a secondhand 75 gallon tank from Craigslist! Yay!



And just now as I was lying on the couch in front of my 55g cichlid tank: CRACK! Bummer.


Irony of ironies: I was planning to replace this 55g with the new 75g. Maybe it overheard me and got mad? Despite the drama, this isn't actually all that hard to repair. It's probably easier to deal with than a reseal, which is what I did to the OTHER 55g tank. Perils of buying secondhand, I suppose. With a track record like this, who's going to be encouraged to go out and buy all their aquariums new? LOL

Rearrangement # who knows?

Okay! So here's the new arrangement - can you tell what changed?

Most of what changed is equipment - I added a Rena XP3 filter to the tank on the left - with some mods. It was secondhand, and missing the output "U" piece, so I replaced it with a generic piece from the LFS (local fish store) - one that has a fan output. That was producing too much turbulent water flow, so I used some boiling water and pliers to widen it out, which helped calm down the flow. The input extenders and strainer have been replaced by a spraybar, which pulls water from nearly the entire water column. I think water quality has improved - the flow pattern certainly has. Now all the plants wave gently in the current, rather than just the few lucky ones near the power filters' outputs. The CO2 diffuser has been moved to the lower right wall of the tank, and the cords corralled by suction cups. Since the loops on the suction cups were too small to fit the power cord through, I cut them off, used a hobby knife to make a slit in the stub, and threaded a ziptie through - that way I could close the ziptie around the cords and cut off the excess. As long as I remember to be gentle with the suction cups I think it'll work out just fine! The two power filters' positions were switched - the surface skimming one is now farther away from the XP3, where it can do some good.

I also added some java moss! It was a pain to tie it to the driftwood and the rock on the right with fishing line, but the invisibility of the line makes it worth the effort. I bought a huge clump of moss, so for the extra, I rounded up some rocks from other tanks and used mesh from a scavenged shower pouf to tie it down. Hopefully the mesh will keep the cichlids and pleco in the other tank from chowing down on it right away! We'll see how much is left in that tank tomorrow. (Not much, I'm guessing.) I'm just hoping the moss in here will take off and do well! The rest I'll keep as a bonus reserve in the quarantine tank.

Playing around with plants

Not exactly the lushest growth yet - as far as planted aquaria go, this is "barely planted at all"!

While further research into canister filter media is ongoing, here's a pic from tonight: the planted tank. The Amazon sword leaves have gone to a more intense green color than they had before, probably because I swapped lights between the cichlid tank and this one, putting the more powerful T8 light above the plants rather than on the unplanted tank. (I got both those lights secondhand and didn't bother to check what bulbs they used at the time - although the housings are identical, one is a T8 and the other a dim T12!) I don't imagine the newly-installed CO2 has that much affect on color. Eventually I'd like to replace the single T8 with a pair, and replace the plastic lids with all-glass ones (I'm not brave enough to go without lids - I've had neons jump before!) I think more light would let me grow better plants, maybe even some reddish varieties that require higher light. There are several species that are suitable for low light (anubias and java fern are the common two, not that I have either) but they grow slowly, and I'm impatient! The water sprite grows quite quickly, and goes all leggy, but the trimmings will let me beef up the plant mass.

I'm in the process of experimenting to see what the best "recipe" for DIY CO2 "injection" is for my system; growing yeast in a pressurized environment is more difficult than growing bacteria in the aquarium! I'll keep the dry, boring lists to myself until I have something to report. I'm not planning to go the full high-tech route with cans of pressurized CO2, intense lighting, and high fertilization - for one thing, having a good substrate would probably help a lot with that, and mine's inert sand. Thus why I fertilize even with low light and low CO2.

I'm not happy with the water clarity in this tank - I've been messing about with it a bit, but I did manage to get the water fairly clear last week. Then I cleaned the filter pads, and I think I damaged the bacteria colonies, because it clouded up again. (White "fog" is usually bacterial bloom, a normal occurrence in a cycling tank.) I'm a little disturbed by that - this tank should be cycled by now - it's been running since March, started with seeded filters no less. I'll have to take some chemical readings to find out what's really going on.

Time to clean the filter

It seems no matter what kind of pet you have, you'll always have to clean up after it and clean its enclosure, whether that's a cage, a terrarium, your whole house, or an aquarium. At least with fish, the mess is 100% contained - and doesn't smell. Don't ask me to clean up after terrestrial creatures, my experience with those is that they all smell. Bleh.

There are really three things to do with an aquarium: clean the glass of algae, change the water/gravel vacuum, and clean the filter. The first two are pretty simple, and if you have sand instead of gravel you don't have to vacuum, as wastes can't get trapped beneath the surface. Cleaning the filter, especially if you have canisters, is where the "ew, gross!" factor arises. I find it helpful to simply not think about what exactly it is that I wash out of my canister filters...

Bucket containing 1/2 inch of fish-produced organic fertilizer!

So having to squeeze solid waste out of my filter sponges can be pretty disgusting, but I've never bothered to use gloves. I have a pair of Rena Filstar XP3s, and this stuff came out of just one of them - I won't do both at the same time, since cleaning a filter is traumatizing to the bacterial colonies that live there, and without the bacteria, water quality will nosedive. Keeping fish means keeping bacteria colonies too! And if you do planted aquaria with yeast CO2 generators, you get to keep fish, bacteria, and fungus. Welcome to the wonderful world of microbiology - I definitely should have taken that class in college!

As for filter media, right now I'm experimenting a bit. I've got the basic set of pads that come with the Rena - two grades of black sponge, and the white polishing pad, but that fills up about 1/3 of an XP3's media capacity. And they're all mechanical - wastes get trapped and have to be washed out. I'd like to come up with some good biological media, preferably without going out and buying the ceramic rings and things they sell as biological media in the pet stores. Folks on Cichlid-forum.com like to recommend plastic pot scrubbing pads, so I'm giving those a try. They have a lot of surface area and seem to let water pass fairly freely through them, which is what I want, but the problem is that they're round, and the media baskets in the Rena XPs are square. The filter floss and sponges that I have are all square, so no water can bypass them rather than flowing through, but water will definitely be bypassing some of the pot scrubber material. Maybe the different flow rates through the mesh will be beneficial, but it seems rather inefficient to me. The pot scrubbers are too large to simply layer, which is how other bio-media seems to get around the issue. I'd like to have both bio and mechanical media in the same filter - that way if I decide to go back to one XP3 on each of my 55s, cleaning the filter will be less likely to cause ecosystem imbalances.

A note on my new filter input/output arrangement: cleaning filters invariably results in a cloud of particulates fouling the aquarium water when the filter is restarted. This cloud cleared out of the water very quickly, faster than it would have with the old, turbulence-causing arrangement. Putting the pipes next to each other passes both the aesthetics and the functionality test!

Malawi Community

After posting the hideous photos of my old tanks, I felt I had to redeem myself a bit by posting a current photo. (Okay, so they're not really all that hideous.) It'd be nice to be able to find enough rocks of a single kind around here, but the local stuff is Virginia-clay red and has a tendency to crumble. The camera makes the river jack look a bit lighter than it does to the eye; the tank lighting itself is softer than it appears here. This aquascape is likely to stay unchanged for a while, unless I stumble across a fresh pallet of stones identical to the dark gray, jagged pieces. I plucked what I thought I could use from the local garden center, but unfortunately when you have 12" of depth to work with, you can't just load up a whole bunch of random large rocks and hope they stack okay at home against the fragile glass walls of your aquarium. (That and they were expensive. Why can't I live somewhere with rocks I can just pick up off the ground for free?)

You can see the three species of mbuna in this photo: electric yellows (self-explanatory), Ps. socolofi (the little blue one above the big rock), and Ps. acei (the purple ones with yellow fins). The long striped fish at the bottom is a flying fox, native to someplace in Thailand or thereabouts. His job is to keep algae from growing all over the sand, and he does a good job and holds his own against the cichlids, so he gets to stay even though he doesn't fit the biotope. I'm not that much of a purist (yet). Not visible in this shot is a picture of a common bristlenose pleco, native to South America. His job is to keep flat surfaces clear of algae, but he doesn't seem to do a good job on green spot algae so that's what ends up growing on the glass. I scrape it clean every so often when I do a partial water change.

The mass of tubing in the corner belongs to two Rena Filstar XP3s, which is technically more filtration than required by my current understanding, but algae growth dropped off a lot after I added the second filter (it was originally on the leaking tank) so it's stayed. I've been experimenting with the placement of the intakes and outputs: originally they were split, one at each end of the aquarium, but I've been reading some discussion of water flow and filtration methods that inspired me to wiggle things around to get them all arranged in the same spot, or near as could be managed. I actually replaced one of the intakes with a spray bar that the previous owner had drilled to make the holes larger (I was going to do that myself, so he saved me some trouble!) but I'm not sure what exactly I hope to gain from all this swapping around, since I didn't have a problem with water clarity before - how am I going to tell if this improves anything? I don't know. I figure I'll be able to tell if it doesn't work, at least. At any rate, both DH and I like having the tank equipment corralled into a smaller, less visually distracting space.

Some improvements I'd eventually like to make to this tank: homogenize the hardscape, aka use only one kind of rock; paint the light blue pieces of equipment black; upgrade this entire tank to a larger one with more front-to-back space (like a 75 or a 90) and get an awesome background made to look like stone. Those last two things aren't likely to happen anytime soon even if I am on a meddling kick!

A Rocky Start

There comes a time in some hobbyists' lives, when they grow up and realize that there's more to fishkeeping than a goldfish bowl or a betta jar. The internet is a wonderful tool - with many forums dedicated to general and niche aquaria, it's easy to find in-depth information and specialist discussions. An impulse buy may be the catalyst for a casual community fishkeeper to become a specialist in her own right. For me, that impulse buy was African cichlids. My fascination with them led me to upgrade from my original 36" 30-gallon to a 48" 55-gallon aquarium, so that I could keep some of the larger species of beautiful but territorially aggressive Malawi mbuna. (I kept the 36" tank, stocking it with a dwarf species.) The biotope for mbuna is characterized by rocks - lots and lots of rocks. My first attempts weren't very good.

Exhibit A: fake castles are never a good sign, and most of the rockwork is too small to accommodate anything but baby fishes.


The 30 gallon wasn't much better: fake resin decorations and cheesy background are signs of the n00b aquascaper.


Exhibit A looks completely different now, and I gave the 30 gallon back to my parents... after nabbing a second 55 gallon tank off Craigslist. Unfortunately, the new 55 gallon was fraught with problems from the start: a heater malfunction killed all but one of the pretty yellow fish pictured above, destroying my breeding colony. Shortly after that disaster, the tank itself developed a slow leak from the midpoint of one of the corners - the interior silicone was shot. Since the four fish left alive in that tank could be scattered to my other tanks, I simply dismantled the leaking aquarium, and planned to reseal it myself. After months of procrastinating and gentle prodding from my DH, I finally buckled down and finished the reseal. It was a lot of work, but in the end, I fixed it myself:


Now what to do? My breeding colony was gone, and at this point I had four tanks: two 55, a 20, and the 10 gallon quarantine. I had gotten pretty tired of keeping up with four, so my plans changed: instead of a second cichlid tank, I would use the empty tank to upgrade the 20-gallon community aquarium, which housed a few barbs, a school of neons, and this guy: a starlight bristle-nose pleco.


I'd also seen my Dad's big school of neons in a 45-gallon corner aquarium, and I wanted a huge school of my own! So I decided: time to tackle South American.

First post: Introduction

The subtitle of this blog is a little misleading - I'm not going to chronicle the trials and tribulations of the very beginning of my journey, which started with a 10-gallon under-gravel-filtered goldfish aquarium, when I was about eight or so. My family has kept fish for years, and I continued the tradition through my teenager-hood and even after I got married! (My husband graciously puts up with my fish madness, and acts as a desperately needed brake against MTS - "multiple tank syndrome" - the condition in which the aquarist finds herself endlessly multiplying the number of tanks she owns, until there is no space left in the house for more. He is why I now have just two "display" aquariums and a single 10g quarantine.) The purpose of this blog is to allow me to gush harmlessly into the ether about my two currant tanks, both 48" 55-gallon aquariums.

The delightful thing about aquariums is that you can set them up to be as demanding or undemanding as you like - a definite perk for someone like me, who likes to meddle at will but wants things to run pretty much on their own for months at a time. Right now is definitely a meddling period - my fish are so used to me being shoulder-deep in their habitat that I can pet them when they come up to nibble me! I have a little bit of backstory to tell about my newest tank, though, so these first few posts will come fast and furious until I run out of things to say.