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.