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.