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.