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.