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!