Christmas

Well, there's not a whole lot going on lately.

The 48 gallon is doing just great. Everyone is fat and happy. Mekong (my RTBS) is right at home. She's bum rushed some of the other fish when they get to nosy with her cave but for the most part she seems quite content. The serpaes are calm and well mannered and the neon herd is staying out of the way. The remaining platys are behaving themselves. The guppies have started to demonstrate an interesting behavior. In the morning when I turn on the light I've noticed all four of them huddled down together in a corner under a cave. During the day they just bum around and ignore one another but apparently at night they like to hang out together.

The Eclipse at work has been an interesting trip. Initially I wrapped the intake in foam to try and slow down the flow through the filter. Well apparently the resitance was too much for the pump. I had problems with the pump overheating and just shutting off. Obviously this would be a bad thing to happen when I wasn't around. I've removed the foam on the intake and for the last ten days it's run without a problem. I also packed the filter with bio-max pellets. Unfortunately I packed some spots too full and had some pellets fall into the biowheel and jam it to a halt. Ugh. Thankfully I seem to have solved all those problems and the tank is mechanically sound.

Biologically... well it appears to be cycled. No ammonia readings, no nitrite readings, and no nitrate readings. It's a bit odd for a tank that's three weeks old with a fish like Shark in it. I've had two algae outbreaks. The first is good old brown algae, yay. The second is only on the driftwood and is this wierd fuzzy gauze. No the pic isn't out of focus, its the algae.


Shark is doing well. He's always excited to see me and eating well. He doesn't seem to mind the current in the tank. Playing in it at times and at others finding quiet spots. His coloration is absolutely gorgeous, his pectoral fins have an iridescent sheen to them that wasn't there a week ago. He's continued to get darker and richer every day.

Sometime next week I'm going to look into adding some harlequin rasboras or maybe platys to the tank for some additional movement.

That's what's been going on lately.

In The Tank!

My girl is now in her tank! I put her in a day early, sue me. Like the serpaes she immediately took to her new home She darkened up instantly and her tail took on a deeper red. I dunno what's going on with the quarantine tank but for some reason the fish just don't get to their best color in there.

Anyways, she started to check out the other fish and the tank and they started to check her out. To my delight she headed immediately for the slate cave I made for her months ago. She's decided that its hers and spends a lot of time hovering around it. She's been the model fish so far and has kept to her side of the tank. I was worried she might bother the corys or vice versa but they seem to ignore one another.

She's gorgeous and I already love having her in the tank.

Tank at Work

For my birthday/Christmas I received just what I asked for, a 6 gallon Eclipse fish tank and all the fixin's, of course it was the only thing I asked for period so take it with a grain of salt.

To my wife's chagrin I couldn't help myself and had to immediately prepare my tank to go to work. An extra wooden brace for my desk due to the weight, cut a piece of foam to cushion the bottom, rinse my black sand. Yeah, black, it's awesome. I got everything ready to go and brought it to work. Since I'd found a great looking betta the day before and was going to get it on my lunch break I had to set it up before lunch. Thankfully my boss didn't seem to mind as I spent about an hour puttering around with it getting everything in and the tank filled. At lunch I met my wife and we got something to eat then we took my boy to the store to find a fish. He hadn't gotten a nap and was too cranky to be any help but he was enthusiastic about getting to see the fish.

I picked out my fish and came back to the office and put him in. After the tiny cup he'd been stuck in with water that was... well its best not to talk about it, he seemed to enjoy having space to swim. He spent most of the rest of the day swimming around his new place poking his head in every corner. He was shy and would scoot away when I got close to the tank but today he's gotten a lot bolder, even spending time watching me work and interacting with me a bit. I put my finger next to the tank and he tracked me running it up and down the side. Yeah it's not much but try and get a platy to do anything but beg for food.

Last night we asked my boy to name the fish. He knows four words for fish, fishy, guppy, shark, and whale. Shark won. Shark is already proving to be far more photogenic than any of my other fish, holding still long enough to get some great shots of him.


The wood has already started to stain the water a golden hue, I'm loving the look. Sadly I didn't estimate sizes very well and the T-Rex skull I got for the tank is just too big to get in it. It'll have to wait for another tank.

Some of you are probably wondering what is wrong with me. Putting a fish in an uncycled aquarium. Well what you can't see in the pictures is that the filter is loaded up with biomax pellets under the blue cartridge and behind the biowheel. Those are the same pellets I've left in my aquarium's filter so they are already seeded with bacteria. All I've got to do now is wait for the bacteria to migrate from the pellets to the biowheel. I plan to leave them in until the first cartridge change then I'll take them out.

December Update

First off my an update on my main tank the 48... everything is perfectly fine. Everyone is doing well in their new home. The quarantine tank residents are just as good. All three neons are just fine. My shark is a female as it turns out, she has a dark gray belly instead of a pure black one. She's also a total sissy. I don't get to see her in all her glory much because she hides whenever I get near the tank. Oh well, another week and they go in the main tank.