Shark, "Oh No!"

With the serpaes in the main tank there's room in the QT tank for something I've been waiting five months for, my red tailed black shark.Well my RTBS and three more neons. Before I put them in I broke the tank down and removed about half the gravel, there was just too much and I had to dig a pit so I could fit in the filter and still put on the lid. I also pulled out the baggie of biomax since the sponge was cycled and the bioload went way down.

And here's my pride and joy. I have to say he's skittish... well he's a complete sissy. He spends most of his time hiding under the heater, the filter, or in a cave/rock. He'll even run and hide when a neon swims by and he's easily ten times their size. I don't want him vicously attacking everyone in the tank but a little back bone would be nice.

It makes it even funnier that when I first brought my boy over to look at him. I told him I had a shark in the tank and pointed to him. My boy spotted him and immediately backed up saying, "Oh NO!"

Serpaes

Well this Thursday marked the end of the fourth week of quarantine for the serpaes and in they went to the main tank. I was delighted to see how they've integrated so far. They've been model citizens so far and keep to themselves. I was surprised how quickly they colored up, they were never very vibrant in the QT tank and they were almost clear while they were being transfered to the main tank. After only six hours in the main tank they were a more vibrant orange/red than they'd even had in the store.

Yes, I'm starting off my post about the addition of my serpaes with a picture of my cories but I was pretty dang excited to finally get a picture of them that's clear and in focus.


As you can see the tank is a lot fuller now that the serpaes were added. It's driving the platys nuts as they are no longer the biggest fish in the tank. They're just two against seven now.

Here's a video of the tank, ignore the reflection of the football in the back ground.

As an update on my temperature woes the recent cold snap has left everyone in the house in long pants, socks and shirts at all times. The 100W heater has struggled with the temperature keeping it only around 73 degrees or so. I finally broke down and purchased a 200W heater online and added it to the tank. Almost immediately the tempeature jumped up to almost 80 degrees. Now I've unplugged the 100W and I'm trying to dial in the 200W to keep things about 78 or 79 degrees. My QT tank has no problems at all as it holds rock steady at 78.

And here is one of the few pictures, well only picture, I have of my shrimp. Unfortunately right after this picture both he and all his friends climbed out and jumped to their dooms. My best guess is that the former owner of this tank probably dosed it with a copper based medicine pretty heavily and is seeped into the silicone. I'll test the tank eventually but for the moment I'm just going to add any more shrimp. It's a pity because I really liked these guys.

New Tank

Sadly my first fish tank looks to have lasted only about four months.

The good news is that everyone took the move over to the new tank just fine.

Things got started on Friday when I moved the tank into the house. The top of the stand itself wasn't perfectly level so I bought some foam to set underneath it. I couldn't help myself and I had to put at least a little water in it.

On Saturday I washed sand. Since water and dirt were intimately involved Charles had to get in on that action.
In goes the slop.

I was actually a bit surprised when a single bag of sand was enough to fill the bottom up but I didn't fight it, washing sand is an absolute pain. Once the sand was in I went ahead and filled it up. I used the tap in the sink to do it. I'd seen too many lizards in the front yard hose to really trust it. 48 Gallons 2.5 gallons at a time. Ugh.

On Monday things started to move. I went ahead and started to pull out about half the decorations and give them a bleach dunk. I didn't want any of that brown algae making the trip over if I could help it. Tuesday I put in the decorations I'd cleaned on Monday and then emptied out the rest of the decorations from the 55 gallon. I moved the heater over to the 48 gallon and then started netting fish. Lemme tell you, trying to net an inch and a half fish out of a four foot tank is no easy task. I actually felt a bit bad about all the stress they were getting but it couldn't be helped. Eventually everyone got moved in and the rest of the decor got a dunking. Finally on Wednesday I put in the last of the decorations and everything was in.

The end result:


I'm very pleased with the way it looks, even more than I thought I would. It was a real pain to aquascape though, lots of depth but not width, sort of the exact opposite of what I had before. I think I need a few taller plants, maybe another one that attaches to the wall but overall it's looking very nice. One thing I didn't expect to like was the anemic light. As you can see the tank is rather dim, it's got all of 15 watts of lighting right now. The darkness makes the aquarium look pretty sharp, especially as part of the living room's decor.

Not So Baby and Sexism

As you can see the babies are growing up and getting big. Big enough that I went ahead and sorted them out. Of the five there was only one boy, the guppy with the bent spine. Since they were getting older I figured I'd separate them before they reached maturity. The boy went down into the quarantine tank and the girls get to stay in the main tank. Angela asked if the boy was likely to get pounded by the serpaes.

Yep.

New Tank Background

Here's the new tank with its background sprayed on. The initial granite spray went on well but even though it looked even it was blotchy. So I went ahead and gave it a black base coat. After it everything was fine. I'll get a better picture after I take off the masking and get it cleaned up.

Corner Tank

In other news I went ahead and bought that corner tank. The tank itself looks to be in good condition. A good cleaning should deal with it. The stand is a piece of crap. It's made out of particle board, you know, sawdust and glue. The stuff that turns into oatmeal when it gets wet. Yeah, that's the material you want to make a fish tank stand out of. So I got a new tank stand made. The guys that made it for me made it out of the scrap they had laying around and what they had laying around was 1/4" stainless steel. Because of this the stand weighs a ton, easily a hundred pounds, maybe one twenty five. The upside is you could park a truck on top of it and it'd hold up fine. Seriously, I ran the numbers.

It also came with a Penguin 170 filter, what is it with me and collecting legacy filters? Anyways, I cleaned that one up and went ahead with putting it in my existing tank. I didn't bother with the cartridges, just some biomax pellets and a load of filter floss. I figured I'd use it to help polish the water and get some flow in the left hand corner of my tank where there isn't much. When I first started it up the thing sounded like a gravel tumbler and for about 24 hours afterwards. However whatever seemed to be the problem worked itself out and now its as quiet as my other filter. Well, almost. For some reason this one sits higher on my tank and the water splashes down into the tank from a height of about an inch or two. This does two things, one it makes a racket just like you'd expect a waterfall to and second it makes one heck of a falling current in the tank. The circulation is good in that part of the tank, its always been a bit of a dead zone, but this is spinning my fish around if they get caught in it. I've got to cut some holes in the lid that came with this thing so I might use that plastic to make a comb to break up the flow going back into the tank. Not likely to do much about the noise but if it can break up the flow I'll be happy.

All that being said my sweetie loves the corner tank. She loves it too much in fact. After telling me how much she loved it the first thing she said was, "Why don't you move your tank into this one?" Well because this corner tank was going to be a briny mess and home to a homicidal little mantis shrimp. Then I got to thinking about it. The tank really does look good and I'd love to get a tank out into the part of the house where everyone is, really let everyone appreciate my fish. So I'm going to be moving tanks.

Yikes.

So I've got more work to do on my hobby which I never mind. My first step is going to be getting some plywood feet cut out for the stand, both to protect the floor and distribute the load. After that I'm going to be spray painting the back panel of the tank with this granite looking stuff.

http://www.rchuntingstore.com/servlet/the-171/KRYLON-MAKE-IT-STONE/Detail

I've seen someone else do it on their tank and it looks awesome. It give the background some character rather than being flat black. That particle board stand is going to be sacrificed as a spray stand, about all its good for. I'd burn it but the fumes from the glue would probably make my babies be born naked.

After that its back to rinsing sand and then filling up.

As for the move itself, well some of the decor is getting left behind. I've only got about 74% as much surface area on the bottom so I won't have room for all the rock work, I think. My fish are going to be very unhappy because before I move any of them I'm taking all the decor from their tank, nuking it again with bleach water, then stuffing it in the new tank. For about a day they're going to have to just deal with living in an empty tank. I'll probably leave the lights off. Once I get all the stuff in the new tank I'll net all the fish out and move them along with the filter to the new tank. Oh, right now I'm planning on moving the 170 first and use it as a water polisher over there as well. All the new sand will no doubt raise a sand storm in the new tank.

All that being said I'm going to have to alter my stocking plans a bit. I was thinking red tailed black shark and a German blue ram because of the length of my tank and the cover available. With the different shape of my tank though I'm not sure I'll have the space on the bottom for both fish to stake out their areas and not get into it with one another. I'll probably leave the GBR by the wayside and just got with the RTBS.

Oh, one thing that's not going to cut it on this tank is the light. It's a wennie little 18" 15W deal who's bulb is ugly right now. I was already planning on upgrading the 55's lights eventually to support plant growth, so now upgrading the new tank's lights is still in the plan. I've done the math and a 24" light could fit on top of the tank, it's just going to take some cutting of the plastic to fit it all in. I'll have a little over hang but just like a quarter inch nubbin. Right now I'm thinking the 24" version of this:
http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=3578+3733+9654+12109&pcatid=12109
That would give me 2.9 watts per gallon and that should be enough to grow whatever I please in the tank.

What am I going to do with the 55? Well I do still want a GBR and maybe some gouramis. Oh, and rummy nose tetras and harlequin rasboras are always nice.

Quarantine Tank Pictures

Ok, first its not that cloudy. Second its not that pink. Its the light. As you can see I have too much gravel and I've left in the biomax pellets. The sepaes seem to be doing well for the most part but once they're done I'm going to spray the back of the tank black and replace the gravel with sand.

Quarantine and Babies

Well there's a lot of stuff going on right now fish wise.

First off my quarantine tank is set up and running. It also has its first residents, seven serpae tetras. Four longfin and three shortfins. Unfortunately it started out as eight with a four/four split. Two days ago I found one of the shortfins dead. An examination of his body didn't reveal anything wrong, no pineconeing of scales, no protruding eyes, body wasn't distended or deformed in any way, and no obvious wounds. My tank's water parameters all check out as well, steady at 79 degrees, 0 ammonia and nitrites, 5ppm nitrates, and a 7.5 pH with a water change three days prior. I have no real idea what befell the little guy. I'm resisting the urge to go out and buy another just to keep things at eight. We're through a week and a half of quarantine, if I toss another fish in we get to start right over.

Speaking of the tank here's a quick reminder of what it is.
~20 Gallon rubbermaid container
Sponge Filter
50W Visitherm Deluxe heater
Quartz gravel (Going to go to sand since I'll be keeping corys in there eventually)
One donated rock ornament
Two terra cotta pots
Two fake plants
15W light fixture

The tank is working out well, my pre-seeded filter cycled the tank in less than 48 hours. Since then the water parameters have been stable and match my main tank as closely as I can manage. The serpaes are all active and eating well.

Cold Snap

Well we had our first cold snap here in Florida and I learned something. First, my 100W heater really is no where near enough to keep my 55 gallon warm when the temperature plunges to 45 outside. It's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be though. My tank got down into the low 70's, around 73, but it never went much lower. Yes, that's not warm enough for my fish but that's not as bad as I thought it would be and its only for about 8 hours. During the day it was able to keep up and keep the temperature around 77 or 78. Looking back I really wish I'd bought my heater online. Online the cost difference between a hundred watt heater and a two fifty watt heater is like $2. I'm probably going to need to buy a bigger heater here soon, real soon, as in get my credit card out right now kinda soon. When the temperature starts to go lower and stay there that 100W is just not gonna cut it.

Stooges

I'll admit, I never wanted to be a live bearer daddy when I started. As cool looking as some guppies and platys are I didn't want a tank overrun with them. So I got three male platys. I knew some aggression issues were possible but I figured in my sparsely populated tank there would be enough room that they could avoid one another if they got too pissy. Thankfully the stooges all seemed to get along just fine with one another. About two weeks ago I noticed that one of them seemed to be hiding a lot more. The other two seemed to chase him any time he came out of hiding. Over the next two weeks I observed him being more and more listless, hiding a lot and progressively eating less. Unfortunately by the time I got worried about him the serpaes were already in their tank and I didn't have a free spot to put him in. I did my best to keep the tank in good condition but he grew more and more listless. Finally he took to wedging himself behind rocks or under plants and just drifting in place, gasping for air. Finally a few days ago he passed.

It sucks because he was one of my do-over fish, one of the first to go into the tank after the pH crash and he'd been with me four months. Him dying and then finding the serpae the next day have me bummed. I'm especially down because it looks like the other two turned on him and hounded him to death. I may try a quartet of female platies later on, the shop has some gorgeous sunburst ones in, but then there's the babies to deal with.

Fry

Speaking of babies. I'm about to stop being able to call the guppy fry that. The two largest are as big as some of the neons now. I noticed it because I did my daily neon count a week ago and counted ten of them. Since I knew there were only nine in the tank I was understandably confused until I took another look and noticed that one of the neons was a guppy. Four of the five survivors look to be just fine, if a little fat in the belly, but the fourth has a birth defect, a severly bent spine. I think all five are female but I'm not sure. I need to really keep an eye on them now and sex them so that I can seperate the girls from the boys before they learn about the birds and the bees. The look a lot like their momma with their spotted tails. So long as they're all girls I'll be happy to keep them in tank.