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.