Thursday, May 28, 2009

Big Fat Shark

Yes, my little Mekong is growing up. She's a good four inches long now, most of the way to her adult size of six inches. But more than length it's her girth. The girl is getting chubby. Her colors are vibrant though, dark black and bright red. Aside from a few extra ounces around her belly she's the picture of health. I'll take fat and happy any day.


And here she is pigging out with one of the cories and one of my new ghost shrimp. I got the shrimp as a rather hearthless way to test to ensure shrimp could survive in my tank. They can. After two weeks I've still got at least four that I've seen and who knows the other four could still be hiding out in the tall plants at back. I figured what the heck, 0.90 cents for all of them. If the fish made them a snack or the jumped like the amanos I'm not out any real money.


While I like my rasboras and Shark at work my favorites at the moment are the plants in the tank. My Java fern is a bit odd. It seems to lose as many leaves as it grows. The good news is that it no long looks ratty like it did when I first got it. Oh! Look below it, see the little green shoot? It had babies. I plucked it from the end of a frond and "replanted" it. Tomorrow during the weekly cleaning I think I'll move it to a rock on the left side of the tank, see if the direct light lets it grow better.

My crypt though is growing like mad. I need to take a look into how to split it because I'd like to transplant an off shoot to another part of the tank.


If you've got plants in your tank but aren't running CO2 injection I highly recommend Flourish and Flourish Excel.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Pregnancy

It's about time for the platies to come out of quarantine. I lost one of them early on. It was one of those unexplainable deaths. Happy, active, no sign of disease or sickness the next day she's dead on the bottom of the tank. The other two have been doing ok and I'm really enjoying having the QT tank running in my office again.

I've decided that I'm going to leave the platies in QT until they give birth. Once the little ones are free swimming both mommies are going in the main tank. I'll give the little ones a couple weeks to mature before looking for some new fish for QT. Probably some more panda cories.