Rainbow Cichlids, Busy at 4:16 a.m.

I woke up, thirsty, and wound up sitting here in the kitchen, with the computer on. I just looked up at the ten gallon tank with five nine month old Rainbow Cichlids, Herotilapia multispinosa, in it, to see them, very shy in the daytime, cavorting freely, and in fine, full color. Amazing.

My First Try at an Old Aquascaping Idea

Today, for the first time ever, I made a moss covered piece of driftwood. I was inspired to do so by Jason Baliban's presentation at Sunday's meeting of the Atlanta Area Aquarium Associsation, at which he delivered a Power Point presentation on the basics of the aquascapers' art, and then aquascaped a moderate sized aquarium, from the bare tank, up.

I did my bit of elementary aquascaping, this evening, by wrapping clumps of good old fashioned Java Moss around a branch, tying dark, heavy cotton thread to the branch, and then wrapping the thread in a spiral over the moss. A couple of such passes, one on each of two sides of the branch, sufficed for a pretty good cover. Then a few snips with scissors, where the moss came up in obvious loops between the wrappings of thread, served to obscure a good bit of the man made nature of the artifact. Fun. Easy. Pretty. Pictures to come.

My Planted 10 Gallon Aquarium

My Planted 10 Gallon Aquarium

The floating Amazon Frogbit, Limnobium laevigatum, was thriving then, along with the Hygrophila corymbosa to the right, the Hygrophila difformis, the taller plant on the left, and the Dwarf Amazon Swordplant, Echinodorus tenellus, in the foreground. There is also a tiny bit of the formerly dominant Myriophyllum matogrossense, a lacy bunch plant, in lower center right.

This was all grown using fermented-yeast-and-sugar DIY CO2, though I've since switched over to pressurized CO2 setup with a tank, regulator, pH probe and controller. My lighting is two 5500k 13 watt screw-in compact fluorescent bulbs in the original equipment somewhat funky plastic hood. I use Seachem liquid fertilizers.

The vertebrate population includes one male Platinum Guppy, who shows up as a blur about halfway from top to bottom, almost to the left margin of the tank. Also, five Neon Tetras, three Corydoras trilineatus, one Siamese Algae Eater, and two Badis badis. There were a couple of large pond snails, but I guess they died of old age. No other invertebrates that I know of.

This shot is, so far, the height of my artistry as a planted aquarium geek.

Fun with German Guppy Enthusiasts

I've been doing a bit of browsing just now, and wound up following a link from a blog I discovered a while back, Guppyfocus. This guy does some very interesting crosses, and also posts pictures of visits to the fishrooms of other breeders.


The fish above is from his most recent blog post, titled "piebald reticulata".

The first link a the forum is this, a thread that shows pictures of Tobi's, the Guppyfocus guy's, fishroom. The last pic in the series is interesting, as Tobi has mentioned a "Channa" that he feeds culled guppies to. It's a nice little planted tank, and I think you can see the snakehead hovering in mid-tank. According to this link, this may be the fish that has been terrorizing anglers in my brother's suburban D.C. area in recent years.

Next, a thread in which a young woman guppy breeder shares a series of shots of a group of male guppies, posing the group a puzzle as to how, genetically, she reached their phenotype, genetics-talk for their appearance.

Finally, here's the forum's "portal" page, pumped through Google Translate.

Wait, there's more! They're like peanuts, I can't stop. Two amazing "Pink Moscow Males". I hope you enjoyed the tour.

Unstable CO2 Concentration as a Cause of Algae in Planted Aquariums

I just found the text quoted below in this article.

Unstable CO2
Both plants and algae adapt to CO2 in their environment. To do this, they produces what’s call the Rubisco. The Rubisco is an enzyme that is used for carbon fixation. In a low CO2 environment, plants and algae will produces more Rubisco so they can fix carbon from the KH (-HCO3). When there is plenty of CO2, plants and algae no longer need the Rubisco so they simply get rid of it.

Problems show up when CO2 is unstable because algae are much faster to adapt to low CO2 than plants. So everytime your CO2 is changing, algae have a chance to outcompete the plants.

When I saw the enzyme RuBisCO mentioned, I remembered the first time I heard that word, which was at a meeting of the Atlanta Area Aquarium Association, during member Brian Revennaugh's great presentation on planted aquariums. If you'd been in the room with me, you probably could have seen the light go on over my head. Aha!

I've been a student of aquarium keeping, and especially planted aquariums, my whole life, and it is wonderful to be able to keep learning things about it.

Addendum: Brian R. adds some depth and precision in his post at the AAAA Forum discussion of this topic.

Added a new plant to the aquarium

I found a couple of bunches of Rotala wallichii at The Fish Store, up in Sandy Springs, last Wednesday. I didn't know what it was, but it looked healthy, and had that reddish tinge that I've been thinking would add a bit of spice to the aquascape. I took one of the bunches home for a mere $4.59. We'll see how the red color holds up under my lighting.

P.S. Here's a note from the future, from October 17, 2008, to be precise. The Rotala didn't hold up. I'm guessing that it needed more light than it was getting in my little tank, but maybe it was needing more nutrients, as well. There are a few small bits left, but most of it gradually turned to a dark brow mush.

Koi Pond T-Shirt

My wife, Nola, is out of town this week, so it was my turn to go check the mail. There was a key in the box to one of the big boxes. In the big box was one box and one Tyvek bag. In the bag was this beautiful shirt.

The shirt is by a Marie McVey, a lady I met on the Aquarium Photography Forum. Marie keeps goldfish and koi, photographs them, and manipulates the images to get the watercolor effect you see here.

Her work is displayed, and available for sale at extremely reasonable prices, here.

New fishes!

After work today, I headed out Roswell Road, about a mile past the Perimeter, to a tropical fish store. I was hunting a specific fertilizer for the plants in my aquarium and I did find that, but as long as I was there, I browsed the shop, and turned up a bunch of these guys:

They are known in the trade as Corydoras julii, though they are almost certainly actually Corydoras trilineatus. Hmph. Anyhow, they are delightful little guys, now about an inch long, and I picked up three of them. They have this charming habit of swimming around in schools, with their noses in the gravel, looking for some left-overs for lunch. Very cool.