Teh fishies.

[platedlizard]

So my parents finally got sick of the 55 gallon tank taking up one of their spare rooms and told me to get rid of it Or Else, heh. Not having much room I set a ten gallon: Penguin 100 filter (over the back, up to 20 gallons w/ a biowheel, niiiice), Macro-Glo light (25 watts, giving me 2.5 watts per gallon, not ideal, but not as fugly as putting two lighting fixtures on the lid), and a CO2 infection unit I had bought a year or two ago on sale. No heater because my room stays fairly warm, but if I need one I'll get it. Depends on how big the daily temp swings are. I dug a couple of mountainous-looking rocks out of Dad's rock piles for decoration.

I rescued all the surviving plants, mostly some small redish swords, but there's this one big onion-looking thing with looong green leaves, and some stuff that looks like sea grass, as well as one lone piece of Java fern. Enough to really pack the tank. The substrait is a combination of regular aquarium gravel and something for aquatic plants.

The fish left in the 55 were the hardy, don't need to be fed ever, survivors. (really, with enough plants, they didn't need to be fed. Enough microscopic bugs grow in a planted tank that the fish had enough food). One Giant Danio, one Black Skirt Tetra, another tetra that looks like a Glo-lite without the Glo, and some sort of brown pleco. The pleco was a surprise, I had NO idea he had survived. For those of you keeping track at home this means that the tank is now at, and possibly passed, its limit. I transferred a bunch of water from the old tank to the new to give it a good dose of bacteria so we can shorten or skip the nitrogen cycle.

My cat finds this all tremendously entertaining.

Pictures as soon as I can figure out how to transfer them from my camera to my computer.

Comments

[syrraki.livejournal.com]

Wow, haha, raising fish sounds complicated! But go you having some hardy ones! I hate it when fish die really quickly ¬¬. Picture is cool!!

[platedlizard.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not the fish that are all that complicated, it's the plants! You can keep fish in a bare-bottomed tank with a filter, heater, and a couple fake plants and they'll do fine. The plants on the hand need special gravel and lighting and ideally CO2.

The key with fish is to make sure the tank is fully cycled (http://www.fishlore.com/NitrogenCycle.htm). Which sounds complicated, but basically boils down to set your tank up ahead of time and either introduce water or a filter from and established tank (what I did) or let your new tank run for a couple weeks, feeding it fish food or a drop of ammonia every couple of days to get it started.

Most people don't do that. They set the tank up and put fish in it right away, before the tank has the capacity to deal with the fishs' wastes. Then the ammonia and nitrites build up and poison the fish.

The second key is to never overfeed the fish. Fish are coldblooded, they only need a very small amount of food. Established tanks also produce a lot of food for the fish, that's how mine survived being neglected. They had plenty of food growing naturally in their tank. Never feed more than it takes for them to eat in two minutes.

The third key is to never overload your tank. The rule of thumb for fresh water tanks is one inch of fish per gallon of water. While this rule isn't hard, it's a good one for new or lazy aquarists it follow. This is why I said I overloaded the tank. I have a giant danio (4 inches), a pleco (5 inches), a black skirt tetra (2 inches) and what looks like a golddust tetra (1 inch). Making that 12 inches of fish in a 10 gallon tank. What is going for me is the extra filtration (the filter is a 20 gallon filter and has a biowheel) and the plants once they get over the shock of being transplanted.