nos pisciculi

Thorichthys Meeki - Meek and mild, it ain't. Beautiful, it is.

2011-05-14T17:17:00.000-07:00

I got a trio of juvenile Thorichthys Meeki (Firemouth cichlids) about 4 months ago. I made the mistake of putting them in my 50 gallon angel-fish tank. As small juveniles they didn't cause any trouble, but as they developed their full adult colors, they also developed full size adult attitude. Mean. Nasty. Spiteful. But cheery, nonetheless. How can you not be cheery when the bottom of you is a bright rose red, and the sides of you sparkle like a thousand small diamonds?

What a beautiful fish. But what a royal pain. Today, I took the entire tank apart, removed all the plants, rocks, and still I could only catch two out of three of the fish. The substrate which is a fracted-clay commonly used for planted tanks, was full of mulm. As I stirred it up, it became rather cloudy. The fish all disappeared into the haze. I gave up. I came back an hour later, drained the tank down to 1 inch of water left in it, and remove every fish I could see, and still I could not find the last of the Firemouths. Eventually I saw what looked like a shift in the gravel. The fish had turned the exact color of the gravel, and was staying absolutely still. With a bit of cloudiness left in the water, the fish was completely invisible.

I've never seen a better job at going "chameleon" in a fish. My clown loaches gray out, and my the colors of my noses on my yellow labs change from bright unstained yellow, to almost brown, depending on their moods. But this is the first time I've had the entire tank stripped down and only 1 inch of water left, and still I could not find this fish. I thought he might have gone under the gravel, like a horsehead loach that I once had. But no, he wasn't under the gravel. He was just gravel color.

Now the trio of Firemouths are in their own tank. I'm hoping to have lots of cute little fishies in that tank soon.

My Shrimp Tank (youtube)

2011-03-05T20:10:00.001-08:00

I have posted a video on youtube showing my 10 gallon shrimp tank. The tank contains Macrobrachium Assamensis (Red Claw or Rusty Claw shrimp), and some more common red cherry shrimp.

Blog Recommendation

2010-09-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

Shirlie Sharpe blogs for About.com, and her most recent blog post is quite interesting. It concerns the Japanese art of Gyotaku.

Another good aquarium blog, for those who like planted tanks, is GuitarFish's blog and site. His posts have lots of pictures and they can be a source for inspiration for your next planted tank.

Sarcastic Fringehead

2010-08-07T17:13:00.000-07:00

This is one of the coolest and weirdest creatures I have ever seen. It reminds me of those aliens on the Muppet show.

Found originally here:
http://www.wimp.com/sarcasticfringehead/

My Black Angel and his Lovely Wife

2010-05-30T18:54:00.000-07:00

These two fishies are in a 50 gallon tank, that is heavily planted. It has pieces of slate lined up against the sides, tilted at a jaunty angle, for them to place their
eggs on. Instead, they have decided that the intake tube of my Eheim cannister filter was a much better place. They have spawned twice now. The first time, the eggs went white (which means a fungus killed them) and they ate their eggs, which is a natural response, when they recognize their eggs are infertile. Now they've done it again, and this time, the eggs seem not to be going white.

My 75 Gallon Malawi Cichlid Tank

2010-05-21T18:33:00.000-07:00

I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves.

You can view the whole album here.

The History of Our Hobby

2010-05-18T08:43:00.001-07:00

The best two articles I have found on the history of the aquarium hobby are:

How did it all begin
by Robin Whittall

-and-
A History of the Hobby (Saltwater Aquariums)
by Roger Vitko

I am fascinated by the early tank designs. Here is a 1920s art-deco tank with a seahorse theme:

Here is a late Victorian lithograph showing a public display of freshwater Trout.

Ten Things I Wish I Knew when I Started Out.

2010-05-08T19:02:00.001-07:00

My first fish tank was a 0.5 gallon tank that my dad gave me. I kept a guppy in it, and a dwarf pleco, and a bronze cory. Now, being over thirty years old at the time, there is no excuse for my ignorance. Even though the pleco was a dwarf pleco, anything more than a minnow or two in that 0.5 gallon tank, is pretty much overstocked to deadly amounts. I did not do water changes regularly. Algae took over the poor thing, and the poor fish inside, that were very hardy indeed, hung around for months of this abuse. I cleaned the tank one time, and used soap, and then everything in the tank died. Well. Everything except one Cory Cat who is still alive now, these many years later. He must be over 5 years old. I call him "Survivor Fish". He floated upside down for a day, and then, he came back, and started eating again.

I bought my sons a ten gallon fish tank. The cory went in there, and a few other fish. I put the blue and red puke gravel in the bottom. I did not have a scuba dave toy in there, but my boys wanted me to. I did water changes, and I fed the fish, and even though it was the boys tank officially, I ended up taking it over.

Then I went into Big Als, the local big-box fish store in Toronto, and they had a pretty good price on a 29 gallon "starter kit" with a basic fluorescent hood, and I thought to myself "29 gallons, wow that's huge". I bought that tank. I did water changes. I joined a web forum (gtaaquaria.com) and I started buying and reading aquarium books, and magazines. Four years later, I know a lot more about the aquarium hobby. I keep cichlids, and live-bearers, and I have a brackish puffer tank. I still don't do enough water changes. Weekly is better than the non-hobbyist fish-keepers, but I have realized recently that unless I put the time in, and do water changes twice a week, I'm never going to get the nitrate levels down where I want them, which is around half of where they are at now.

But, thinking back over all I've read, and discussed on online forums, here are the ten things that I think I needed to know before anybody let me buy a fish and keep it in a glass box:

1. If you don't change the water regularly (at least weekly), you're being cruel to animals that can feel pain, and that isn't cool. So do your water changes, or don't keep fish.

2. It's worth buying fish from a better store, and paying more. Here in Toronto, there are a few fish stores that I love, and buy most of my stock from. Recently there was a new store in my area, and it was the worst run store I have ever seen in my life. Now that it's closed (thank goodness), they won't be killing any more fish. Second only to ignorant pet-owner cruelty, ignorant pet-store-owner cruelty gets me upset the most. People starting out in the fish hobby should find out the best stores and shop there exclusively.

3. I love the dip-strip testers. If you don't test your water, you don't know what you're doing to your fish, and we're back to cruelty again. (Hate to repeat myself here.)

4. Keeping up with aquarium maintenance and having healthy fish and a pretty, clean, healthy aquarium is more fulfilling (and fun) than keeping an ugly aquarium full of sick and dying fish.

5. Aquarium club auctions are a great way to get a lot of aquatic plants cheap. The second best cheap place to get plants is the pond section at your local greenhouse, rather than at the aquarium stores, which tend to charge a lot for plants, which mostly melt in my low-tech-no-co2-not-so-very-much-light tank. Hornwort and Rotala are my two "most successful" plants. I have so much of the stuff, that I can not even give it all away. Java fern is the one thing worth buying at your local fish store. Stick it on a piece of wood. Awesome.

6. You're not going to like that blue puke gravel after you've been doing this hobby for a year. You're going to say to yourself, "who in their right mind would pick bright un-natural colors for their decor". A brand new person into the hobby, that's who. It seems many aquarists start out in the "blue puke" phase and then outgrow it. I've got several buckets of blue, red, and other colorful gravel in my basement. Anybody want it?

7. You can never go big enough. Small is dumb. Big is good. So start out with a big first aquarium, if you want to enjoy this hobby instead of get frustrated by it. I started at 0.5 gallons which was merely a convenience because I got the tank free. Then I went to 10 gallons, which still seems cripplingly small to me. Then 29 gallons, then a pile of 29 and 20 gallon tanks. Then a 50 gallon tank, and a 75 gallon. I think 110 gallons would actually be a better "beginner" tank than a 10 gallon tank. I wish someone had told me to get a 30 gallon to start with. Everything is easier then.

8. Buy a book. A really good one. I recommend the first "beginner" book I bought: "The simple guide to Freshwater Aquariums" by David E. Boruschowitz. I don't agree with everything he says in here, but almost everything in here is the best expert advice on the planet, on every subject known to aquarium keeping. This guy has been the editor of the single best fish-keeping magazine on the planet (Tropical Fish Hobbyist), for nearly fifty years. He knows his stuff. He probably has about a hundred tanks at home. If he tells you not to add a million chemicals to your tank, but just to do water changes, and avoid the chemzorb-3000 granules, then take his advice.

9. Pick a species, or two. Everybody seems to start with a community tank. But it would be a much better idea, to have a first tank with one, or two species. Maybe danios and a few corys. Or platies. Or just barbs. There are so many cast-iron species out there, that are impossible to fail with, on your first tank. You can't put ten species you know nothing about in your tank, and have much luck with that. My earliest "wow!" moment in this hobby was my first platy tank. I had four platies in a 29 gallon tank. I had plants. And rocks. And soon, I had hundreds of platies. It was magic. I was hooked on platies. Today, I just bought some nice hi-fin platies at a nice aquarium store in Markham. Hi Frank. Your store is great.

10. Don't sweat everything. Learn to love snails. Learn to live with that algae on the back of your tank. Scrape the front glass, and leave the back go grow if it wants to. Learn to restock, and give away livestock, until things work out. And if you have a bad experience, learn from it. But don't sweat everything so much that you fail to enjoy this hobby.

The best part of my hobby, the part that keeps me in it, is the hours I can spend just watching these amazing creatures live their interesting little lives. They are happy to see me, and happy to be fed. They are happiest of all when they are splashing around in fresh clean water, or eating yummy treats, like bloodworms. You can feel the happy. It seeps up your arm, and into your heart.

Brood Care - My Convict Cichlids

2010-05-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

I bought six Convict Cichlids, formerly labelled Archocentrus, now "Amatitlania Nigrofasciatus" according to up-to-date sources. Thank you Ichthyologists of the world, for the always entertaining Latin Dance you do; the Taxonomic Shuffle.

That was a year ago, when the Archocentrus latin name was still current, I think. If you have a fish book from ten or twenty years ago, then it's anyone's guess which of the six historical latin names applied.

For several weeks, I thought, hey, this easy-to-breed fish just isn't breeding for me.
I had read somewhere, that all you had to do to breed these fish was to keep them at least mostly submersed in some sort of liquid or other, if it's mostly water that you have them in, so much the better.

Then not one, but two pairs formed, and all my tanks were flooded with fry. Seven hundred fry later, I thought I had finally given away every last one, and was safely past my Convict Cichlid phase. One fish store took a hundred off my hands, and a fellow hobbyist with a serious case of multi-tank-syndrome took sixty more. But six small hideaway fry grew up into full size fish. And then I got a whole tank full of African Rift Lake cichlids from someone getting out of the hobby, and he had a "pink convict" male in the same tank, who was so shredded up that I couldn't recognize him as a Convict Cichlid at all. For those of you not in the hobby, it's bad form to mix south-american convicts with african rift-lake cichlids, and in general, it's bad to mix fish with different levels of aggression. You end up with sickened or shredded, or dead fish. A convict is a tough guy and can take care of himself. He shouldn't go in a community tank, nor should he go in with twenty-five Africans who are bigger and tougher than he is.

The long trailing tapered fins of this Pink Convict Cichlid male were gone, and the fellow looked like someone had given him a trim with a razor-blade, removing most of his fins.

Click thumbnail for a closeup of the Male Pink Convict

Now the pink convict, who looked like death when I got him, is healthy and three months after I put him in a convicts-only tank, he has bred with one of my remaining regular Convicts, a female with the most gorgeous blue-purple color highlights of any Convict I've ever had.

Here she is taking care of the "wigglers", newly hatched not-yet-free-swimming fry:

Click thumbnail for a closeup of the fry

I am curious if I will get any interesting colors from this mix of different color Convicts. Some aquarists have no taste for this fish. I must admit that this fish is a tough, charming, and fascinating little critter, and as much as he is an imposing visitor, when he brings his seven hundred little fry into the world, he is also a phenomenal success in his natural habitat, and very well adapted and ideal species for any aquarist, beginner, or jaded expert.

I am cultivating Infusoria cultures in the back yard to feed my coming storm of cute little fry. I will post pictures when they reach the free-swimming micro-fry stage, and the "mostly eyes and spiny fins" fry stage.

Update: They are free swimming now. Here's a picture:

And for mother's day, here's a picture of the proud fish-mama:

Poissons, Ecrevisses, et Crabes de Diverses Couleurs (1719)

2010-03-21T15:45:00.001-07:00

This is amazing. A rare book, scanned and online for your viewing pleasure.

From 1719, including many color illustrations, probably painted by hand.

Corny but Amazing Video from 1957

2010-02-22T17:48:00.000-08:00

This video was produced by the Moody Institute of Science,
1957

"When we watch the living things about
us carefully, and with patience, there
are many wonderful things we can learn."

You may be tempted to mock the 1957 narrator, or the music. I know I found the euphemistic avoidance of biological terminology odd, and yet charming. I could do to live in a world where we left some things unsaid. But I'd like you to notice yourself too, while you watch this video. "What happened to your species, between 1957, and 2010 that made you so cynical", I asked myself, when I watched this.

This is quite a fine piece of science education for children, done by the Moody Bible College, in 1957.

Wouldn't you rather believe in a world where there is a plan, a design, a parent
who loves you? Not only to believe this, in your childhood, but throughout your life, that there is always, always, more out there. The study of science with an open mind, and open eyes, leads to the revelation that the universe is personal. And if you look at the universe, you see competition, yes, and you see that fish aren't all cute and cuddly. But the longer the you look into this little world inside glass, the harder it is to look away. Isn't the amazing intricacy of this world we live in, a sign that there may be more out there to discover? Do we not live in a world of mystery, of beauty? I see a whole cosmos inside these little aquariums. I find peace, staring into my tanks. And when I learn more about this amazing world, and these amazing animals, I am left with a feeling of awe, and wonder.

The fish in my aquarium are truly important. They matter. They are alive. They deserve humane and gentle care. And they reward their keepers richly. Their lives, their behaviours, their beauty, are a rich banquet for those who have eyes to see it.
I'm well and truly hooked into this little hobby.

This is my blog about aquariums.

2010-02-22T07:41:00.000-08:00

I am going to blog about aquariums. I have decided that my other blog topics, Religious, and Technological, are not something I want to do any more.