Say Cheese!

I was lucky to find the bamboo shrimp today. He had found a current in which to deploy his fans, it just wasn't the one I expected. I found him on the temple, facing up towards the filter output, methodically licking of his fans-arms one at a time. He officially has turned a brilliant red, which lead me to be optimistic about how he's fitted in.

Also encouraging was the fact that he was current feeding; apparently, that is a better sign of health than if he were picking about on the bottom. My only surprise is that he was out in the bright lights; I had thought he would be a nocturnal feeder. I hope that means he's not too hungry.

Looking at the new growth of my new sword plant, it appears that the new growth is not exclusively red. In fact, the first leaf to deploy has turned almost immediately green, while the newest leaf is still coming up a ruddish brown. I can only assume this is how the plant will continue to grow.

Speaking of plants, the rotala indica is really going strong now, with very red shoots all along the water's surface. However, my bushy rotala whatever is sending up new leaves that are quite distorted. The temple is not having as much trouble with new growth. It seems at times that the best conditions for one species necessarily make life difficult for another. I'm not sure I'll be able to get all of them to flourish with same water parameters. I can hope, but I have yet to see everything flourish or flounder at the same time.

Can't Stop Trimming

Whatever bushy, thin-leaved plant I have growing in every part of the tank is growing well in every part of the tank. That is, a lot, and quickly shading and pushing out anything that is around. My plan was to cut it up, as well as some moneywort, and take those with the temple to Alamo Aquatics. I was not terrible happy with the condition of the bushy stuff, so some of it ended up in the trash as well as quite a few temple leaves. The temple especially, showed some tell-tale signs of potassium deficiency (brown, pin-point holes forming in older leaves), but I find it hard to believe, since I am dosing not only KNO3, but K2SO4 as well.


I'm not even all that thrilled with what is left, either. The store can do with it whatever they may, but I'll bet they like the moneywort chain, with half a dozen stems growing off of the one stalk. I didn't have time to go this evening, so I bagged them with some water, and I'll swing them by after work tomorrow.

As a side note, I frustratingly looked for my bamboo shrimp for 15 minutes. It is so big, how could it hide? Well, when I got distraced by a long, narrow fallen leaf that looked for a second like his back stripe, I saw the tail end of him (with back stripe) just barely poking out of a hole in the driftwood. I didn't even know the wood had holes that big in it. I'm hoping he's just being nocturnal and not stressed.

He came out with the lights off, and I spotted his white stripe by the red lotus; I don't know it was a trick of the light, but he looks like he has adopted a reddish hue already, which according to this site, is a good sign.

Speaking of stressed, I'm afraid my latest mystery snail is dead. I noticed him on the ground under the spray bar, rather motionless. His shell was rather pale yellow, and when I grabbed him, he made no visible effort to close up. I have no idea what the tank's problem is (the 5 gallon snail is still alive and presumably well), but I've having zero luck taking care of them lately.

I removed the CO2 indicator today since it hasn't been doing me any good anyway, the liquid in it recently turned nearly completely clear, and the suction cup had become precariously inverted. It remains to be seen if I will replace it.

Three's Company

I was at PetCo the other day for some cat supplies, and I got sucked in to the aquarium section, of course. I was already in the market for an oto for the 5 gallon tank, and they had plenty. In the adjacent tank, however, were bamboo shrimp. I saw these little guys (they're actually a couple of inches long!) on the Discovery Channel special Earth - Freshwater. They have four little fan arms they deploy in the current to filter food. They then rake these against their mouth and eat up whatever they find. It is quite a cool process. And sure enough, there they were in the store! I also saw a couple pretty neat sword plants that looked to be good candidates for replacing the temple on the right side of the 30 gallon tank. Before I pulled the trigger and took them all home, though, I decided to do some reseach on the bamboo shrimp in order to see how compatible they would be.

What I learned about the bamboo shrimp was encouraging. It looked as if they would get along well with everyone (including their fellow shrimp which they would dwarf). Seeing as they cost $6, I decided not to "risk" getting two in case there was any problem fitting in. The oto I was given was actually pulled from the same tank as the bamboo shrimp. And when I say "pulled" I mean it. The worker was having trouble coaxing the oto out and literally yanked it out by its tail, which I don't condone, but it seems to be doing okay in its new home.

The sword plant that I picked up had a different shape than anything in my tank (long thin stems topped with wide leaves) and was spotted, which I liked. I toyed with cutting the temple up, but ended up yanking the two main plants out by the roots, trying to leave as much substrate behind as possible. Cutting away the plastic pot and pulling off the "substrate" (it had the consistency of a wet cigarette-filter) took a few minutes, and the plant's breadth and relative shortness made planting it a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle. Thankfully, it still provided great cover for the tetra that had established the nook defined by the temple, and even the bamboo shrimp enjoyed its shade. The temple got tucked away with its bretheran under the filter, waiting perhaps to be delivered to the local fish store.

Vacation Looms

Today is CO2 refill day; I was hoping to strech out this bottle until my vacation on the 9th of next month, but that was obviously wishful thinking. So I'll probably have to get it refilled again before it needs it, because it would be unwise to have it running unsupervised at the end of its life-cycle. This also got me thinking about how I will handle the tank in other ways during my two-week vacation. Food will probably be taken care of by a feeding block in each tank. Fertilization is a much tougher issue. I have fanciful aspirations of using my soon-to-arrive Lego MindStorms kit to deliver ferts over the course of two weeks, but I'm guessing the safer bet would be to lower the light duration and cross my fingers.

Maybe I've never seen a healthy oto, but a couple of the little bastards I've got swimming around my 30 gallon are not so little. In fact, they've got enormous bellies that are full of either food or eggs. I'm not sure what to do differently if they are pregnant; I imagine I will find out soon enough if they lose a bunch of weight dramatically. At that point, I can only hope to see baby fishes swimming around shortly thereafter.

Perfection is Elusive

I should have learned this lesson long ago and become more comfortable with "good". On the other hand, if I didn't have perfection to aspire to, I might be done with the 30 gallon and felt the need to do something else.

The tank is going well enough, green spot algae is becoming a rarer occurence, the amazon swords are kicking butt, and the rotala indica has made a recent resurgence. As an aside, it's still groing a little too horizontal for my taste. In the past, I blamed this on the stong current produced by the spray bar, but now that that problem has been remedied, I'm suspicious that the severe water changes are conditioning the stems to bend over.

So I can't really complain. All right, I can complain, but I shouldn't. I don't care; here it goes.

A lot of my new growth, specifically the temple and bushy rotala whatever, has some very twisted, crinkly, stunted leaves coming in. The difficulty in diagnosing it is complicated by the fact that some of those plants have perfectly healthy shoots, too. I can't decide why. There does not appear to be any consistent environmental conditions that would lead me to draw any conclusions. Both kinds of shoots are subject to the same water conditions, both sides of the tank, varying levels of light.

Speaking of light levels, after I was feeling good about the progress of the red lotus, I was discouraged to see it was extremely pale today, bordering on brown; the two leaves even looked a little wilted. As far as I can tell, this is either due to disturbing its roots during the water change on Monday night, or diminishing light levels. I can't undo any root damage, but I did peel back the rotala shoots that had shadowed it in hopes of correcting the problem.

Self Medication

If my tank were a child or pet, a doctor would probably recommend against this, but while I was at the local superstore today, I sauntered through the vitamins and supplements aisle and spotted a number of calcium products. Still thinking a calcium deficieny might be leading to some of the sporadic, crappy new growth I spotted, I tossed around the idea of getting something to drop in my tank. The bottles didn't all list ingredients (at least not explicitly), but calcium is calcium, right?

In fact, I saw a couple bottles that both listed their calcium as calcium carbonate, which is exactly would I would be getting from a Greg Watson calcium fertilizer. I ended up settling on a Nature Made supplement that had magnesium and zinc in it, which I need to add, anyway.

I also bought some Flourish root tabs to push into the substate and help compensate for the lack of water column fertiliizer while I'm on vacation. They might even provide some stuff I've been negected to add with my Watson ferts.

All Present and Accounted For

I don't know if they're getting more comfortable and braver, or that I am just rarely home at the time of day they're most active, but I was able to identify, with a high degree of confidence, all six golden kuhli loaches squirming around in the rotala indica today. Needless to say, it's very comforting to see all of the fish I bought, seemingly happy and healthy, and well-adjusted to the presumably balanced tank.

Quick Head Count

I just wanted to take a second here today to mention my latest golden kuhli loach sighting. This evening when I got home, I counted five of them at once, one shy of the six I bought. They were just squirming around in the rotala indica branches, not unlike the original kuhli loaches. Since I keep seeing more and more of them, and they seem healthy and active, I'm holding out hope that the sixth one is just a little shyer and less confident.

Tiger Shrimp Are In

Without any soccer, it was the right weekend to start hacking away at all of the overgrowth I have allowed over the past few weeks. These pictures make it pretty clear how much I was able to remove from the tank. The two freezer bags in the top of the picture have those big, bushy thin-leaved plants, and temple on the left. The third freezer bag is full of some truly large water sprites, and the sandwich bags had star grass and rotala ludwiga.
To give some more perspective on how much stuff I had actually pulled from that tank, I also have a picture of all the stuff that was unworthy to bring to the store and ended up in the trash.

Below is a picture of the "new" tank, where light can now get to the lower plants (especially/hopefully the red lotus).


Looks completely different, no? Almost bad... Well, it's kind of like a haircut, I guess; if you don't care for it, you just need to wait for it to grow back. We'll see how quickly it fills in again.

Rather than waste all of the excellent growth, I decided to swing by Alamo Aquatics again to see if they could move some merchandise, as it were. The tank was relatively empty, and they were nice enough to take on my plants.

Mona said the temple had gone like wildfire previously. It's a high-demand item they don't carry otherwise. I was particularly complimented that my water sprite was the only water sprite she could keep alive in that tank (the rest would melt), though I imagine that is more due to luck than skill.

They were nice enough to give me some tiger shrimp in exchange (don't they look cool?). I only asked for one or two, but Mona graciously gave me four. They ended up in the 5 gallon, because it needs some interesting inhabitants. I just hope they leave my pregnant ghost shrimp and her eggs alone.

As a side-note, while doing the water change on my 30-gallon tonight, I was happy to spot five otos, so they're all accounted for. I doubt I'll ever be able to count 6 golden kuhli loaches at once, but I saw a couple healthy looking ones swimming around the back of the tank, too.

It's a Jungle in There

Here is the lastest incarnation of the tank, completely overgrown with star grass, temple, water sprite, and whatever that bushy, thin-leaved plant in the middle is. The rotala ludwiga is also a bit overgrown, crowding the amazon swords. The glosso is carpeting the substrate very well as of late; one can also see a very tall shoot of moneywort in the foreground on the right. The new red lotus is practically invisible, buried in water sprite roots.

Views from the left and right. I love the overgrown look, but I know it's getting a little bit out of control, and I need to make sure everything's getting enough light.

Obviously the temple is getting too tall. A couple different stalks are straining towards the light. Like Cupid, they are being burned for their efforts.