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.