Hi,
I'll start with the bad... I've held off updating this journal as we were unfortunate with our betta fish and I was quite sad about it to be be honest!
The fish seemed perfect for the first week but in the second week he just dropped like a stone. The missus had gone away for the week and I naively thought that as this fish was in her office and was now alone, it was just withdrawn from having no contact. Basically it stopped eating and by the time I realised something was properly wrong and treated the tank it had full on dropsy and I had to do what I think was the right thing. Was really very sad to see such a rapid decline in him so soon after getting him. I've looked into what have could have gone wrong (over feeding, live daphnia, poor quality fish from LFS etc) and any of them it seems could be responsible.
The missus is very keen to try another betta but we've decided to leave it until after our holidays in July, then we'll think about another.
In the meantime (and better news), i'd acquired some frogbit & cabomba from Darrel. Never had much luck with frogbit but was hopeful in this tank as the flow is slow to non existent lol. Well from a planted point of view this little tank is still surprising me, the growth on the ludwigia and cabomba in particular is mental, i've just trimmed it all up and the stems of both were 45cm+ in length trailing all over the surface. The most amazing aspect though is the plant health of all the plants in there. Didiplis diandra looks so much better than it does in my hi tech and the few tennellus plantlets I replanted are now throwing runners like crazy. Even the frogbit is looking great and starting to spread now. It all looks super healthy in there!
As for the livestock, well since the tank became fishless the 5 cherry shrimp I'd kept have boomed again, there's a number of new shrimplets and the more mature ones are constantly berried. At least some things are thriving.
Anyway, enough jibber jabber, here's a couple of pics taken yesterday after a 25% w/c and trim up...
Cheers,
Rob