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Round indoor pond project queries.

And a pic of the tank and plants as it is now. The palm hasn't stopped flowering for months but the peace lily still hasn't flowered in this tank. I did start with smaller lily this time though so it needs to mature.

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:D I was trying to trick you into revealing numbers & names ;)

Hillstreams?
 
No, the hillstreams are in a cold water tank.

I think about 13 clown loaches, 6 kuhli loaches, 5 harlequin rasboras, 10-ish corydoras(never counted them), 9 denison barbs, 5 SAEs, 1 pleco :) Although not completely compatible, the lot seem to get on very well together. Even the small harlequins are brave enough to line up for food.

And strangely enough, the majority of the fish tend to stay around the "feeding spot" front of the tank. When I look at the back(round tank :) ), there's never much action there, mostly the harlequin rasboras, having litres and litres of water to themselves and looking really happy.

I would love to get some more harlequins as there is lots of room for them but they were very sickly when I bought them and I fear a repeat of the months of TLC they had to go through to get healthy.
 
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I feel you had an unusual experience with the Harlequins, they are usually pretty sturdy, ship in well & hold well in shop tanks though occasionally a "bad" batch may come in (as with any fish)

They should be active & decently coloured in the shop tanks

If you get your Harlequns up to 18 or more, they exhibit some great shoaling behaviours (& fun to see them spawn)
 
The harlequins came with columnaris/mouth rot and one of the 2 clown loaches I bought at the same time with them had worms as well. I posted it here at some stage. I lost 3 harlequins and when all was well, I lost a 4th to jumping. . So from 9 was left with 5 but the 2 loaches made it through. All have been healthy for many months since all that was sorted. I bought them Christmas 2016. I should have noticed the columnaris straight away but the harlequins were so tiny, I actually only saw it when one was dying a few days later. Only then I started paying greater attention saw it was actually columnaris. I was lucky I had kanamycin sulfate on hand to save what I saved. This Christmas I didn't dare buy myself fish :)

I have one plastic tub that's been running with just shrimp and snails and left over plants so I've got room to quarantine but haven't had the urges yet :) If I do, I may buy myself 15-ish harlequins next time....I don't intend to be adding any other species to the tank as the combo right now seem pretty happy together.

Someone ate all my anubias! It's shredded to bits and I had kept anubias with clown loaches for a long time without seeing any of this. I suspect either the denison barbs or SAEs...I haven't caught anyone in the act but someone has been pulling chunks out, leaving only the stalks of every anubias plant. At the moment none is left....Funnily, despite the lack of success with plants under water....no black brush algae for a long time....I have some small version of crypts planted around the roots of the emersed plants and the fish haven't been able to get at them. But the emersed plants have grown humongous....The palm will soon pass height of the window behind it.... Its never been that big but the natural light seems to do the trick.
 
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Christmas fish can be less consistent - often shipments will get delayed (no cargo room left or someone else paid more) so boxes may wait on the next plane or travel back & forth between transhipper & airport a few times (each time spending hours at the airport in order to be ready for plane access)

You did well to salvage as many Harlequins as you did
 
I did quite the cleaning today around the tank. The filters were severely overdue their cleaning time. I am ashamed to say how long.... I cleaned two of them....messy Sunday...:) The third one will be next week or the week after just in case....

I also saved one of the peace lily from under the parlour palm. It was being smothered. It has grown so little in comparison to the other peace lily, one can't see it at all unless you know its there. The parlour palm also completely smothered the fern...

I also put another small parlour palm in a hanging basket. I got it from the one on the window sill which right now isn't doing great at all....There's literally no light this winter, crappy weather, storm after storm. Half the leaves of the palm have dried out. I hadn't even noticed till today. The clay pebbles I placed in the basket around the roots aren't water logged so first time I placed basket in the tank, everything went out making a mess..just after I did the damn water change :arghh: .I had to fish out the pebbles and try again :lol: I sort of managed to position it over the hanging inlet so the basket is not completely under the water. I had forgotten I had the same issue last year.

I just need to think how and where to move one of the lights so all plants get it.
 
Today I came across something very interesting in relation to denison barbs, and in particular the colour change one of them experienced earlier in this thread. What I read is that in one recorded rare breeding from 2005, prior to the mating they underwent change of colour, the dorsal surface getting blue. My barb didn't get blue at all but turned out striped, clown loach looking colour, which is amazing on its own, as in the pictures I showed previously.

However, after some googling, there are quite a few occasions where barbs turned odd colour. The people are describing loss of scales, sick looking fish that act healthy, etc... but that's exactly how my denison barb looked like at some stage, very patchy....until it decided it is a clown loach and got that striking black and yellow stripes :rolleyes: Some old threads on the issue even have pictures of denison barbs at the beginning of what mine looked like. The consensus of the thread is that they were picked on or sick but there was no follow up from the original poster. These were old threads and in my scenario I know my barb was neither sick or picked on/attacked by other fish as he/she is still alive and in full denison barb colours right now. It is just something I never came across online...and it interesting to mention.
 
I tried to capture the beautiful colours of the barbs but its proving very difficult...:rolleyes: I love the contrast with the green backs, red line and yellow tails..I may sound too proud :) but I've never seen other denison barbs online with such colours, especially not with such iridescent green backs.. That's the best shot I got from them, lol.

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Edvet said:
( soft apologizing voice: could be the viewing angle:(:shy:)
Click to expand...

They're extremely green I swear :mad::joyful: I actually pictured them mostly "horizontally" to catch the colour as from the top directly you can't capture it as well, holding my phone at an angle waiting for a barb to come on view. But in real life they're very green and shiny.

If you can manage to watch the below older video in high definition it is somewhat obvious, greener than any other denison barbs you'll see online :lol:

 
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