Episode 3: A new scape

[Karmicnull]

Last weekend, I decided, was time to tame the Pogostomonster. I've spent the last 6 months reading tales of people with high tech tanks having to remove or replant 50% of their biomass whilst my lot of plants trundled along not really getting the hang of the whole growing thing. Until one day I suddenly realised I could no longer see my mountains. The Pogostomonster was sprawled all over them like a squat frondy beast from an H.P. Lovecraft novel. So I dedicated last Sunday afternoon to a leisurely session of pruning and rehoming, accompanied by plentiful quantities of Shipyard IPA. I took most of the Pogostomon out, and then with the aid of my trusty reel of black cotton, resettled it into - I think - a more aesthetically appealing arrangement. I have discovered that I have a LOT of Pogostomon.
I also relocated my Java moss and my Spiky moss to be lower in the tank - my working theory is they don't need as much light, so if they're lower, they'll also get less thread algae. One week on that seems to be working, ish. When I cut back the spiky moss I discovered to my surprise that my Hydrocotyle tripartita was actually doing ok - if not growing as aggressively as some of its neighbours. Well, not growing at all to be honest. I've moved all the stuff around it so it can be better lit. Hopefully that will help.

Here's a before and after:

Love pearl gourami, definitely a shy fish to begin with but once settled they really colour up

Yeah mine have definitely done that. They are absolutely stunning now!

Cheers,

Simon

 

[mort]

They will continue to improve as well Simon. Have a look at the adult pair here https://www.seriouslyfish.com/species/trichopodus-leerii/ and I've seen more red/orange in some mature males before.

I'm guessing yours are still small going by the fact your snail in the first update pic looks about the same length. They will continue to improve over the next 18 months or so. They really are a lovely underrated fish.

 

[Karmicnull]

Have a look at the adult pair here

Blimey - you're right. I hadn't looked at that picture since I actually decided on them - there's still a way to go!

 

[Karmicnull]

Well damn. Launched into my periodic count to check I still have six Panda Corys. It would appear I now have seven. And I know fine well they've done it deliberately to wind me up. They always mess about when they see me starting to try and count them.

 

[Karmicnull]

Léonie has decided that the new arrival is called Bobetta. Bobetta is about 1cm long and astonishingly cute. According to Seriously Fish, to get this far I reduced the PH to 6.5, did a 70% water change, and then increased oxygention and flow in the tank. Once the eggs were laid I moved them into a separate spawning tank, where I fed the fry microworms and brine shrimp until they got big enough to move to an adult diet. I must be getting old because I can't for the life of me remember doing any of that. Bobetta was an accident. But we're not going to tell her that.

Here's the irony: up until this evening I had no clue that Bobetta existed, and she has thrived on my neglect. But now I know about her, if I carry on doing nothing and she dies it will be my fault. Aaaargh.

So that leads to my question and my request for help. According to aqadvisor.com my stocking has just crept up from 105% to 107%. What's the implication of overstocking and what do I do to compensate? I'm guessing the answer is more and/or bigger WCs? If the Pandas make this a habit it's going to become a bit of a problem!

 

[Hufsa]

105% to 107% doesnt make a difference imo. You can just carry on like youre already doing.
You'll very likely get a few more Bobettas though, best start thinking up some names 😁
Can you arrange with a local fish shop to offload some once you get too many?

If youre changing any significant amount of water once a week, youre already leagues ahead of all the other overstocked fishtanks out there.
I think its the people who want to have 500 fish and also never do waterchanges that have problems with overstocking.
The aqadvisor is quite conservative and youre barely over 100% No need to sweat

 

[Hufsa]

Just to add as an example, when I say overstocking I dont mean cramming a bunch of angelfish into a small tank and saying its fine if you change more water.
But having a colony of happy fish in a suitably sized tank who start breeding and bumping up the population numbers a bit, that is a different thing.

If I were in your particular situation I would see if I could build up to maybe 5-6 babies of salable size before delivering a batch to your LFS.
5-6 is a number that is easily sold as one group based on common recommendations, so would be easy for the LFS to sell without having lone corys hanging around here and there.
Do your regular waterchanges, feed your fish with moderation and sit back and enjoy seeing life being made in front of your very eyes
Its one of the best parts of the hobby

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,

I still have six Panda Corys. It would appear I now have seven.

I think that you will get some more. <"Panda Cories"> are quite likely to <"raise a trickle of fry">, when they are happy.

According to Seriously Fish, to get this far I reduced the PH to 6.5,

They are good in hard water and about the only locally bred Corydoras you ever see here (water about18dKH)

Bobetta is about 1cm long and astonishingly cute.

Corydoras have the cutest fry any way and Corydoras panda is cute even for a Corydoras.

cheers Darrel

 

[Karmicnull]

having a colony of happy fish in a suitably sized tank who start breeding and bumping up the population numbers a bit, that is a different thing

Thanks for the confirmation - in my head that's what I was thinking. A lot of the advice here boils down to: Get a feel for your tank. Does it look happy? if it does then it probably is. And yes if I end up doubling my population I'll definitely be phoning round the LFS's!

 

[Karmicnull]

they are good in hard water

Corydoras have the cutest fry any way and Corydoras panda is cute even for a Corydoras.

I'm on that page. When I was researching I was all over Venezualan Corys as the hard-water variety I would get. Then I walked into the LFS, saw the Pandas and there was no competition 🥰

 

[Karmicnull]

I messed up. Two weeks ago I killed all the shrimp in my little 12L Marina. I didn't mean to. I didn't even know I had. but they died by my hand. Literally. It was my first major prune - some of the AR Mini was poking its head above the waterline, and the tank was generally overgrown. I set to with gusto and ended up with a heap of cuttings. I potted them up and added them to a new underwater potting shed. A couple of shrimp smuggled themselves in with the cuttings, which was fine - I thought there was enough in the potting shed to keep two shrimp busy. They were fine for the next few days, but by Wednesday, they were looking a little sluggish and unhappy. I figured maybe the potting shed was a little unstable still, so I netted them and put them back in the Marina. It was then that I realised that the shrimp in the Marina were in a bad way. All bar one or two were dying or dead. I did a reflexive 96% water change (2x80% in practice), but it was too late. 24 hrs later they were all dead and I had the the unpleasant task of extracting around 20 corpses from the tank. I'm sure there are as many again that I didn't find.

I spent a sleepless night trying to understand what had happened - clearly I'd done something, but what? Then I was emptying some rubbish into the bin and saw the two empty sachets of Frontline. I can't be 100% certain, but it seems highly likely that's what did it. The cats were frontlined on Saturday, I did the WC on Sunday. It's not that I don't wash my hands after stroking the cats, but I do it reflexively - without really paying it attention. There's every chance that the cat visited mid wc and I gave my hands nothing more than a cursory rinse after having petted her. And then spent half an hour wrist deep in the tank. So far, somehow, the main tank seems ok (I did a WC for that too, and planted some of the cuttings from the Marina in it). I'm crossing my fingers that it's not just taking longer due to a lower dose. I've looked up Frontline and the active ingredients are Methoprene (stops unhatched eggs from developing) and Fipronil (attacks the nervous system). Fipronil is the biggie which is highly toxic to fish and inverts. Methoprene has a half life of 30 hours in water. Fipronil's half life appears to be 12 hours in well lit water, but the things it breaks down into are even more toxic than Fipronil, and there's much less data on how persistent they are. I'll just have to wait and see.

I was (and still am) pretty upset, which is why this post has been so long coming.

Pre-prune

Water emptied

Death Trap.

 

[Simmo]

That’s sad news, but virtually impossible to forsee. Your main tank looks fabulous, what a hige change since you started!

 

[aquascape1987]

Sorry to hear about your shrimp losses @Karmicnull. Try not to beat yourself up too much about this as @Simmo said above, as it is an easy mistake to make, especially with shrimp. Shrimp are often very sensitive to chemicals, and it’s common for people to learn the hard way that something you wouldn’t think of as being dangerous to your aquarium, is highly toxic to them. And is often toxic in minute trace quantities, so you can easily poison them by mistake with normal household activities, even after washing your hands. I once went through a phase of mass shrimp deaths on a daily basis, only to work out in the end that my EI micro mix was contaminated with something that was killing them. Never worked out what it was, but it became apparent after 3 episodes that they started behaving very strange within 5 minutes of dosing on micro days, and by the evening I had lots of freshly dead shrimp. It took me 3 micro days and many shrimp deaths to work it out, which made me feel very bad about it. I scrapped the old mix and made up a new micro solution, and the shrimps stopped dying, so I figured it must have been something contaminating it that wasn’t in the recipe.

Keep your chin up, and take it as a lesson learned the hard way! 😀

Perhaps flea tablets for the cats could be a solution to avoid this in future?

 

[Karmicnull]

Thanks @Simmo and @aquascape1987. I will learn and move on, but I won't stop kicking myself. Still, I'm grateful that the main tank was untouched, and that's the silver lining I'll hold on to.

On a more positive note ostracods have recolonised the Marina, which answers my question about when it will be safe to put shrimp back in, so I dropped an advance guard of three in and I'll see how they do. There's always a bit of algea on the sides of the Marina, but without the cherry shrimp in there, it's really noticeable how much more there is. Weird as I've never seen them grazing the sides.
The sides in the main tank are pristine, which is entirely down to the Bristlenose. He is reticent about it, but the moment the lights are out he's out and polishing the glass, like a proud car owner on a Sunday afternoon. I've got one of those magnetic glass cleaning sponge things, and since getting the Bristlenose I've never used it. It cost more than him too. Here's an FTS to show off his pristine home.

The whole family remain fascinated with the Bristlenose. A while back Blaise and I were watching baby shrimp.
"now the shrimp are breeding, will any of the other fish breed?" he said.
"From what I've read it's possible that any of them might breed, but the corys are most likely to. they'll probably eat their own fry if they do, so don't get your hopes up. The Gouramis make bubble nests which sound really cool."
"What about the Bristlenose?"
"We've only got one Bristlenose."
"Hasn't he heard of Mitosis?"
"Fish have to mate to propagate, you dipstick."
Blaise was unimpressed. "Well that's a bit of a design flaw, isn't it," he said.
I think the Bristlenose's standing in his eyes just nosedived.

Meanwhile the Pearl Gourami have had an abrupt behaviour change. They had got much more relaxed with all the comings and goings in the living room to the point when my fingers would be nibbled at feeding time. Here they are hanging out under the water lettuce.

Once they had calmed and got used to the tank, the dominant male started getting more and more territorial. Also one of the females may not be female; hard to tell but based on the top fin, which has grown out considerably, she could be a he. Hmm..
I presumed the four of them were working out a pecking order, as the argy-bargy was not limited to the dominant male - it was spread out across all of them. Here's one face-off I caught:

This all came to a head one evening about a week ago with an awful lot of splashing and some frantic sprinting around the tank, following which all four of them have vanished behind the mountain and have been hiding there ever since. The females will come out to feed if I stay fairly still, but the male is not to be seen. The Cherry barbs have all been a bit skittish too, staying much closer together, although they have gradually expanded their range to cover the territory abandonded by the Gouramis. Really strange how the dynamic of the tank has changed.

On the plant front, some of the slower growers are now really well established. The Crypt. wendtii tropica has turned into a fantastic feature plant, and the Anubias nana bonsai has spread roots all over the reef rock.

As for the shrimp, they remain supremely unconcerned. We spotted 4 berried females the other day - here is one.

Cheers,

Simon

 

[Simmo]

Looks fab! Gouramis eh? Tsk! 👍😀

 

[Karmicnull]

An indices post!

First off the Frogbit index. A while back I was down to one lone frogbit, it having been outcompeted by the water lettuce. I banished the water lettuce from the marina and gave the frogbit a chance to recover. It did! And moreover it then got a bit pale and wishy washy looking - which I diagnosed as iron deficiency, so I dosed a bit of iron, and hey presto - green happy frogbit. This is the first time I have used the frogbit index in anger, and I am dead chuffed.
A couple of snaps. The first one is a reminder of the frogbit low point, with just one lonely plant huddling by the filter well away from the water lettuce, and the second from yesterday - you can see the older pale growth, and the new happy leaves.

The second index is my home-grown - and definitely untried - shrimp index. I was slightly concerned that I was overfeeding my fish. So I dropped in some shrimpy delicacies to see exactly how hungry they were.

They almost completely finished off a cube of marrow and some nettle overnight - they've never come close to doing that before. If they're that famished, I reckon I'm probably not overfeeding.

Cheers,

Simon

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,

I was slightly concerned that I was overfeeding my fish.

The Cherry Barbs do look a bit chubby.

I banished the water lettuce from the marina and gave the frogbit a chance to recover. It did! And moreover it then got a bit pale and wishy washy looking - which I diagnosed as iron deficiency, so I dosed a bit of iron, and hey presto - green happy frogbit. This is the first time I have used the frogbit index in anger, and I am dead chuffed.

I still get that feeling of achievement, even now.

cheers Darrel

 

[Karmicnull]

The Cherry Barbs do look a bit chubby.

Yeah - I have concluded my 'shrimp index' is essentially a good measure of how many shrimp are in the tank, rather than anything more sophisticated. I've reduced feeding slightly and put the barbs on a new exercise regime.

 

[Karmicnull]

It's been a while, but hey, this is a low tech tank, so there's no hurry, right?

What I've learned over the last few months, is that if you want something to get on and grow right from the off, pick a plant which has 'weed' in its common name. Asian marshweed. Slender pondweed. Star grass. Ok that last one doesn't quite work, but it's actually the most bonkers of the three. I added Potamogeton Gayi (that's the pondweed) and Heteranthera zosterifolia (that's the Star grass) and they immediately started growing. The Star grass in particular I have to trim every week. What's that all about? If I wanted to trim plants every week I would have added CO2. Pfft.

Here are the pondweed and the Star grass just after a trim. Apologies for the shrimp food skewer that features heavily in this set of photos. I have a lot of frozen marrow that the shrimp need to get through before the next lot gets harvested.

These two plants are in sharp contrast to everything else (apart from the Pistia, but that's floating, so it doesn't count). All the other plants have grown at a regal, tortoiselike pace. Until May. Maybe it's something to do with the spring, but 8 months in, everything has just started going for it. The Vals you can see in the photo above is now doing its Gigantea bit. I've been able to remove my airline potoon, as the Vals now does that job, nicely keeping the water lettuce away from the spray bar.
My Crypts are all growing like crazy. The C. Wendtii tropica has spontaneously generated a second plant a good 3 inches away from the original. And the Helanthium Bolivianum (Chain sword), which was, I thought, just taking an awful long time to die, has suddenly doubled in size and started putting out runners. Someone on this forum commented that they found at some point a mature tank found 'balance'. I reckon this tank is there. Largely despite its owner, rather than because of him.

Towards the right hand side of the tank, the Pogostomon helferi carries on being as happy as can be. It has decided to be a tree, in fact. Which is completely not in proportion with the mountainous effect I was shooting for with the glimmer rock. It's kind of the Godzilla of trees, glowering over the whole tank. Not that trees can glower, but you know what I mean.

I also decided to admit defeat on the Alternanthera Rosaefolia, and planted a pile of AR Mini in the corner of the tank, as I have that coming out of my ears elsewhere. So far it hasn't died, and adds a nice splash of colour. Here is an Arty Tank Shot to show it off.

And finally the obligatory FTS, without which all viewers leave feeling somehow cheated.

Cheers,

Simon

 

[Cait1]

It’s looking good. Your writing style reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s ‘Small Gods,‘ which I suppose makes you the god of this particular scape. By which I mean, this journal is highly enjoyable.