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2.11 Gallon - Lace and Wood, All, My Tanks, Plant Profiles 2 Comments

Lace Java Fern and Wood – 2.11 gallons – Initial Setup

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I really love Lace Leaf Java Fern (Microsorium pteropus v. Windelov). It has such a beautiful, rich green color with intricate and delicate features. It is savage, raw, and angular, yet something about it is as soft and provocative as the lace for which it was given its common name. Here are some pics of my lace leaf java fern.

It was this plant that inspired my idea for this tank. I decided to go with all wood and lace java fern, though a few regular java ferns are in there too, and there’s some moss in the back to keep everything in balance. The idea of having wood be as angular and thrusting into the air above as the tips of the lace leaf really resonated with me. I chose a dark, thick, angled, throne-like shaped piece of Malaysian bogwood for the main wood feature. It’s beautiful grain swirled gently around the sharp bends, really capturing the attributes I wanted the tank to display. I didn’t have many small pieces, and I really wanted to have many jutting, striving branches of sorts around the main piece, hiding its base. For this I used small sections of broken off bogwood and some lighter pieces of aquarium safe wood I had lying around from previous purchases. This added nice depth and variation to the wood itself – again making the wooden sections more intricate and complex. All of these smaller pieces were angled upward from the substrate, all pointing to the same far away spot, creating a perspective point as if the tank were much larger than its actual size.

I couldn’t find a ton of lace java fern more than the few pieces I had at the time. I added what I did have, a large moss ball from another tank, and began preparing it to house shrimp in the future. Here was the tank on the first day:

I’ll be doing an updated post with how this tank came out  and all of the equipment running it soon!

All, Betta and Black Neon Tetras, Fish/Invert Profiles, My Tanks Leave a comment

Farewell to My 10 Gallon

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My basic ten gallon tank had become the repository for fish that I couldn’t bring myself to bring back to the store. It had been my first tank, originally overstocked with platies and a pleco on the advice of a fish store salesperson. This is the tank I learned my first, brutal lessons on fish tank cycling, handling livebearers who just keep on making fry, and keeping proper ratios of male to female fish who get aggressive when wanting to mate.

Anyhow, this ten gallon recently saw the passing of the bright yellow betta who had been living there. He jumped out of the tank in the middle of the night, only to be found crunchy on the floor the next morning. This has been the only way I’ve ever lost a betta – they manage to find any small holes in a tank’s cover if they really feel like jumping. Here’s the tank and the betta:

What remains are the eight black neon tetras and three microglanis iheringi, aka South American Bumblebee catfish. I’ve never been a huge fan of smaller schooling tetras beyond using them for aesthetics, but I absolutely love my little catfish! There isn’t a whole lot of information on these little micro cats, which is a large part of what has inspired me to begin planning my first biotope tank around their natural habitat. I tried getting some pictures of them this morning, but these little guys are ridiculously fast. I didn’t think to grab the camera until after their initial feeding, and then not even some defrosted blood worms could tempt them from their hiding spots:

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

So instead, here is a photo from this site to give you an idea of what these guys actually look like:

Microglanis_iheringi2

I love watching them come out to chomp down on food, frantically swimming around through all of the nooks and crannies in the wood and through all of the bottom plants to suck in a mouthful of food. Yet the most comprehensive source I can find on this species is from fishbase.com, located here. They’re originally from the “Turmero River Basin.” Yet every website that contains similar phrases is either about this exact species or about the pollution of that waterway. The Turmero river flows into Lake Valencia, located in north-eastern Venezuela, South America. I plan on making this location my first biotope.

If you have any information on Venezuelen fish species that might be available and be okay in a smaller tank (I’m thinking a 20 gallon long – with high flow to make a river type system), let me know! For now, there seem to be many options for guppies, tetras, or killies, and it would be nice to have the bumblebee cats to keep the fry levels in check!

There are also many other options I’ve been considering with the new tank spot I could have now, maybe a Scarlet badis (dario dario) tank? Peacock Gudgeons? American native darters? Killifish breeding? White Clouds? Furcata Rainbows? Gurtrudae Rainbows? Can’t wait to find out.

All, Fish/Invert Profiles, Green Spot Puffers Leave a comment

Green Spotted Puffers (Tetraodon nigroviridis)

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If you’ve ever decided to look further into green spotted puffers (GSPs) than just noticing them at your LFS, you’ve probably run into a large variety of conflicting opinions and professional recommendations alike. I, unfortunately, am not here to declare definitive stances on anything, but rather to share what I have learned in my own experiences owning one, then two GSPs over the last two years.

Side/Front Pic

Side/Front Pic

Firstly, GSPs sometimes get mislabeled in fish stores. True GSPs, Tetraodon nigroviridis, when healthy have the following appearance traits:

  • bright white bellies
  • a neon yellowish lime colored top half that gets reflective and brighter on top of their “head”
  • dark black, round spots all over their greenish portions, with some overlapping near the boundary to their white portions
  • Puffers often change color to match their surroundings, and some just seem to change color. I’ve never seen anything this drastic in my puffers, but this person’s puffer has the ability to alter its coloration dramatically.
  • They’re not going to be puffed up like a giant round ball unless under extreme stress. Without having to be a huge, spiky ball, puffers are still pretty round fish
  • Two eyes on either side of their head that can move independently to look around. These stick out of their heads a bit, and you can see the motion of their individual eyes changing their lines of sight.
  • Teeth. These little puppies got teeth. This impacts their diet, because their teeth don’t stop growing.
  • Two small side fins and a tail – all a translucent pale green.
http://aqualandpetsplus.com/Brackish%20Water%20IV.htm

From above – notice these guys have torn fins 😦

Puffers are really curious and endearing. For all their known aggression with other fish, they have many ridiculously comical traits that make them seem harmless and endearing. Puffers often “blimp” around, pretty much hovering in place with fluttering side fins that look too small for their large bodies. Sometimes they’ll just stay exactly in place while slowly curling their tail toward their side, causing them to spin in a perfect little circle. Then they’ll see a snail across the tank.  One sudden sprint later, they’re biting through the shell and sucking out the inhabitant in one swift moment. Then they’ll watch you watching them from the other side of the glass, deciding whether to come toward you to get more food or to wait cautiously for you to move first. Some puffers are attention hogs who will swim to the glass immediately to meet you, while others are cautious and easily spooked. But all of them seem to be really adorable.

Teeth - Too long!

Teeth – Too long!

Though most people tend to be drawn to GSPs when they see them and think that they are quite cute, GSPs are not common pets because of their high difficulty of care and stringent tank requirements. You pretty much seem to need GSPs in their own tank, else have thirty or so gallons of water per GSP. This is a lot of aquarium space for a single fish to need. Furthermore, they need good quality water to actually be healthy and grow. Yet this is difficult to maintain with a GSP because of their enormous bioload and inability to utilize plant growth for filtration given their changing salinity levels throughout development. So, you’ll need to make sure you have the tank over-filtered with good flow throughout the tank. Regular water changes and substrate vacuuming will be especially important – meaning GSPs are high maintenance fish. Oh, then there’s their absolutely required special diet. Since these protein lovers don’t really chew on anything unless they’re eating, you need to feed them hard foods (snails, crayfish, clams) that will wear down their teeth. And when you’re not feeding them that, most won’t take anything less than frozen bloodworms, freeze dried krill, defrosted or live shrimp, or other such ‘meaty’ foods.

Before you take a GSP home, do your research on these fish. While they can be rewarding creatures to care for, they have lots of quirks that commonly sold freshwater fish do not. Go read through many different websites about GSPs to hear many opinions. Learn to interpret your GSP’s individual signs of stress and aim to find what seems to make your GSP  as calm, curious, and brightly colored as you can get them. Some of the websites I visited and still visit at times when I have a question or concern are thepufferforum.com,  myfishtank.net, this hubpages.com site, or other such sites I find from googling various names for the GSP (like GSP, Tetraodon nigroviridis, green spotted,…) and terms about the questions (like teeth, pale, help,…). For more general, beginner info, sites like fishbase.org’s pageor seriouslyfish.com’s page would be decent starting sites. If you want me to add a suggestion, let me know or put it in the comments for me to add.

Here is my GSP Jake:

Is it raining bloodworms?
Such a bright spot on his head!
Chewing Break while curling up
Ooo, is that a snail?!
Oh hai.
More food!!

Normally, two GSPs in a 20 gallon is a bad idea, but my first, Jake, was an extremely shy fish. After eight months of researching and incorporating attributes of successful GSP habitats and tanks, Jake was still extremely shy, easily frightened, and rarely seen. He would occasionally get spooked by a ghost shrimp that snuck up on him. Jake was so passive that the ghost shrimp began breeding and multiplying in the tank with him. Yet his appetite an coloring were great. I tried adding more hiding spaces, breaking more lines of sight, adding more swimming room at various water levels, changing substrate, adding more filtration, adjusting water flow/turbidity, adjusting pH (they like higher pH than average), adjusting the lighting, changing diet,… I finally decided that another GSP would be my best bet. This would also let me see if Jake’s behavior was exhibited by a second GSP. If two GSPs both had Jake’s irregularly shy and skittish behavior, then the tank setup would have remained a probable cause. Thus came Finn:

Just woke up – still getting his colors back!
Starting to Perk Up and chase down a snail (not hard to beat a snail in a race…)

So to Jake’s tank, I added Finn. Finn originally followed Jake everywhere in the tank, with Jake mostly running away. I almost brought Finn back that first day because images of Jake suddenly going all Ozzy Osborne on Finn’s fat little face if he got too fed up with it. Within an hour or two, Jake and Finn had settled and were napping a few inches away from each other peacefully. Jake has become much more active and social, and the two seem to get along wonderfully. They are both still less than half their likely final size, and I don’t expect Jake and Finn to live happily ever after together in a 30 gallon tank. Within the next year or so, I plan on either upgrading them to a larger tank, or, more likely, only keeping one and moving them to a 33 gallon (or larger) long, rimless tank.

I plan on doing a post in the near future on creating a beautiful tank without using live plants. Since GSPs need a higher salinity than most freshwater plants tolerate yet a lower salinity than marine plants can tolerate, GSP tanks are very difficult to plant. Maybe once I have figured out freshwater better I’ll give it a go, or wait until they are mature enough to do a full marine planted tank, i.e no corals. In many ways, the GSP tank has been harder for me to decorate as I would like, so it has gone through many different iterations and changes. I have some decent pictures of at least four different GSP setups that will be the subject of a future post.