Way too much time has passed without an update here. I had problems with my Google account and time and work got the better of me. This is not to say that time has stood still in Liz's World of Aquariums.
The P. leopoldi spent a month in quarantine, battled ich, and were installed in the 150-gallon, minus many of the Endler's and all of the guppies. They are much, much happier in that tank, and in hindsight they'd have been better off going straight into that tank rather than spending a stressful month in the 40-gallon. I did not really have much I needed to protect in the 150, when I think about it. No delicate species, nothing fancy, and these wild caught fish sure seemed to be happier. I actually never did eradicate the ich, which may not have actually been that parasite, because I treated with temperatures in excess of 90F, salt, and finally Rid-Ich and Quick-Cure. Nothing touched it for a month, so who knows. It has now been 3 months later and a few of them still have a cyst or two on them, but they must be encapsulated, encysted scar tissue or something.
The next thing to announce is that I also obtained a Planiloricaria cryptodon, or a spoonfaced whiptail catfish.
He's a fabulous fish, and maybe one of the most interesting specimens I've ever kept. He spends his time buried in the sand almost completely, does not swim around hardly at all, and eats sinking pellets that I usually hand-feed him with forceps. I know he is capable of finding food, but I tend to baby this fish, since many people have trouble keeping them fed and thriving. After almost 4 months I feel quite accomplished to have him happy and healthy. He has a very long filament on the end of his tail, about the same length as his body, that he raises and lowers, just like cracking a whip. He also has a shorter filament on his dorsal fin that he raises when alert. He crawls around on pectoral fins, like a mudskipper, as he creeps towards his food. He mostly spends time like this (it makes me feel sorry for all of the other ones mistakenly kept in gravel):
In the 40-gallon Q-tank that held the leopoldi, I have installed a proven pair of silver angels, domestics, and am trying my hand at breeding them. I am accustomed to African cichlids, mbuna and haps and such, and they breed without any intervention from the fishkeeper, so I would wait until the babies were selling size, slip a trap into the tank and haul out the juvies to take to the LFS for cash. These angels are a different story. I got the pair from a hobbyist friend I met on a forum and who happens to live a few miles from me, and he assured me that they were good parents who would raise their fry. That is a good thing, since many domestic P. scalare do not raise their young and the eggs must be taken right after they are fertilized, and kept in a separate tank with measures taken to maintain water flow over the eggs and methylene blue added to prevent fungus. My pair, Agnes and Frank, have prove to be pretty good at this, though they apparently ate their free-swimming babies, since I had almost 100 of them and over the course of about a week they all vanished. I can detect no problems with water quality, and the parents are healthy.
They have now spawned again, and I have set up a 37-gallon tall tank that is mostly bare, save a thin layer of sand and a large chunk of driftwood with some Anubias sp.
Since Agnes and Frank are very good taking care of the eggs, and taking care of the wigglers, I will scoop the free-swimmers out when they are still being kept corralled in a bunch at the top, right after the wiggler phase, assuming Frank does this with them again. The first time I wanted to see how they did, and did not really have somewhere to put them, but now I will be ready. I will do a large water change in the 37-gallon using parent tank water so they won't have a shock, and hopefully raise these babies to sell. The parents are quite attractive, with excellent finnage, so I hope they will have equally attractive babies. This is prep for the eventual breeding of the wild leopoldi angels. No sign of pairing off in the 150, however.
The final update is that I have revamped the 10-gallon desktop tank and it now contains an adorable Figure-8 puffer named Otis (I don't typically name my fish but for some reason the domestic angels and the puffer seemed to require naming). I removed almost all of the plants from the tank, added base rock and coral to form arches and caves, and left some Anubias in there for interest. Puffers seem to like plants. He is a great little fish that keeps me company while I work. He eats live worms, live adult brine shrimp, frozen blood worms, and, of course, snails. He does a real job on snails. I have a bumper crop of ramshorns in the 40-gallon with Agnes and Frank (am working on a mystery snail farm in the 37-gallon fry growout tank as well) and I used to crush the larger ones for Otis, but today I learned that this is totally unnecessary. He can handle them with no problems, especially now that he is comfortable and settled.
Otis was sold to me as FW so I am taking my time to acclimate him to brackish. I have begun doing my water changes with a small amount of brackish water I have mixed up in a 5-gallon water cooler jug, and over time I'll get him to full brackish, which is SG 1.005. It takes 12 tbsp of saltwater mix to bring the 5 gallons up to brackish. I am enjoying this little fish, and am also enjoying the prospect of a brackish tank, which I have never kept before. It is said that I can possibly keep some sort of goby with him at some point (I have a nice sandy bottom) but I may need to upgrade the tank to a 15 or 20-tall to make room as he grows. His meaty diet means very frequent PWCs (partial water changes) already, so more water will make things easier. He is about 2" right now but hopefully will grow. I think he has grown already in the 3 weeks I've had him.
So, my only other plans tentatively involve adding some sort of dwarf cichlid species to the 150, like Apistogramma sp., since I could likely keep several pairs in there. There is quite a bit of room still, and they will stay on/near the bottom where there are plenty of hidey holes and caves. There is a local breeder I ran across on Aquabid.com, so I will look him up and go see what he has when I am ready to shell out a few shekels. Otherwise, I'm just waiting on Agnes and Frank to raise me a batch of babies, am wondering if there are any catfish (Ancistrus sp.?) that I can keep in the 37-gallon fry tank that will not eat fry but will hold a cycle for me in between times, and am contemplating a small tank upgrade for Otis.
Almost forgot - I have a story about The Whip. I had my friend, Deborah, over to pick up some of the Indian almond leaves I received so she could try them in her SA blackwater setup, and we were in the kitchen talking. I had the lid to the hood on the 150 open in the living room, since I had just fed them. We came back into the room because I wanted to give Deborah some of the hornwort that runs rampant in the 150, and I noticed my bullmastiff, Stella, sniffing the floor in front of the tank. She was sniffing in an unusual way, and that's because none other than The Whip was lying on the floor on his back! She was fascinated, but I was horrified, of course, since the top lip of that tank is 5' off the floor. I scooped him up and returned him to his watery home, and 4 days later he's doing just fine. Deborah and I could not figure out what caused him to leap out. We are not aware that these fish are jumpers - I'd not have kept the lid up on that tank if I'd have known - and since he rarely even swims I did not think him capable of such a feat. We also marveled that he did such a thing when we were proximal, since many long hours of each day I am upstairs and nobody is near the tank at all. We were very grateful for Stella to have pointed him out to us in that way, since the rug beneath the tank is a mushroom color and it was not immediately obvious that the fish was there. Serendipity!
Never a dull moment.
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