My 55 Gallon Office Tank, Part One

As long as I'm on the subject of the pearling plants in the 55 in my office, I figured I'd might as well describe it a little for you. In this post I'll attempt to detail the fish and then I'll do another post on the plants.

To start, it's a typical 55 gallon tank in standard dimensional configuration. I think that is 48" x 12" x 18" high or somewhere thereabouts. I used a very small gravel substrate with a mixture of laterite in the bottom layer. Laterite is a clay that is used in planted tanks because it absorbs iron and will release it to the plants (iron is a common deficiency in planted tanks). The gravel is a dark, natural color. Multicolored is probably a better answer - it's supposed to be similar to a natural stream bed, this is darker than most of what is labeled as natural. It doesn't appear to be tumbled as the individual stones appear to be chips rather than pebbles and all range around 2 to 4 mm in size. I've got a rock structure on the left end built from flagstone from Lowe's (I'm way too cheap to buy rock from an aquarium supplier). Flagstone is kind of a generic term that doesn't denote what the actual makeup of the stone is. In this case it's clearly sandstone, time tested and proven to be safe in aquariums. I bought a couple of big slab-like pieces and busted them up with a mason's chisel and small sledgehammer. I have them stacked to form a kind of wall with numerous openings for the fish to hide in as use as their territory. On the right end of the tank there is another small cave of sandstone with a beautiful peice of bloodstone in front of it. In the center there is a pile of tumbled river rocks ranging from 2 to 4 inches long and about an inch or so thick. There are also additional river rocks scattered here and there and a couple on top of the rock wall.

As mentioned in my last post, the tank is pretty heavily planted and has CO2 injected under 180 watts of light. More on the flora later.

As far as fauna goes, I'm not quite done with this tank. This is the tank that I'm dying to put a school of rummynose tetras in but haven't come up with any healthy ones yet. I really, really, really want a school of something in there and I keep getting tempted to buy another species of schooling fish, but for a long time I've wanted rummys so I'm trying to hold out.

Beyond that, I've got a combination of angelfish, loaches, and peaceful cichlids. There also is a pair of male red wag platys that ended up in there via strange coincidence. They are beautiful fish but oft overlooked in favor of the more exotic specimens.

Loaches are bottom-dwelling fish that are oblong in shape. There are many, many species from many different countries. Mine are all of the botia species, originally indicating they were from India though I'm not 100% sure all of mine are. I've got a single botia dario and a single botia histronica. They are kind of like opposites of each other - the dario is predominantly dark with narrow yellowish stripes and the histronica is primarily yellowish with narrower dark stripes, though not as narrow as the dario's stripes. Both are very active, though neither was at first. Originally I had just the dario and he hid most of the time but came out occasionally. Loaches prefer to be in groups and are more active that way, so I got more to reduce the stress on dario and get him more active. (Stress in fish is a very bad thing and be caused by many, many things, social setting being one.) The histronica was extremely shy for the first few weeks in spite of the other loach population. Some loaches only prefer to be with their own species while others will hang out in interspecies groups. Finally histronica has gotten brave and now is seen regularly all over the tank.

The other three loaches are all botia kubotai and are each amazing specimens. I got them from my friend Nikolay locally and he picked out his favorites to send to a local home. For that matter, all of the loaches are from Nikolay. Originally I got just one when I got the dario and he also was shy, but not as bad as the histronica has been. Kubotais are very particular about being in groups, so I got two more. One of them is HUGE, almost four inches long - Stephanie calls him Sigmund the Seamonster. The other two are nearly as big and equally beautiful. They are commonly seen in stores marked as botia angelicus, which is incorrect, or named angelicus loaches or polka dot loaches. All of the loaches play together and often play with other fish, racing around the aquarium chasing each other and playing leap frog. The kubotais are so big that they wreaked a little havoc when my plants were first planted. In general, loaches and plants aren't the greatest match in aquariums but I couldn't resist the beautiful kubotais. Hopefully now that the plants are rooted they'll go a little easier.

Loaches are kind of like catfish in that they eat off of the bottom, but they are more picky then some catfish. I don't think I'd call them scavengers, but also don't doubt that they'd snarf down a dead fish if they found one. Mostly they swim around and grab flakes out of mid-water during feeding time, clean up flakes that fall to the bottom, snack on my plants (ugh), and enjoy the wafers I drop in every few days. I feed them a combination of algae wafers, catfish wafers, and Hikari carnivore pellets.

Next up is my calico bristlenose plecostomus, ancistrus sp. var. "
calico", likely ancistrus temminicki but not 100% sure. It's definitely some kind of ancistrus, though, because all BNPs are. I bought him from a breeder that used to be in the DFW area but has since moved to Colorado. She offered them for sale on our local forum and a bunch of us did a "group buy", meaning we all bought a couple and shared the shipping costs. I bought two, only one survived past the first week or so. We call this guy Spot and he's a handy guy to have around - he eats lots and lots of algae. BNPs are one of the favorite fish in the hobby for tank clean up. Like all plecostomi, he is a "suckermouth" type of catfish, meaning he has a downward facing mouth that is designed to cling via suction to whatever he chooses. Usually he's found cleaning the glass or the river rocks because that's where most of the algae is. I'm sure he snacks on the wafers I drop in as well. Hopefully I'll have the algae under control soon, but that won't put him out of work. There's always something for an ancistrus catfish to eat.

I already mentioned the two red wag platys - xiphophorus maculatus. They are beautiful fish, a bright red, velvety color with a black tail. Their eyes are kind of gold colored, too, which sets off nicely against the red. Mine are both males and I still haven't decided if that's good or bad. They are livebearers, which means they are very easy to breed, but also means that they breed CONSTANTLY, flooding your tank with fry (babies). In this tank the fry would all get eaten by the angelfish, ram, and kribs. Part of me enjoys the breeding part and wishes one were female, but the bigger part of me says I've got more fish than my tanks can hold. Then the first part of me reminds me that, once raised up a little, they can be traded into the LFS (local fish store) for more fish. Both are males so the point is moot. I have no intention of adding a female any time soon, but if I was going to breed more livebearers these guys might be it.

That's probably enough for this post. Stay tuned for details on a wild-caught blue ram, a pair of Nigerian red kirbensis, and the angels.

My Plants are Pearling!

I'm pretty proud of myself - the plants in the 55 gallon tank in my office has started to pearl. What is pearling, you may ask? Simple - biology 101. Plants "breathe" in CO2 and breathe out oxygen during photosynthesis. That's no different for aquatic plants. Aquatic plants absorb CO2 that is dissolved in the water and release O2 gas.

The gas is released from little stomata on the bottom of their leaves, just like land plants. But, when the plants are underwater the O2 appears like little bubbles all over the bottoms of the leaves. As more and more oxygen is created the bubbles begin to break loose and rise up to the top of the tank.

It's called pearling because, on many types of plants, as the oxygen forms a bubble and prepares and break free from the plant it looks like a little pearl clinging to the plant. If you've never seen it is very cool, as is the look of many ultra tiny bubbles all across the aquarium rising to the top. In my tank, most of the bubbles range in size from the size of the tip of a pin to the size of a small pin head, so the overall effect is almost mystic as the bubbles rise.

I'm proud of myself because it's a pretty big breakthrough for me, a sign that the plants are beginning to thrive. I have them under pretty high light as freshwater aquariums go (190 watts, or about 3.5 watts per gallon) which is by design as several of the plants I've chosen for the tank require high light conditions. I also am injected CO2 via a homemade CO2 reactor to stimulate growth. I think they just started pearling because I recharged my CO2 bottle (I've been a little lax in that respect) on Monday and yesterday the pearling started.

It was kind of strange - I came back up to the office after lunch yesterday and was looking at the tank from across the room and noticed what appeared to be tiny particles of dust or other matter suspended in the water. As I watched I realized that they were all flowing upwards, telling me it was probably bubbles. My initial reaction was frustration, trying to figure out how enough air got down to the bottom of the tank to cause the gas release as it appeared upon first glance to be coming from the substrate. The only thing I could think of was that I had the power off over lunch while I installed a new light switch and when I turned it back on the filter had cavitated, resulting in an unusually high amount of air dissolved in the return flow. Upon further examination I realized that the bubbles weren't coming from the substrate and I started to get a little excited. I took a close look and, sure enough, all of the plants had a very fine sheen of bubbles glistening on the bottom of their leaves. A great sign for the overall health of the plants, and more oxygen in the water is always good for the fish. Fish are like humans, exactly the opposite of the plants - breathing in O2 dissolved in the water via their gills and breathing out CO2.

I'll get some pictures up eventually, hopefully I can get some good shots of the pearling. I actually took a quickie video with my phone yesterday and it came out pretty good, so maybe I'll work on trying to get a decent video up, too. In the meantime, do a google search for pearling aquarium plants and I'm sure you'll find a zillion cool pictures.

Weekend update - on Tuesday

As my schedule goes, this weekend was fairly eventful. I actually got out of the house and had interaction with other human beings other than store and restaurant employees. That's a big event for me.

I haven't made time to write up all of the details on all of our aquariums yet, but I will soon. As a preface to my weekend update, I'll just say that right now we are at seven freshwater tanks encompassing about 150 gallons. That's really not that much for seven tanks. A quick guesstimate is 25 species of fish, one species of invertebrate, and probably around 20 species of aquatic plants. That means a lot of upkeep, but I generally don't mind.

So on Saturday we visited four pet shops and that wasn't even the primary focus of the day. There actually is a good reason we went to four - Canine Commisary was having a big anniversary sale so we went there and loaded up on dog food, then I had a coupon expiring for PetSmart so we went there and got kitty litter, a couple of kinds of fish food, and some other junk, then we went to The Fish Gallery to meet our friend Nioklay and look for rummynose tetras and possibly another SAE or BNP, then on the way home we swung through Exotic Aquatics to see if they had any rummys. It's not really quite as extreme as it sounds, though as I type it all out it does seem a little over the top.

Nikolay is a friend that we met through www.dfwfishbox.com. That's pretty much the local freshwater aquaria enthusiasts group and we've met several very cool people through there. Nikolay actually runs a fish importing business with a partner, Pedro, out of their homes in McKinney. They specialize in rare and very small fish and sell exclusively over the Internet and to local people. We've bought a fair amount of fish from him and become friends. His fish are cheap and healthier than most any others around town.

Nikolay is fairly well known for his skill with high tech planted aquariums. I'm talking prize winning aquascape stuff. He's one of the key people in the local freshwater aquatic plant society, so has met and worked with some very talented aquascapers through there.

Nikolay invited us to come along with him and another of his friends to visit two buddies that live in a loft downtown to meet them and check out their aquariums. I hesitate to guess how many gallons they had all said and done, but it had to be close to 1000 or more. They had several large tanks, all AMAZINGLY planted, and a whole bunch of small species and breeder tanks.

The piece d'resistance of their collection is a 240 gallon setup that they designed from top to bottom including custom built (by them) filtration. The tank is actually two-tiered, with the top/back layer being a bog with immersed plants flowing through a waterfall into the main tank, loaded with fully submersed plants and a bunch of very cool fish. They had a couple of pairs of the most gorgeous discus fish that I've ever seen in there along with a bunch of other good stuff. They have a blog where they update their aquarium adventures - aquaticobsession.blogspot.com - and another that details the design and building of the 240 bog tank along with the filtration and water management system they designed. If you're not aware, discus tend to be pretty challenging fish to keep. They are extremely sensitive to water quality and temperature. Not only have these two raised a couple of beautiful pairs but they also have successfully bred them, a testament to the quality of their set up.

I could go on for hours about their tanks, but I'll leave it that I am sure they would national contenders if they ever entered an aquascaping contest, and the plants are only half of it. They have a fantastic array of fish, many very rare, and a great breeding setup. You can check out more of their work, and some of Nikolay's work, at http://www.aquatic-plants.org/ . The stuff listed under "Michael" are some of the tanks I saw this weekend.

On top of that, they are both super extreme geeks like me. They have a full wood and electronics shop set up right in their loft where most people would have their living room. They are both IS professionals and have started designing microprocessors for fun. They turned me on to some very cool publications and web sites that are likely to cost me a lot of money in the near future. To top if off, they had the coolest loft I've seen since I've been in Dallas. It's in a building that I think was called Southside or something like that on Lamar just outside of downtown.

That's the first time I've been over to someone else's house other than to buy fish from Nikolay in months, and the times previous were to go visit other fish people, pick up shipments that we were splitting, etc. It was a real pleasure to hang out with a couple of extremely intelligent and engaging guys with similar interests to me for a change.

Beyond that, it was the usual maintenance stuff - changed water in the 10 gallon plant farm, the 10 gallon guppy tank, and the 55 in my office. I had to replant some of my new plants in the 55 that came up and clean up the refuse from the ones the loaches destroyed. We also have a very cool little goby, a red neon goby, that we moved from the guppy tank to the Eclipse 6. His colors are showing much better on the dark gravel and he seems much happier living with live plants. I also made a new cat box for the kitten - he's outgrown his old one and what they charge for a decent one with high sides is highway robbery. I found some good ideas on the Internet and ended up making one out of a cheap, 19 gallon storage container from WalMart. It's got huge sides with just a little door, but he still has managed to get litter all over the laundry room. He loves to play in there like a sandbox.


That was pretty much the excitement for the weekend. I won't rest until I get a school of ten rummynose tetras for my office tank, but I can't seem to find any anywhere. Nikolay got some in and I bought 10 but they all died in the first 24 hours. And that was after two weeks of quarantine at Niko's place! Needless to say he offered to refund our money, we just took the credit in additional fish : ) No one in town is getting them in right now - it's the wrong time of year for wild-caught rummies and the tank-bred versions coming from Singapore have way too high of a mortality rate. Most of the stores aren't even ordering them now and the ones that do sell them all in a day. They are beautiful little fish, which is why I won't give up my hope. I could always order some online but the shipping costs for live fish are prohibitive for anything other than the most unique species. Nikolay has some Asian rummynoses and I have been kind of doubtful about those, but after seeing a school at Michael and Shane's this weekend I'm tempted to go that route. They are quite a bit different from the South American rummys, but still very attractive.

That's probably enough for now. I'm on my own this weekend as Stephanie is going back to Ohio for a family visit, so I'll probably get some more content up here then. I'd like to get more adept at the whole embedding-a-picture thing so that I can start posting shots of the animals and fish I'm writing about. I'll probably figure that out this weekend. She'll be gone from early Friday to late Monday, so it's just me and the animals. Wish me luck.

Pet Profile #1 - Chani

I'm not tired of typing yet, so I thought I'd go ahead and post a profile of the apple of my eye, Chani. Chani was born in March of 2000 and found her way into our lives through a serendipitous series of events. For those of you who don't recognize the name, check of the characters in Frank Herbert's Dune.

Stephanie, my wife, and I were debating about getting a dog. I never had a dog in my life and Stephanie had one for a while as a young girl, but for all intents and purposes neither of us had any significant experience raising a dog. At the time we lived in Ohio and were bird hunters (upland and waterfowl) and had the pleasure of hunting with several very well-trained and personable dogs. We both came to be dog lovers and decided that we thought we wanted a hunter, but the cost of a purebred hunter was a big step to take for a couple that had never had a dog before.

One evening in 2000 I was driving home from work and saw a sign scrawled in black paint on a piece of scrap plywood in front of someone's house that said "Free Puppies". I called Stephanie and suggested she drive over and check them out. She was more hesitant to take the step into dog ownership than I was, but I convinced her to go visit them knowing that there are few that can resist a young puppy. Of course she fell in love and called me to come over immediately.

There was a litter of eight puppies of various colors, markings, and coat styles in a box in a fairly dingy basement. They were four weeks old and just starting to get rambunctious. Six had already been spoken for, and we made a snap decision to claim Chani. Her mother, Scruffy, was an unidentified mix described to us as Springer Spaniel and who knows what else. Her father's identity isn't known for certain, but there had a been a black lab hanging around the yard for a while so that seemed logical.

As Chani grew it was quite obvious from her physical features and behavior that she had some Labrador Retriever in her. I am fairly certain that she must have some Border Collie as well. She doesn't really favor the Springer side as much as her mother and one of her sisters adopted by a friend of ours did. The only real physical attributes that would hint at a Springer are her spots and her size. She's about 60 pounds and carries herself about like a Brittany or Springer Spaniel. She also has some tell-tale tiny spots that look an awful like what you'd see on a Spaniel. Her sister, Pepper, definitely has Springer Spaniel ears and much more typical markings, so I'm sure that Scruffy's humans were correct on that part of her heritage.

Chani is nine years old now and starting to slow down and show her age a little. She's still a fireball when she's in the mood, but has finally slowed down from the breakneck pace that she always seemed to function at during the first six or seven years of her life. Don't even get me started on the puppy days - I never a new a creature could have such unending, over the top energy. She has been and still is the best dog you could ask for - very intelligent, trainable (if a bit stubborn), loving, protective, and wonderful with friendly strangers and children of all shapes and sizes. The first eighteen months posed plenty of challenges, but the goods FAR outweighed the bads. Had our experience not been so good we may not have the array of critters that we do today.

Chani's favorite pastimes are definitely eating (she's food-obsessed if a dog ever was), playing ball, swimming, laying in the office with me, and sleeping in our bed. We've only had our kitten for about two months but she's taken a real shine to him, too. That whole thing is very funny as she used to be the stereotypical cat-hating dog. I mean cat-hating with every fiber of her being. It took her a couple of days to understand why in the world we would bring a cat into our house, but once she realized he was here to stay they made friends and now play together all the time.

She's the typical ball-crazy dog that isn't often seen without a ball when awake, and has been known to sleep with one in her mouth. As a puppy it was downright annoying at times, but she's learned to be more polite in her old age. If she can't find her ball it can be fairly traumatic. It's funny to watch her scour the house trying to figure out where she left it.

I'm sure all write more about her in the future but this is getting lengthy and I am now tired of typing. Suffice it to say she's my first four-legged pet and will always have a special place in my heart that no others, animal or human, can approach.

Welcome to my cyberplace

A new blog, with little or no predefined direction or purpose. This was born out of my compulsion to write about my various pets and projects on Facebook and realizing that was probably more info than most of my friends would want to see. I decided to start a blog to let the information pour out of me whether it gets read or not.

That being said, if you stop by for a read, drop me a comment just so I know someone was here!

Why the name? Well, my wife and I have made the decision not to have children and consequently have filled out lives with an increasing number of critters. It started many years ago with a cockatiel and a 10 gallon tank that proved to be the perfect environment for algae but apparently not for anything else. That tank ended up being scrapped 10 years ago and the cockatiel has long since passed (RIP Merlin), but along came a puppy and the rest was history.

Now we have two fairly large dogs, a kitten, and a host of freshwater fish tanks. For the sake of keeping my intro short enough to be readable I will detail each in future posts. Ideally I'll have some pictures, too, but that takes more work so may or may not ever happen. For now, your imagination must suffice.

Beyond our critters, my interests lie with playing and recording music, woodworking, tinerking around the house, listening to audiobooks, solving word, number, and trivia puzzles, and watching movies. I'm a pretty serious technology geek, so love getting and playing with new techno toys of all sorts. I also have a vast music collection but always get bugged when people list "listening to music" as an interest - who doesn't enjoy listening to music? Should I list eating and breathing as interest, too? I guess that's what listening to music is like for me.

I'd love to see this be interactive, so feel free to comment. Intelligent conversation is probably my real number one favorite pastime, so any meaningful input is appreciated. Please be gentle - it's my first time.