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.