Welcome to Fishies Weblog

Well, as promised here’s a brief discourse, vaguely dancing round things that people have searched for before being dissapointed not to find any information on the “fishies weblog”

The snails seem popular, and they are indeed “water snails” and we did indeed get them from “snailshop” (free plug for www.snailshop.co.uk becuase the service was very good imo, the only minor gripe being that one (or more) are still scoffing our nice plants from our “tidy tank”, we try not to let it get to the “dirty tank” stage you see. This is probably helped by doing the regular water changes, including the “wool filter” change, which we tend to do each time we change the water, this is the white “wool filter” layer and is the first the dirt hits.

“platties” were requested 7 times, which is good, given that we’ve got 7 platties, we started off with 6, three orange, and three yellow and black which are the “tuxedo platty” type, (so called because apparently it looks like they’re wearing a tuxedo!) there were a few orange babies, but only one lived on so now there are 7. I dunno if we’ve a mix of male and female orange platties (I haven’t looked that close!), or if a female was pregnent when she arrived. We haven’t had a “baby tuxedo”

I’m afraid that I can’t help at all with “pics of all salt water fishes” as all the fish in there are tropical freshwater, does make me ponder about coldwater saltwater and warmwater saltwater, i guess it must work something along those lines. Same holds true for “salt water tank filter”

The more morbid among you wanted to “see dead fishes” and to know “do fish float when they die”, the answer is that they don’t, typically, and unfortunately I’ve a fair sample size. This probably relates to “what is the lifespan of a guppy”; well not very long, I’d say a couple of years for your average captive-reared guppy. Luckily we get lots of “baby guppies”. “how the fishes have babies” is another issue, and I don’t know about the conception but certainly watching babies being born is very spectacular, the guppies and platties (or would they be guppys and plattys?) are both livebearing species which means they give birth to a living breathing swiming fish. We haven’t had any “fighting fish babies”, but lots do get eaten, if you asked “do female platty fish eat their babies” i’d certainly have to say a resounding yes to that one!

I haven’t mentioned it yet but we do have a “bristlenose catfish”, “Chinese algae Fish”, and a corydoras. We do occasionally feed this lot (the bottom dwellers really) “cucumber in fish tank”. I’ve not looked into the “corydoras lifespan” as much, but it’s at least a couple of years, as we’ve had ours that long

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Well I think i’ll have to divert my ranting from algae to snails now. The algae is proving much less of an issue, but the snails have started eating the plants!

To recap, we got some snails here: http://www.jammeh.com/fishblog/2005/09/26/woooo/

and some more here: http://www.jammeh.com/fishblog/2005/11/11/more-snails/

and they’re very good in the main, nice colours, shiney etc. I was actually quite impressed with teh packaging as well, so if you do want snails then snailshop.co.uk seems reasonable, they packaged them up in some damp cotton wool stuff, then put that into a polystyrene cup, that was put in some shredded paper which was then packed into a cardboard box and taped up nice and tight!

The problem is, that they’ve been munching on the plants, after Christmas they’d had a bit of a feast, so we thought fair enough, the plants in there were pretty haggard and bought some new ones to go in. However, they’re just as keen on these ones. I keep spotting big chunks of leaf etc floating about, it’s like they’ve got some secateurs stashed away and are lopping bits off. It’s only really frustrating because they were sold as “don’t like plants snails” We’ll have to try and isolate the culprit and take action, tho admittedly i’m not quite sure how to deal with a naughty snail who eats what it shouldn’t!

Aside from that all is well in the land of fish, a few more guppy babies have made it to the size where they’re unlikely to get gobbled up so will probably reach adulthood, not really an issue tho as we’re well within the reccomended stocking levels.

Another one of the guppies died today, they really do drop off with depressing regularity. Hopefully there isn’t anything that we’re doing wrong, water conditions seem normal, everybody else is fine it’s just the particular ones that has trouble.

Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 22:58:48 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: SNAIL SHOP ORDER
From: sales@snailshop.co.uk
To: jam12@kent.ac.uk

Dear sir/ madam,
Your order has been dispatched, you should be receiving it shortly.
Thank you for shopping with Snail Shop!
The Snail Shop Team

No snails arrived, so i guess they’ll prolly turn up on tuesday or wednesday. Sensibly enough they don’t dispatch before the weekend, and promise to mail when they do. Of course, this also means there won’t be a monday delivery as they wouldn’t have done anything over the weekend.
Just about to do a small water change, prolly only a couple of buckets today cos rach is busy doing other stuff, and it’s harder to do it on your own.

Well i’ve ordered
4 different snails will be arriving in the post sometime. I’m getting them delivered to work, now i don’t expect this to be a problem cos it’s accepted that we will get stuff sent there, but a box of water labelled “livestock” might be one of the more interesting things to turn up at reception!
I’ll update when they arrive, could be tomorrow cos they were actually ordered last night from www.snailshop.co.uk but dind’t have time to post an update.

Gonne file this under fish, cos really it means living things in the tank, but i’m not changing the name of the category, or making another :p

Still pondering some mail order snails, they do lots of funky colours so i think perhaps we’ll try to get one of the multipacks that has a few different ones in.
Everybody seems fine atm, tho every now and then monster and munch seem to look a bit pale, i’m not quite sure what causes it, or even if i’m just making it up, but there we go. Anyhow, it doesn’t seem to last or cause any problems. m&m seem to be chinese algae eaters.

Splosh died earlier. She was the oldest fish in the tank, one of the original ones from over a year ago. We were thinking that they seem to die quite often, but given the number of them we have it’s not all that suprising really. The average lifespan for a guppy is (depending on the source you get data from) somewhere between a year and 3/4.
We still have lots of babies but there aren’t quite as many as before, i’m wondering if we should allow a few more to reach maturity

There’s about 20 of the beasts suddenly popped out of somewhere. I did wonder after the previous one had babies if the others were going to as well. If so we’ve got 5 female guppies all dropping.

These fish are gonna be on iron rations until they get hungry and tidy up the population! Gogogo hungry platties

Just done a 40l (or 25% or 4 buckets, whichever you prefer) water change everybody seems well at the moment. Podger seems to be growing rapidly and is happily munching away on algae. Put the carbon filter back in after taking it out while giving the antibact medication.

Other than that not much going on really, ooh, apart from a *yellow* baby which is rather unusual, normally they’re guppy (silver) colour. Either this is a very funny colour guppy or a platy, time and growth will tell! There are about half a doz (maybe slightly less) other babies as well.

Today has been a very mixed day in the fish world. Unfortunatley the guppy who we have been worried about and who has been struggling on for the past few days gave up. Perhaps it’s best for her, perhaps people generally bring that to mind to make it easier. I’ve no idea what it was that killed her in the end, and have no way of telling really so probably will never know. The little tank that we had set up has been tidied away and put back in storage now.

Later on in the evening we witnessed a whole load more however, and noticed that another of the female guppies was skulking around the bottom right of the tank. On closer inspection we noticed a few babies loitering nearby. Then all of a sudden she gave birth to a couple more! It was incredible watching this. It was slightly macabre watching as well I must admit, as these mini mini baby fish were born (they kinda pop out folded double which i hadn’t expected tbh) and as soon as they were in the tank the platties were wooshing after them looking for dinner. In the end they almost seemed to be waiting for the next ones to be born so they could eat them! Shocking, but also why we bought some slightly larger fish, obviously the population control is working well.

An eventful evening all in.

Set up a hosital tank for the ill female guppy today. This is mainly to that we can add salt to the water she’s in without subjecting all the fish to a saline solution! (in particular the cory doens’t like salt). A number of sources have suggested that a g of salt per litre will help.
The practicalities of it were pretty easy actually, we got the old small tank out, and then set up the filter and stuff in it and checked the light. (not that we actually had it on, nicer to keep her in the restful dark). Then we did a water change for the main tank, but rather than throw away the old water we put it into the small tank. It’s remarkable that to fill this tank only needs two and a bit buckets of water when the water change on new tank is 4 buckets! We also changed a filter in the main tank, and cut a bit off the old filter media to put in hospital tank as a filter there. All this was intended to minimise the change in environment that occured between the tanks.
After that put her in when the temps had stabilised and then added the first of 3 dessert spoons of salt.

I really hope this helps her, the saline water is said to be good at reducing the sweeling that she’s suffering, but if it’s a tumor there’ll be no recovery and we may need to put her down. She doesn’t seem to be suffering atm, just sitting on the bottom.

We also added the appropriate dose of the antibacterial solution to both tanks (inc the main as really don’t want anything to have been infecting others, and a couple do look slightly podgy but maybe that’s just paranoia)

To recap for main tank, 40l water change, green filter water change, and added treatment.

At last i’ve got some pics of the fish for the avid and only fishblog reader, here you go kilgore :p

• the first is a yellow texedo platty, the ones in the background are mini baby guppies!



• next is a male guppy, this is either midget or gem (they were ours from birth, and were *tiny* to start with



• the next two are both of ralf who is our siamese fighter, he’s the daddy of the tank and would fight any intruder of the same species as him to the death. In one you can clearly see the manky algae, podger is still getting to grips with it all!




• the final one for now is of the last remaining cory, i think this is dylan
• 

The female guppy that wasn’t that well still isn’t really. She is sitting at the bottom of the tank not doing much, and occasionally will get up and have a swim about and then sit at the bottom again, she also seems to be right off her food and hasn’t eaten much, even some little bits that managed to float down a bit.
We will put more anti-bacterial in on either Monday or Sun night, I have a suspicion she may have dropsy.
Everybody else is still looking very well, and there aren’t any water problems, the last readings were:
Ammonia 0.25 ppm
Nitrate 10 ppm
Nitrite 0 ppm
pH 8.0

We are still worried about the female guppy, so today added some anti-bacterial agent to the water, this is to be repeated every 4 days so we’ll have to see how things go. While we’re using that the charcoal is removed from the filter, so will have to put a new one in when we stop using it.

Dear me, I have been slack in the world of fishblogging.

Current status is that the fish are mainly well and good. There is unfortunately only one cory left, must be either dylan or zeberdee but he’s been hiding while I’ve wanted to ID him There is a bit of algae still about, grr at it! I’m sure that Monster and Munch have been eating some of it, cos their poo is quite green which is a good sign! However, to help them out we have just got podger, a bristlenose pleco who is supposed to want to eat it all up, we’ll see!
To help him settle in we’ve got a little cave style thing for him to hide in, and a couple of changes for the rocks in the left half of the tank, this hopefully stops him from seeming to be the intruder on Monster’s territory (that’s where he rules the roost, left hand side down at floor level) The hiding place is half a coconut shell with some greenery growing on top of it.
He’s already been eating a bit of stuff from rocks and stuff, so hopefully he’ll be hungry enough to move onto the glass soon, it’s getting a bit grubby so needs a good clean. He’s only tiny at the moment, about 20mm long at a guess, so it doesn’t seem reasonable to expect things to instantly clear up, but i’m optimistic that if he lives off the algae things should pick up a bit

Did another water change (3 buckets out, a little bit more back in), we’re kinda nearly getting into a weekly cycle now which would be rather good if poss Rach did some more scrubbing at the front, but there wasn’t that much to attack this time, so perhaps things are perking up.
Actually got round to doing the water tests as well, so here we go:

Ammonia: 0.25ppm
Nitrate: 5-10ppm
Nitrite: o
pH: 8.4?

I always find the pH a bit hard to decipher, relating the colour in the test tube to the one on the reference chart seems a bit haphazard as there seems to be a much less apparent match compared to the others.

Doing the water change seemed to flush out all the babies who were hiding, i think we got to about 6 or 7 trying to count them all up. I’m not sure if we missed a couple before when taking them to the shop, but we certainly didn’t miss this many, somebody’s dropping babies all over the shop!

Only got round to feeding them the live food that we bought on Friday earlier today, but all seems fine, they gobbled it down like normal!

Bah, get rid of some and more arrive before you’ve time to blink!
I just counted 3 babies swimming about, i’m pretty sure we didn’t miss them, cos these ones are *tiny* again.
If i’d realised we’d have babies in perpetuity perhaps i’d have given them a seperate category

Monster seems to have been chasing munch a bit. He also seems to be somewhat larger now, i’m sure they were pretty much the similar size when arriving so perhaps he’s just eating more. I’m hoping that if they are going to insist on being mean to others, then they’ll act as a foil for each other, and that any aggression won’t actually leak out to the community as a whole. Seems to me that normall monster is more back and left and munch is front and right, so perhaps they’ve divided up the place, or indeed perhaps i’m just making myself believe that.

Finished work early today, so managed to go back to the local shop with some more babies for them, birl who worked there seemed everso pleased to see them, and described me as the “bloke with breeding guppies” which i guess is pretty accurate!
Took back 5 of them, I was sure there seemed to be 6 when i was counting up the previous evening, but perhaps Ralf had one for supper! :p

Picked up some live brine shrimp while there, and some filter media (the white one)

Did a good water change earlier, about 25% (4 buckets, which is a much more useful measure from my POV!) Also took the opportunity to clean out the gravel a bit using the uber cunning gravel cleaner. Am very worried that one of the new algae eaters is missing presumed dead tho, have taken out the middle bogwood and trimmed off the bits that were most afflicted with algae, and then moved the plant that was behind it (in white pot) to see if he was behind there. Also moved the front right plants and did a good clean down there, but still nothing
Really can’t work out where he might be!