Flipper Posted January 21 Share Posted January 21 What is that red and white striped version called? They are so pretty 😍 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted January 22 Author Share Posted January 22 @Flipper, they are Red Rili 🦐 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted January 31 Author Share Posted January 31 (edited) Yesterday was time-up day on the quarantine for my new Siamese Algae Eater. Though they'd been pretty inactive (every time I was able to observe which wasn't a lot of time), and fairly colorless, I saw no signs of real illness for the 2 weeks they were there. So I wasn't going to "torture" the little one any further with isolation. I put them in my handy ACO catch cup and started the acclimation process. Here's them waiting: After the allotted acclimation time I let little one go into the tank, they started to move about more than I've seen them do in the last 2 weeks but still looked pale: But in just 15 minutes the little SAE was confidently swimming with the other middle dwellers and colored up nice: I'm really enjoying them so far! What a cool little fish. (some day to be a big fish, yes I'm aware) So I have 2 Hillstream Loaches Kirby and Dyson, so I decided to name this little one Bissell! Edited January 31 by xXInkedPhoenixX Typos suck. 2 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveO Posted January 31 Share Posted January 31 I love your name choices, but Bissel with one L ? Oh, and he is a looker! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted January 31 Author Share Posted January 31 (edited) On 1/31/2024 at 11:00 AM, DaveO said: but Bissel with one L ? Haha! Whoops! Typo! Thanks for seeing that, corrected! Is a pretty little thing. You know how to tell the difference between a male and a female by chance?? I haven't a clue. Edited January 31 by xXInkedPhoenixX Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveO Posted January 31 Share Posted January 31 On 1/31/2024 at 1:16 PM, xXInkedPhoenixX said: Haha! Whoops! Typo! Thanks for seeing that, corrected! Is a pretty little thing. You know how to tell the difference between a male and a female by chance?? I haven't a clue. No, I don't. I have never kept them before. Somebody in here must know. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted February 2 Author Share Posted February 2 @DaveO, apparently, per my research females have more body girth and males are narrow. Also, I found it interesting that SAEs don't have swimbladders! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveO Posted February 2 Share Posted February 2 I vaguely remember hearing something about SAE's having a reduced sized swim bladder, and that, being the reason they always are swimming around so fast. Ya, that makes sense about the females larger size. I think many cyprinids have that characteristic. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveO Posted February 3 Share Posted February 3 On 2/2/2024 at 5:21 PM, DaveO said: I vaguely remember hearing something about SAE's having a reduced sized swim bladder, and that, being the reason they always are swimming around so fast. Ya, that makes sense about the females larger size. I think many cyprinids have that characteristic. Wrong! Now I recall. That guy was talking about his Dennison Barbs, not SAE's. So the no swim bladder in SAE's is new to me. Very interesting. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted February 23 Author Share Posted February 23 Sad announcement for my tanks. I've been treating Punk my Bolivian Ram for popeye for several weeks with no change. In the meantime though, Industry, my Bolivian female has been in the Parent tank with all my catfish. Sadly, she came down with a fast moving illness. Some days ago I found her not doing well, pulled her to QT and with no real clue as to what was wrong dosed the tank with Kanaplex and Metroplex assuming possible bacterial infection. She came through the dosing but no change. I'd done a water change and had been salting her QT and had IAL but came home yesterday to find her gone. So I will miss the little thing. Thankfully besides my 2 Bolivians and 1 bloated Black Neon everyone else in my tanks (which is quite a number of fish) seem to be doing very, very well. So I have to count the positive things! 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Odd Duck Posted February 24 Share Posted February 24 So sorry for your loss. Sometimes illness moves so fast there is nothing that can work fast enough to fix it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted February 24 Author Share Posted February 24 (edited) This weekend is a big weekend for my tanks. The decision was made due to my 196 gallon custom tank that the process of moving and consolidating tanks should be starting. So one big plan is to gift the Medieval tank to my Mum. As much as I absolutely love this tank the small fish and shrimp inhabitants just wouldn't be safe in such a big tank with higher flow and larger tankmates. So the 8 Embers and countless Rili shrimp will stay with the tank and be combined with my Mum's few Neons and 2 Guppies. The not fun part is getting it broken down enough without doing TOO much and transporting it, a 30 minute drive away. Being very long but small will be interesting. The idea is to remove the fish and some of the shrimp (no way of catching all) drain it as much as we can and take out only what we have to. Possibly use plastic packing material to float on top of what water there will be in there to cut down on sloshing. Get ourselves a nice stiff board of wood and essentially guerny it to the car. Any other tips would be appreciated! Moving starts tomorrow! Edited February 24 by xXInkedPhoenixX 🙄 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nabokovfan87 Posted February 25 Share Posted February 25 On 2/24/2024 at 9:39 AM, xXInkedPhoenixX said: Any other tips would be appreciated! When I had to do mine, thankfully the seats went down and the car was generally flat and there wasn't a lot of issues with plastic things on the seatbacks or anything. If you do have any issues like that I recommend making a "pad" of towels or blankets. Just be sure not to pop out any bottom glass and support it as well as you can. It's a bit tense of a drive, but wishing you the best of luck on the journey as well as all of the little critters. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Odd Duck Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 Towels on top of plastic or puppy pads help to contain any sloshing but you should be able to transport the tank with minimal water. Lay down any upright pieces so they can’t fall against the glass or squash any shrimp you can’t catch. Definitely a board to stabilize and a rim around the edge of the board could be helpful. Extra fancy would be cleats on the bottom thick enough to prevent finger squashing when setting the rig down. IP clearly has the skills to put that together in only about 10 minutes. 😉 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted March 1 Author Share Posted March 1 (edited) Tank got moved! Unfortunately we did run into a couple of issues and in the end only 2 of the 8 Ember tetras made the trip. Only 1 Kuhli spotted during the whole move of 2 possible and they made it through fine. What happened is that when trying to catch the Embers they kept "passing out" from terror (When I moved them from the Flex to the Medieval I had a couple die from fright seemingly, so this played a part in what I did). Sadly I made the decision to leave the rest in the tank. One giant wave (and the only one that happened) on the drive there is probably what did it. As I found them deceased when we got the tank on Mum's countertop. I was pretty bummed. The wave displaced a LOT of gravel from the tree side to the arch side and that is likely what played a part in the deaths- and it covered the beautiful "stone floor" on the arch side too. Quite a mess. I didn't find any dead shrimp though- hundreds of them made the trip fine. I also had the bucket with the Embers I was able to catch and some of the prettier adult shrimp. Hard lessons learned and some good ones too. It was a mixed bag really. Here it is mostly drained (even then the fish could NOT be caught!!!) I took the biggest of the rocks out of the tank but everything else was pretty stable. I got a nice board and we lifted it only very briefly from the shelf to a table we moved up against it onto the board and guernied it to the car. It made it really easy to slide it off the board onto the countertop we transferred it to at its new home. Here are the fish that refused to get caught: Here it is in the back of the car: Honestly most of it went really well so I was really disappointed about my fish losses. If it wasn't for that one big slosh I believe everyone would have been fine. It's not the way I wanted to do it but it seemed like the right thing at the time. 😞 So the tank got set up and it was of course cloudy so lots of Stability, Prime were recommended for the next week to my Mum. I dosed it with Seachem Clarity and Pristine before I left. Mum sent me a pic of the tank the next day which seems to be doing well and 98% clearer than it was the day before: Mum even went to the LFS and got a group of Embers so the remaining 2 will have buddies again. It was stressful! I don't want to do that again! But I have to!!! ACCCKKKK!!! Edited March 1 by xXInkedPhoenixX 🙄 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted March 28 Author Share Posted March 28 (edited) Things have been just nutty in my life lately and I've not had a lot of time to post nor spend quality time with my tanks just maintenance and sadly sometimes just minimal at that. Firstly it's been nice to have deleted a tank- though I miss the Medieval tank a lot my Mum has been having fun with it. She's added a lot of plants from her tanks that are now decommissioned and gave me some of the overflow (which were my plants originally anyway). I don't have a very recent picture but the new Embers and Endlers she's gotten are doing well. She's had the same issue as me with the plain platinum guppies and the few that she bought have passed. Her fancier iridescent residents are fine. I don't know what the platinum guppy issue is but there's definitely something up there with them just dying off randomly. Poor Punk. He's not gotten any better. He still has popeye and his other eye isn't super clear though he seems to see out of it. The tank is lightly salted and has 2 IAL floating at all times but I've run out of treatment options for him. So I try and make him as comfortable as I can. Since I'm not sure how well he sees I decided to make more open space for him. It was getting rather jungle-y in the Angry Man: The plants in the front right were suffering a bit from the salt treatment too so I pulled them, picked off the stuff that was suffering, lead weighted it and put it in front of one of the sponge filters giving him the vast majority of that front area. I am in LOVE with my SAE, Bissell, what a little workhorse fish they are. All of the hair algae is gone to the point where I pulled plants from the Accidental tank to have them clean up. This is the state the Anubias was in and now it's entirely cleaned. Of course I lost a few leaves as they were never able to recover the algae assault, but overall the plant is now doing well: I need to get a pic of how clean it is, but you can get the idea with the picture above of the new arrangement, especially if you zoom in to the both of them as the before pic is a decent amount older. Bissell is steadily growing too. Can't wait until the big tank is up and running to let them loose in there as they are definitely growing! I even started with the smallest fish the LFS had. Bissell is probably already pushing 3 inches. He happily swims along with the other fish in the tank. While cleaning the Dragon Tank with Invictus the Betta I noticed his Betta leaf was covered in algae. So I switched out a clean one for him and decided to give the algae to Bissell too. Well, Not only have they mostly cleaned it at this point but this morning I saw this: Bissell cleaned house and made himself a home! You can see the Anubias leaves they cleaned in the background. I'd planned on removing it when finished with the algae but as you can see I just won't be able to bring myself to do it- despite all the other natural resting options. Speaking of fish named after vacuums, I have recently seen my oldest Hillstream and first love of the species, Kirby: I see the other, Dyson, all the time but they are much harder to take pics of as they are usually wedged between a Foo dog and the middle sculpture- so it would just be a pic of a black Hillstream sideways. Hardly a prize winning photo! Last but not least Invictus doing well, though I think at times he gets bored. I've tried the Betta mirror but he doesn't even acknowledge its existence. He's always looking for my attention, I love the little snuggler. Come a long way from the poor little shell I got at the box store. Edited March 28 by xXInkedPhoenixX 🙄 1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveO Posted March 28 Share Posted March 28 Bissell looks content on his custom couch. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted April 10 Author Share Posted April 10 Bissell definitely loves his spot. I've taken to putting a little Repashy on the leaf in the morning since they seem to have an AWESOME handle on ALL the algae in the tank. In the Parent tank I've spotted 2 False Julii Cory babies of different sizes rooting around in the tank. I caught them both in this picture. Note that the glass bowls the littlest one is near are small lab dishes so they are tiny! I think this makes 10 Julii total! 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chick-In-Of-TheSea Posted April 11 Share Posted April 11 (edited) Just catching up.. wow! There is quite a bit I missed! First, sorry about Industry. Glad to see Punk is hanging in there though, and Invictus looks awesome! The tank move.. I can’t imagine. I tried to transport African cichlids in a 5g bucket with airstone from PA to FL. I lost some. To tell you the truth, they were fighting because they were in too small of a space. Then again, could have been sloshing or stress too. Not sure. I did see the fighting though; nothing I could do to stop in while on the journey. It was stressful. The medieval tank looks great, and I know your mom will enjoy it! And the shrimp you were so doubtful about.. you mentioned there are hundreds now? That’s awesome! Looking forward to following along on the large tank adventure. I love the stand. Edited April 11 by Chick-In-Of-TheSea 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beardedbillygoat1975 Posted April 11 Share Posted April 11 Agreed @Chick-In-Of-TheSea just went 6 pages through you journal! What an aquatic adventure?! Thanks for enjoyable read! 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted April 17 Author Share Posted April 17 It is with a heavy heart that I have to mention that my beloved little Invictus passed suddenly overnight. I'm not even sure what might have happened. Devastated really. Swim in Peace little buddy. You will be missed! 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveO Posted April 17 Share Posted April 17 I'm sorry to hear of your loss. Sympathy from a fellow lover of fish. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nabokovfan87 Posted April 18 Share Posted April 18 My condolences. What a beautiful Betta. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Odd Duck Posted April 20 Share Posted April 20 So sorry for your loss. That’s an especially tough one! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXInkedPhoenixX Posted May 1 Author Share Posted May 1 During maintenance yesterday my Hillstream Loach, Dyson decided to make an appearance and say hello. I really love this species. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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