Galaxy Rasboras
January 17th, 2007
After work today, I decided to drop by the House of Tropicals since I haven’t been there in a few months. It didn’t hurt that I had a couple of gift certificates to spend there from Christmas. I had planned to just pickup some supplies and fertilizers, but I had to first do my obligatory walk through all of the fish aisles. In one of the aisles I came across a tank full of galaxy rasboras. I hadn’t previously seen these fish in person, but I’ve certainly heard plenty about them. I marveled at the tank for a bit, and then moved on. Shortly thereafter, I came across another tank of slightly smaller galaxy rasboras priced at just $3.98/fish. Well, I know most LFS’ sell these fish for around $10/fish, so I decided to jump on them.
I snatched up 18 fish, got my 10% club discount, and came home.
I had to clean out one of my 10G tanks of all (or as many as I could catch) of the Endlers that were in there, to make room for the new rasboras. I don’t know a whole lot about these fish, but apparently they need soft water, pH in the 6.3-7.3 range and 10 dH. Those parameters aren’t too far off from my tap water, so hopefully they do just fine with that. I need to figure out what to feed them. A few Internet sources say that small live foods are preferable. I have blackworms on hand, but they may be too large for them right now. I’ll have to hatch out some baby brine shrimp. If anyone knows anything else about these cool fish, please comment.
January 17th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
>> I had planned to just pickup some supplies and fertilizers
…I know better than that!
They look great – much better than when you brought them home and they were all stressed. I love their spots!
January 31st, 2007 at 6:53 pm
If you want them to color up even more, some of the newer foods that have cyclops in them work wonders to bring out the reds.
The new Tetra stuff works, but the frozen cyclops seem better to me – less fillers.
January 31st, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Thanks for the info Joseph! They’ve been snatching up the blackworms quite readily. It’s fairly amusing watching them eat worms that are probably as long as their total digestive tract! I’ll have to give the Tetra stuff a look.
April 9th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I have bought about 25 of these beautiful fish. I have a plant tank and have not had any problems with loosing any fish. I feed them most days very small dry food, sometimes for a treat I feed them bloodworms frozen. What a great species I had no idea when I purchased them that they were so rare and over fished or I would not have bought them. Someone should breed them. But I will tell you the wonderful way they interact with each other is something everyone should see.
April 9th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
They are incredibly pretty fish! I’ve read a disputing article saying that they’re not as endangered as originally thought, but I honestly don’t know which to believe. They’re great in planted tanks, and I’m glad you’re enjoying them Chuck. Thanks for the comment!