One evening this week, I glanced outside at my raised brick pond, and noticed that the spring foliage and pond had attracted a little toad to our patio. After my dogs gave it a thorough inspection, the toad remaining perfectly still to avoid absolute detection, I thought it would make the perfect photo subject. I grabbed my camera, slapped on the macro lens, got down on my belly, and shot the little guy for about 5-10 minutes. Besides the motion of inhaling and exhaling, he didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t even blink when the flash went off. I hope this guy sticks around for the duration of the summer. I hope you enjoy the pictures!

Unfortunately, it’s not mine! On Weds, I helped my friend and fellow GWAPA member upgrade his stand from a wire-frame stand to a much sturdier wood stand that he had built himself. This, all in preparation to hold, among others, his brand new and shiny ADA 90P tank. If you’ve never seen an ADA tank up close before, you’re missing out. Seamless design with expertly done silicon, without any messy silicon drips, even on the bottom of the tank. Plus, the glass itself is incredibly clear, and nicely polished on the edges. Yeah, I have tank envy!

Before we could setup the tank, we had to get his new, nearly 7 foot, stand up a long flight of stairs and setup in his fish room. Besides the small obstacle that all of the ceilings in his apartment were not uniformly taller than 7 foot, we eventually got the stand upright, and in position. A few blocks and wedges later, and it was level and ready for tanks. Aaron proceeded to put down the padding he bought to cushion the tank, and cut it to size. With the tank now in place, I can’t wait to see how he scapes it. There’s one small caveat, he’s not using Aquasoil. He’s setting up an ADA tank with a soil substrate. Should be interesting…

On Saturday, I attended GWAPA’s May meeting at Ghazanfar’s home in Virginia. Meetings at Ghazanfar’s house are always exciting because everyone wants to see the latest adjustments to the aquascape in his huge 215G tank built into his basement wall. As always, he never disappoints, showing us the beautiful aquascape you see below. It’s hard to get the full impression of its size without being there in person.

In addition to spending a lot of time staring at Ghazanfar’s tank, we all prepared for a much smaller endeavor by picking up our 2.5G aquascaping tanks and equipment. You can see my progress on this tank at my previous post. There seemed to be a rush on downoi and HC in the auction at this meeting, presumably to use in the 2.5G contests. There must have been at least 5-6 bags of each sold at the auction. I picked up one of the downoi bags, which will hopefully fill the back corner of my 2.5G tank without too much trouble.

After the meeting ended, Ghazanfar was nice enough to give the few remaining folks there a tour of his shrimp factory, also known as the 215G tank seen above. He has pretty much ruined the local area price for Cherry Shrimp by bringing thousands of them into our local fish store. Ghazanfar claims that at any given instant, he can siphon out his tank’s canister filter, and pull out 50-60 shrimp. We asked him to backup his claim, and so above you see him dumping filter water into a 5G bucket. To his surprise, not a single shrimp appeared. I’m not sure where he’s getting them from, but there’s no denying that he’s farmed a ton of shrimp! (My guess is that he’s finally starting to win his thus-far futile war to eradicate the shrimp from his tank.)

GWAPA’s aquascaping contest is currently underway after we handed out the equipment at our May meeting. So, what did I do? I went straight home, filled my tank with aquasoil, popped in some new bulbs into my old fixture, and setup the aquascape below.

Obviously, this is a mound style of aquascape, using the downoi and blyxa japonica to highlight the rocks. In the middle is anubias barterii nana var. ‘petite’ with crassula helmsii in the foreground. I have a little bit of ranalisma rostrata in the back right to transition to a better height from the blyxa japonica. I’m still deciding how much I like this scape, but I hope to have it grow in with enough time to take a picture and try another scape before the October deadline. Hopefully that’s allowed. 😉

Over the winter, I kept a 10G aquarium chalked full of various plants I was hoping to transfer outdoors to my pond. One of these plants is Brazilian Pennywort. I’m hoping that it to grow immersed in the pond, and vine down the brick sides. So, I’ve been letting the Pennywort in the 10G tank grow out of the tank, and up onto the windowsill immediately above that tank. With some good Spring sunlight, I was pleased to find this lone flower stalk coming from one of the nodes. I’m guessing that this will turn into a seed cone like a sagittaria subulata flower stalk does. I transplanted this runner out to the pond this morning, so we’ll see if I get any more flowers popping up in the full sun.

RIP apistogramma viejit

As posted a couple days ago, I rescaped my 20G high tank with some fresh Amazonia aquasoil and manzanita wood. I’ve rescaped a number of tanks in the past with aquasoil, and I’ll usually add the soil, plant and scape the tank, fill with water, allow to cycle for a few hours, and then add in the fish. Most times, the filters are preexisting, or some of the plants/hardscape come from other tanks, so the biological filter should be largely pre-established. I’ve never had any problems with fish loss using this method.

Now I’ve read and heard about other folks experiences about how new aquasoil temporarily causes the pH to crash. Since my methods above have always worked, I’ve never paid them much heed. True, the pH does drop, but never to an extreme degree that the fish couldn’t adjust to. So, with this 20G setup, I followed my same methodologies. I removed the apistogramma viejitas that were in there, placed them in a bucket with airstone, and proceeded with the change. A few hours after setup, I moved the apistogramma back into the tank. I was actually hoping that the pH would drop down a fair amount and induce spawning since I haven’t been able to get them to breed at a 6.5 CO2 induced pH. They seemed happy enough that night. Morning came, and they were still swimming around, not looking distressed. Then, I get home from work, and one is on the floor, and the other is upside-down in the tank. What changed?

Well, I’m not sure. This is the first tank I’ve setup with fresh wood in a long time. Is it possible that the tannins from the new manzanita dropped the pH further in conjunction with the aquasoil-induced drop? I don’t know. In any case, I think I’ll let my fish spend an extra day or two in an aerated/filtered bucket next time I redo a tank with aquasoil. Rest in peace apistogramma viejita.

I’ve been a bit preoccupied with any number of things lately — mowing the yard, preparing the vegetable garden, spending more time taking pictures outdoors in the nice weather — that I haven’t really spent a whole lot of time paying attention to my aquariums. Well, that changed a little bit today when I put together my first scape using the new manzanita wood that I ordered a few weeks back. Below is the first show of the new aquascape. I was so eager to get a shot, that I forgot to fill the tank all the way up.

One of my goals with this aquascape is to provide something that looks nice, without requiring too much upkeep. Lately, stem tanks have been too much for me to keep up with. So, to that avail, my foreground is ranalisma rostrata, background is bylxa japonica (yes I know, it’s technically a stem plant), to the left are some cryptocoryne, and in the middle are some anubias barterii var. nana. Finally, fissidens moss is adorning some of the branches.

Please let me know what your first impressions are…

I had the good fortune of hosting GWAPA’s April meeting this past weekend. Preparing for any aquarium-related meeting is always a challenge because in addition to the usual cleaning and setting up when any folks are coming over, you also want your tanks to look their best. This can sometimes require planning as much as a few months ahead. For example, in my 75G (updated picture below), I replanted the glosso about six weeks before the meeting, anticipating that it would take about that long to fill in.

Then, for the two weeks prior to the actual meeting, you have to time your water changes, and trimming sessions exactly, so that your stems plants will reach their perfect “bushiness” on the meeting date. Combine that with increased glass scraping, and more consistent dosing, and you’re looking at a bit of work. I’m not complaining because I enjoy all of it, and find that my tanks look the best because of my increased effort. The rest of the year is a crap shoot, however!

This month’s meeting had another nice turnout, reaching 15-20 folks. The weather was beautiful outside, which made talking about my raised-brick pond, much more enjoyable. It’s still too cold outside to actually grow many of my aquatic plants, so I had to cheat a little bit by covering the surface of the pond with lots of Phyllanthus fluitans from my 54G tank. I promise that I really do grow plants outdoors later in the year. I went through a brief overview about how I constructed the pond, and what my experiences were last year. After my pond talk, we all went inside for our auction, which was large and lively as always. The manzanita wood that the club purchased was met with very much interest, as were most items in the auction. I came away with a few goodies, namely an Eriocaulon species that I haven’t tried before. I also added another Red Lizard Catfish to my 75G. (Thanks Cristy!)

More pictures and info can be read on GWAPA’s website.

Last week I ordered a huge box of manzanita wood from manzanita.com to split between myself and the rest of GWAPA. I highly recommend this retailer for ordering wood for your aquarium. Rich, who I dealt with, is very professional and is willing to accomodate just about anything you’re looking for. I described to him that I wanted some branchy pieces, along with plenty of pieces that have lots of character.

When I got home last Wednesday, on my doorstep was a box about 6 foot tall, and about 2 foot in diameter. Due to the size, it made 65lbs much more cumbersome than if it were in a more manageable size. I separated the box into three categories: branchy, large sized pieces, and medium sized pieces. From there, I divided the wood into a number of different lots that were pretty even. I took a few lots for myself, and the rest were auctioned off at the GWAPA meeting this weekend. Look for some upcoming tank pictures with this wood in it!

Milling around before the meeting

The Capital Cichlid Association’s April 2007 meeting featured a well-known dwarf cichlid expert, Ted Judy, from Colorado to speak about west African dwarf cichlids of the Pelvicachromis genus.

Pat shows off the new poster.

Before the meeting started, everyone was milling around, engaging in typical fish talk, and admiring the upcoming auction goods. Pat Kelly, CCA‘s president, opened the meeting by showing off a new club poster that is going to be spread around to the local stores to help advertise the clubs’ existence.

Then, Pat introduced Ted Judy, who had prepared an excellent presentation about the Pelvicachromis genus of west African cichlids. Ted opened his presentation with a brief overview of the cichlid family. Pelvicachromis is a very popular group of cichlids that have

Ted Judy

been in the hobby for a long time. The Pelvicachromis pulcher was first kept and bred in the 1960s, and gained widespread affection since it is a colorful fish, that is peaceful enough to be kept in a community setting. In general, Pelvicachromis can be easily sexed by looking at the ventral fin. A male will have a pointed ventral fin, with iridescent blue markings, while a female’s fins will be more rounded. All Pelvicachromis species are coastal fish, found only in freshwater streams/rivers within 100 miles of the ocean. Their habitat does not consist of much vegetation, so the substrate is quite silty/muddy. Therefore, the Pelvicachromis often sift the sand, feeding on decaying matter and invertebrates found in the sand. The pH of these streams is usually close to neutral, 7.0.

Based on Ted’s observations in the wild, he has come up with his own unique formula for feeding his Pelvicachromis. Since their diet consists of 70-80% vegetable matter, he tries to replicate this by mixing vegetable and spirulina flakes, with a small portion of protein-based flakes, such as “cichlid flakes” into one container. He then feeds his fish this combined flake mix, ground into small pieces so that it can be easily eaten. To rear fry, or prepare fish for spawning, he will mix in some brine shrimp, daphia, or grindle/white worms. He will also feed krill to bring out more color in a fish.

When seeking breeding pairs, Ted recommends buying a group of 6 fish, and putting them into a smallish 20G tank. Within a month, if a pair has formed, Ted removes all but the weakest other fish. He has found that by leaving one extra Krib in the tank, the pair has a target to “beat” on, which helps to strength the pair’s bond. Setting up the Krib’s breeding space is relatively straight forward; just add a few hollowed-out coconuts, with just enough space for the male to enter. He notes that pH affects the ratio of male and female fry produced. More acidic water produces more females, while alkaline water tends to create more males. Once the fry are free swimming, raise them on powdered flake food and brine shrimp, and make sure to do lots of water changes. Ted does a 20% water change everyday when first raising fry.

Ted then proceeded to discuss many different species and color morphs of Pelvicachromis, providing pictures of each. He did an excellent job giving geographic collection information for each species, as well as, the probability of finding each species domestically depending on political or logistical complications. Each species was accompanied by a slew of information that I recommend you research further on web:

Ted Judy’s profile on Cichlid Room
apistogramma.com