We’ve started to get some cooler evenings as we’re days away from the start of Autumn. Therefore, I decided to begin the process of shutting down my raised brick pond for the year by netting out my mosquito controlling white cloud mountain minnows and bringing them indoors.

I had put a dozen outside in the spring, but so far I’ve netted about 20 adult sized fish, and quite a few tiny fry (2-3 mm). I’m going to try to collect as many of the tiny fry as possible and raise them in an extremely densely planted aquarium inside. I love putting fish outdoors, as when I bring them back inside, I almost always multiply the number of fish I have, and the colors on the fish are fantastic from all of the live food they’ve hunted down over the summer.

All of these minnows are going into my 12G bookshelf aquarium, which has a large colony of orange-eyed-blue-tiger-shrimp in it, plus about 50 juvenile bristlenosed plecos. This is a low-tech tank without any CO2 added and minimal fertilization, but there has a noticeable increase in plant growth since I’ve added the baby plecos and minnows. I guess they’re producing just enough waste to spur the plants on.

The baby plecos are also progressing pretty well. I’m keep their small bellies round and full by feeding them a mixture of veggie pellets, with earthworm or shrimp protein foods added 1-2X a week. Of course, I just noticed a brand new spawn of bristlenose in my 50G aquarium, so I’m overflowing a little bit with these fish at the moment.

Nevertheless, my 12G bookshelf tank is becoming one of my favorite aquariums to sit and watch. The bottom is always moving with shrimp and plecos scavenging about, and now the white cloud mountain minnows are constantly active in the upper water column. Comments welcome!

At the last CCA meeting, I purchased a bag of Pseudocrenilabrus nicholsi dwarf cichlids from West Africa. This morning, while in my fish room, I noticed the dominant male showing fantastic coloration, and policing the middle of his tank. He was chasing away the other males, while gyrating his body near some plants, presumably to lure the females over to spawn there.

The video quality isn’t fantastic, but hopefully you can still see how entertaining and beautiful these little fish are…

I wanted to share a few pictures that I took this afternoon in my fish room. I was experimenting with a new macro lens and flash that I got a couple months ago, which is why a few of the shots are obviously unrealistic. In any case, the blue tiger shrimp are one of my new favorites, with their black bodies and bright orange eyes.

Of course, when you’re breeding these shrimp, you’re never going to get 100% solid black bodies. Some of them will come out as “blondes,” or shrimp with transparent bodies with the signature tiger stripes.

Otherwise, these don’t seem to be too difficult to keep. They’re slightly smaller than cherry red shrimp, but similar in size to crystal reds.

Mine are all housed in my 12G GLA bookshelf aquarium, where they graze on a little bit of beard algae that’s snuck into that aquarium.

They also love to hide in the short Eleocharis sp. ‘Japan’ hairgrass that makes up the foreground in this tank, picking at whatever tiny goodies they can find.

In my 50G aquarium, I have a breeding colony of bristlenosed plecos. Their are several generations cohabiting the aquarium, which are constantly working the driftwood and glass.

I caught one such pleco hanging out on the front glass. I like to think that I keep my glass pretty clean, but I guess she’s finding something of value there.

Finally, I snapped a quick shot of one of my beautiful angelfish, which really are the most personable fish I’m keeping right now. When they’re hungry, they follow me from end-to-end of the tank, begging me to drop in some tasty morsels for them to devour.

I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at my latest shots. Feel free to leave a comment if you’ve enjoyed these same creatures for yourself…

Since there’s multiple feet of snow outside, I’ve been sitting inside trying to come up with creative things to occupy my time. Today, I pulled out our old video camera and headed into the fishroom. I lucked upon some interesting activity going on in my 50G with the colony of Apistogramma baenschi ‘Inka 50’ . First, I have a video of a female in full bright yellow coloration guarding a little patch of territory she’s carved out underneath some Blyxa japonica stems.

Next, I caught two males displaying to each other, with the largest, most dominate one eventually chasing the other away. This happens all of the time, and doesn’t usually end up with anyone getting injured. It’s interesting to me how in both of these videos, the Apistogramma only cares about other cichlids. They never chase away the other tetras. (This would change if they were actually protecting fry.)

Finally, after the male-to-male domination display earlier, his female approaches him doing a kind of odd-looking dance to indicate that she’s not a threat. Recognizing this, he lets her go into their patch of Blyxa that he’s protecting.

The behaviors of these cichlids provide unending fascination to me as I enjoy my aquariums during a  cold wintry day. Comments welcome!

I just wanted to share a couple photos of the new inhabitants in my 75G aquarium. After finding a good home for my Blue Spotted Sunfish, I decided that I would like to keep Angelfish again. This time, rather than just getting the various commercially bred color variations, I wanted to get ones with the wild coloration. I feel the natural coloration with the vertical black bars are the most elegant looking Angelfish of all. I was fortunate to have another GWAPA member turn me onto a breeder.

The breeder imports and breeds wild Peruvian angelfish to keep the gene pool healthy for their other various color variations. They also sell of some of the offspring from their live imports. Finding this out, I bought 7 first generation (F1) domestically bred wild angelfish. The breeder sent 8 fish, and they all looked fantastic, even in the bag.

At first in the tank, the fish hid every time I came into the room, but after a week of feeding them, they have really warmed up to me, and are starting to follow me up and down the tank when I’m working in my fish room. Right now, the Angelfish are the only mid-level swimming fish that I have in this aquarium. I still have my Nannacara, red-lizard catfish, and L279 bristlenosed plecos, so the bottom level is covered. I’m having a hard time settling on a small schooling fish to act as attractive dithers for the Angelfish. Suggestions welcome!