Well, I couldn’t manage to pull out a win for 1st place in the advanced category. GWAPA members awarded first place to Sean’s tank pictured below. Congrats Sean!

 

Well, it’s Friday night before the Saturday GWAPA meeting. Tomorrow’s meeting will conclude what has been a 5-month effort in preparation for GWAPA’s first annual aquascaping contest. I tidied up the tank, cleaned the glass, removed 2 dozen Endlers, and snapped some photos.

(Front View – Straight on)

Tomorrow afternoon, I will drain all but an inch of water from this take, pack it up at securing it as best as I can, and take it to the meeting, where GWAPA members, beginner and advanced, will rank my tank aside everyone elses. I’m not sure how mine will rank, but I’ve it’s been a great challenge getting this tank to where it is today. Comments welcome!

(Front view – Looking down at an angle.)

Well, I finally got fed up with lots of not-so-dwarf hairgrass, full of brush algae, that ended up not staying rooted in the substrate. So, I pretty much yanked everything out of the tank. I had neglected this tank for about 2 months, allowing a lotus plant to nearly cover the entire surface. I had hoped that if I let it go long enough, I would finally got a beautiful lotus flower. It figures that the day I pull out that lotus, I see its first flower stalk shooting up. Of course, I only realized this after I ripped out the foot long root system, uprooting the entire left side of the tank. So much for patience — I’ll try that next time.

So, anyways, I’m working with a very limited set of slate rock that’s leftover from redoing my 75G. One of these days, I need to get back down to an excellent slate collection site by the side of the road in northern Virginia. Below is what I’ve come up with thus far for the hardscape. I want lots of caves, as this tank houses several apistogramma panduro. Please ignore the horrible derth of flora right now. I need to make a serious visit to my LFS (and a few GWAPA member’s tank) to find some new and interesting plants to throw in here. I’m open to any plant suggestions, particularly for the foreground.

In less than 2 weeks, GWAPA will be judging the aquascapes of our member’s 2.5 gallon tanks. Earlier this spring/summer, GWAPA announced a club aquascaping contest. Any club members, who wanted to participate, would be given a 2.5G tank, complete with 3M ColorQuartz Sand, a 2x13W PC light with legs, and a set of Seachem fertilizers.

We soon found out that the ColorQuartz sand was nothing near the substrate we were used to dealing with. To put it lightly, growth was terrible! After adding a few root tabs, and fertilizing heavily, the glosso finally started taking off. Below is a picture of my tank, two weeks out from it’s final trim before judgement.

Below are some pictures of one the male bolivian rams, microgeophagus altispinosa, that I have in my 75G tank. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any female rams to try breeding this fish. The local fish stores, generally only carry males because their coloration is much more profound than their female counterparts.

Rams are very nice additions to your tank, even in community tanks. Unlike some of their more aggressive cichlid cousins, these dwarf cichlids from South America are quite docile. I have found that when multiple males are put in the same tank, a hierarchy is definitely established, where the dominant male is the largest and most colorful.

I have kept both rams and apistogramma in the same tank without problem. They will not interbreed, and so long as the tank is large enough, the two will not bother each other. The obvious exception is when either is spawning. Recently, my apistogramma cacatuoides began rearing fry, and seem to purposefully pick out the bolivian rams to chase away from their “nest”. They tend to leave various other rasaboras and tetras much more leeway than they do their dwarf-cichlid-counterparts.