Here is an updated picture of my 20 long tank in my office. Last week I noticed that one of the female apistogramma borellii had turned bright yellow. I haven’t seen any fry yet, but then again, I haven’t really seen the female fish either. There’s still a school of about a dozen male Endlers in here as well.

 

The plants in this tank are rotala macrandra ‘green’, rotala indica ‘red’ (or rotala colorata), Crasula helmsii, Ranalisma rostrata, marselia quadrafolia, and Heteranthera zosterifolia. I’m finally starting to win the thread algae battle in this tank. Over the previous month or two this tank had a mess of 8″ long thread algae flowing in the current. My brother commented that at least I’m able to grow “cool looking algae,” but I wasn’t amused. Thankfully, thanks to a strict SeaChem-only dosing schedule with Excel overdoses, I’m now in control.

Maybe one of these days I’ll properly trim these stem plants. I hate growing stem plants in a 12″ tall tank! At least I like the rockwork!

On Saturday, I attended GWAPA’s first meeting of the new year. The topic of the meeting was about low-tech aquariums, meaning, aquariums without CO2, high light, or excessive dosing. Since most of my tanks are fairly high-tech, it’s always good for me to remember that folks can maintain really nice planted aquarium at a fraction of the cost or effort that I do. My 54G tank is my only real low-tech tank that I try to keep looking nice, and it’s amazing how many guest we have over that marvel over that particular tank, and then hardly mention the other ones. I tell myself that it’s simply due to the low-tech tank being near the entranceway of our home.

Anyway, the meeting was great. It looks like it’s going to be a great year for GWAPA with lots of stuff in the works. The “mini” auction of not really mini at all, and I came away with some great plants to try. I managed to snag Crasula helmsii, a fine-leaved, creeping foreground plant, crypt. molmanei (for my 54G anubias/crypt tank), and a bag of HC since I still haven’t tried that yet.

Finally, I had my first opportunity to get out of the house to test my new camera, the Canon Rebel XTi. I have a lot to learn, but I really like how this camera is working so far. The pictures of Viktor’s rainbowfish are using my 17-85mm zoom lense.

A few weeks ago, I came across this post on one of the cichlid forums, offering a dual language (English/German) version of a special DATZ publication on South American Dwarf Cichlids. I decided to contact the poster, Mike Wise, who consequently is the person who did the actual translation work from German to English, and is now selling copies of the book himself to folks in the United States.

This week, I received the book, and boy am I impressed. This doesn’t have the extensive information that the Cichlid Atlases have on each species, but as a simple photo log for hundreds of apistogramma or other dwarf species, with general locality information, it’s tremendous. Most species have multiple photographs, showing possible color morphs, and noting differences between different A-numbers currently attributed to the same species name. The book is organized sequentially by A-number, but the index is very comprehensive, listing both Latin and common names for fish, so they’re easy to lookup.

My only complaint for this book is that it doesn’t list pH or TDS information for each species. That said, I realize that this information is not necessarily available for every species, and even if it were, might fluctuate greatly depending on the wet/dry season.

All in all, this is a very dangerous book. It’s easy to flip through the pictures, and find some amazing species that you would like to try in your tank. I imagine many of these are hard or impossible to find unless you go collect them yourself, but it’s great to peruse nonetheless.

You can get a sample of some of the book’s pages here.

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.

I had my camera and tripod out last night, so I decided to snap a picture of my 54G corner tank. This scape doesn’t change too much, but that’s a good thing. As a reminder, there’s no CO2 on this tank, and the light is mostly deflected some the Phyllanthus Fluitans floating on the surface. I have an Eheim Liquidoser on top of the tank that dumps in a few milliliters of PMDD every day, but otherwise I don’t supplement this tank with anything more than fish food.