The 10 Gallon: Fish Journal!

And since I’m talking about fish tanks, let’s talk about the old 10 gallon that I had. Sometime around my wedding, I had let this tank go to ruins. I think the last time anyone saw it was Jenn, it was covered in blue green algae.

So over the past year, I’ve been trying to rehabilitate it. But there was just too much algae of several types. It was just easier to start over and save whatever plants were left. (Luckily, these were cheap Petsmart plants and nothing fancy.)

Back in its hayday, it looked like this:

I got new substrate (since those bllue rocks were just covered in hair algae. The new substrate is eco-complete, btw, for those who care.). And placed the salvaged plants in.

Don’t ask me what I was thinking putting that plastic cup in there. I thought the shrimp could hide in there, but it’s clear, so everybody knows where they are! Turned out that the fish liked to hide in there, but the problem is that sometimes they couldn’t find their way out. Cuz, you know, it’s clear. So I took it out. There’s nothing worse than watching fish freak the hell out. You think they’re dying.

What’s all that junk hanging off the back, you ask? Well, the very left is a Hagen CO2 generator holder. And the middle 2 are filters. The right filter is the old one that’s not doing so well. The impeller has died due to the fact that thousands of pond snails have wandered in there and got pulverized. So for the time being, there are 2 filters until the tank goes through it’s new nitrogen cycle. You know nitrifying bacteria lives in there!

This is what it looked like on the 14th, before I took all the tetras out. The reason why I took them out was because they were fin nippers and I wanted to put in a betta. It seems that I’ve always had bettas. And I’ve always had this particular kind. It’s a crowntail, which means that it’s got frilly tail. We haven’t named this one yet because we got a yellow one, that didn’t survive. His name was Swavwell. Chris said he was only going to name this fish if it survived longer than a week. He’s going on four days now, so his prognosis looks good.

Here is a blurry picture because he won’t sit still. I’m thinking of calling him Hamtastico because every time I try to take a photo of something else, he comes right in front of the frame. I think he’s dark purple and red. But in this photo, he looks blue and red. It can be a trick of the light. He could be both blue and purple!

The other inhabitants of the tank are 2 otos (for cleaning algae), an innumerable bunch of ghost shrimp (also for cleaning algae), and 2 bumblebee gobies (because they were cute! You can’t find them anywhere anymore. Like people stopped selling them because people couldn’t keep them alive. Same with dwarf puffers. What the hell? I had dwarf puffers for like 2 years and these bumblebee gobies are going on three. So I don’t know what people were doing to kill these things. And if I had another tank, and I could find dwarf puffers, I’d totally get them again. They are way cute.).

I am not completely satisfied with the tank yet. There’s something that’s a little bit off that’s bugging me, but shifting around plants hasn’t helped at all. Maybe it just needs to fill in some more. We’ll have to see, I guess.

Here’s a photo of what it looks like as of yesterday.

I also have a 5 gallon and a 1.5 gallon tank. Oh yeah, it’s going to be all about the tanks this week. I bet you’re thrilled. Just THRILLED.

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal