The Puffer Forum

I'd like to start a tank journal as I'm extremely forgetful and it would be nice to have things written down somewhere.

Quick Background
- We've got 3 angels, 9 rummy nose tetras, 7 sterbai cories, 2 rams, 1 adult female bristlenose, and 6 calico bristlenoses. All are juveniles except the albino BN. We also have 2 nerite snails.
-Tank is a high tech planted tank. We inject CO2, have high light, and are dosing with the EI method.The plants grow like crazy and the algae is pretty happy too. We keep putting cherry shrimp in but the angels must be eating them. On the diet of shrimp the angels' colours have really popped.
-We have 2 Eheim 2215s on the tank and a smaller internal filter that does about 56gal/hr turnover. We're currently using it for CO2 dispersal but we made an inline reactor which is curing right now but will go on in the near future.
-Water changes are 75% every 7 days.

News
The newest pending arrivals to the tank are some guppies. 3 males and 11 females. One of the males died the first night so we'll be getting him replaced. He was looking quite poor and had horrible fin rot. Didn't expect him to die though. The males are 'purple' as they were on sale and we're broke The store didn't have any females so we picked up 12 feeder females. One died in the bag on the way home but the other 11 are doing wonderfully. Upon purchase they were all the pale silver colour but in just 2 days their tail colours have really started to come out. The females are all very small, under an inch. All the guppies are currently in a QT tank. Tank contains a heater, used filter media, an air stone, an antiparasitic, Melafix, and Pimafix. Really went for the gold there but they're in rough shape as the store isn't known for taking care of it's fish, never mind it's feeders. Their feces were white but have already turned brown. They're eating flakes well but don't seem to be up to the 0.5mm NLS pellets yet.

Why haven't I seen this before? It sounds very pretty Flutter! Do you have any pics?

How are the feeder guppy girls doing? Did any RCS survive the angel's wrath??? Mine is a pretty big angelfish; so I can imagine she'd eat my RCS in a heartbeat.

Sounds like a good start.

I could have shipped you guppies

Lol, yeah, but shipping would be more expensive than buying those ones

We don't have any tank pictures but we have some fish pictures and a video of the angels doing their thing. You'll have to give us a few days to get those up though. None of the cherries survived but we think it was them that's brought out the angels' colours and may have triggered their laying eggs.

We euthanized a female today. She was in poor shape and couldn't swim, we thought she was dead for a while. There were no external signs of illness or disease so something must have been internal. The rest are doing fine. They're eating well and are still on the IP treatment. One of the females popped out some babies but we're not sure if they'll survive in this tank. There's almost no cover and the area that they're hidden in doesn't have access to food. Also, the adults think they taste yummy. I've been putting in extra food for them and hoping that they are scavenging overnight.

June 16 the paired angels did their thing on an amazon leaf. We left them with the eggs in the community tank and the eggs were eaten by Thursday evening. We expected this and will try to raise some in the future. Male is about 3" and female is about 2". We're very surprised they produced eggs at such young ages.

We went away for the weekend so all the fish had 4 days of fasting. All have pulled through marvelously like we expected.

Today our male and female angels bred again. We have approximately 100 eggs on our red sword again. Mom is doing a great job but dad's a little stunned. He wanders off a bit and is doing a wonderful job at fanning the opposite side of the leaf. I want to screen off their section of the tank but it's going to be difficult with only one person in this tank and Kyle won't come and help. Bad Kyle. I hope we don't lose one this time, they're so young to be breeding. Both are about 2-2.5 inches long.

+1 to pics and vid

There's pictures of some fish here:
http://www.kwas.ca/forum/showthread.php ... post112210

Just remember that those were taken in May (shortly after their purchase). The fish look so much better now though they still haven't grown into their colours fully. The large male angel passed away shortly after his first time breeding due to unknown reasons. His breeder thinks it may have been the stress of breeding.

very nice photos!

Kyle has some talent there

beautiful fish

We moved an otto into the tank 3 days ago. We had 3 in QT, one passed away and the other we can't find. Serves us right for QTing in a tank with plants and driftwood. We hope the otto is ok as we're running out of algae in there and none of the ottos were eating any of the foods we put in there for them. After moving the otto it became covered with fungus on the dorsal side of it's body, must have been from the stress of the move. The fungus is clearing up quite quickly with no medication thankfully. After the water change we will add Pimafix and maybe some Melafix to help with the healing.

We're having some problems with low O2 so we have a bubbler running and we moved a spraybar up near the surface. We'll move the second one up today during the water change. I also just did a massive prune as we believe the plants were really inhibiting the water flow to the front of the tank. We're also debating getting a powerhead to increase water movement. After the prune I exposed 3 shrimp and I really hope they survive as the angels are on the hunt. It would be phenominal if we could have a population of shrimp in this tank.

Right now we're waiting for someone to give us plans for rescaping the tank and we can't wait to do that. I hope our new plants aren't all dead from the long wait.

The angels spawned again! Sheesh, they're both babies and this is her third time. This time the entire leaf is covered with eggs. I'll try and get a picture. Again, mom is doing a great job and dad is being a doofus. Dark stripes on dad though. The last round survived until hatching but I don't think any of the fry survived. Maybe we'll try and raise these ones...? The wisteria by the eggplant is severely overgrown, I think I'll try to prune it back for them. Let's see if I get attacked. The tetras are harassing the eggs in a serious way. Any chance they get they dash in to eat them. Grrr.

A few days ago we found some small white eggs on the glass. We don't know what they're from. They're approximately 1mm in diameter, maybe a bit less.

We've changed some plants around. We ripped out a ton of plants and added some new ones. We added 3 amazon swords, and ozelot sword, madagascar lace, and round pelia. So far all new plants are doing well.

ETA: it may be coincidence but the angels seem to spawn after they're fasted a couple days. It's becoming more obvious when mom is getting ready. She's filling up more and more with eggs.

We have a friend offering us some of her altum angels. I have no idea what the price would be but we're seriously interested and are thinking about upgrading to a 65gal.

awesome, always like having a reason to upgrade tank size lol

We're getting a new tank tonight and we'll be getting 3 altums in the near future. They're so pretty. Almost tempted to get rid of our regular angels

We're throwing out all old substrate and starting this new tank over.

I had to look up the Altum. Haha

They're really elegant, Flutter (Tess).

Tell Kyle to get his camera out!