Flickr: The Aquarium Pool

Just thought I would mention quickly that the The Aquarium Pool at Flickr has been seeing a lot of activity lately. And a lot of it is freshwater home aquariums -- hurrah!

The Age of Aquariums

Interesting looking site. Bills itself as "one of the oldest, largest and most entertaining international aquarium sites on the net, where both novice and seasoned hobbyists have been meeting since 1997 to share experiences and promote responsible fishkeeping."

Age of Aquariums - Tropical Fish - Main Page

I got to by contacting someone on Flickr to find out more about how he set up his tank. He answered my questions, and then sent me a link to some more pictures of his fish.

Cleaned the 55 Gallon and the 20 Gallon

Cleaned it on Sunday, April 3, actually. Finally getting around to noting it here. There was a rather large gap in cleaning because of a vacation and then soon after I got back a flood in my basement. Sigh.

The fish seem to be doing well, though. The j. reganni babies are growing up nicely and there is at least one j. transcriptus in the 20 gallon.

Aquarium/Malawi on Flickr!

Finally, someone has posted some photos from their freshwater aquarium to the Aquarium Pool on Flickr. Don't get me wrong; I've loved all of the photos from the public aquariums -- some beautiful shots of some saltwater fish (sharks, jellies, and so on). But I keep freshwater aquarium fish and I'm only a hobbiest on a limited budget. I want to see what other people who are like me are doing with their aquariums.

Anyway, here's a link to some gorgeous Malawi cichlid pictures:

Aquarium/Malawi on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Water changes and j. transcriptus babies again

Just saw that my j. transcriptus have at least 2 babies in their 20 gallon tank. I think the last batch didn't make it. If this one doesn't, I will have to be a little less passive, I think, and actually purchase some brine shrimp eggs. I've done it before, but that was pre-kid, pre-house... i.e. when I had more time on my hands. I'm also not look forward to the messiness of trying to hatch those buggers.

I'm also behind in this blog. I did 1/2 water changes to both tanks on March 5 (with my son helping! He had a blast!), and on February 24 (by myself).

Just another post about cleaning

I'm a bit behind on posting to this. I did water changes on the two tanks on Tuesday, 2/7, but because I was at a conference last week, didn't get a chance to do another. So much for my attempt at a weekly regimen. I will try again tomorrow.

I think my 20 gallon has been doing fine with the one sponge and the new powerfilter. Since it has been a couple weeks, I can probably assume that the power filter has a good bed of bacteria in it now. So, probably tomorrow night (my next scheduled "weekly" change) I will remove the sponge filter.

Cleaned the 55 Gallon and the 20 Gallon

I'm getting better at cleaning the tanks more frequently, but at posting here... not so good. The last cleaning I did on both tanks was last Tuesday (2/1). I'm hoping to clean the tanks once a week now -- hopefully stay on a bit of a schedule. So that would mean tomorrow night is cleaning night again.

On another note, I have not seen the j transcriptus babies since the day of my last post. I'm beginning to wonder if my eyes were playing tricks on me. I suppose it could be that they died off because I didn't feed them any baby brineshrimp, but I thought I might have seen them for at least a few days. I'll keep an eye out for them.

Baby j. transcriptus

I was looking at my fish tank last night before their lights go out. (They're on a timer - usually go off around 10 pm). And I was noticing that a pair of j. transcriptus in the 20 gallon were being a little more aggressive than usual. Ah ha, I thought. They are about to breed. Then I noticed a tiny speck rise up briefly from the rocks that the two were defending! They have already hatched some little ones apparently!

Thus far my approach to the Tanganikan tanks has been pretty low key. In the past, I would have immediately tried to find and hatch baby brine shrimp to feed the baby cichlids. I didn't even think of doing that when my baby j. reganni's were born -- I was just to busy. And they appear to be still alive and growing! So, I'll see what happens with the j. transcriptus. If they don't survive this time, hopefully there will be more, and by that time I will know better and have some brine shrimp eggs on hand.

Water Changes on 55 and 20 Gallon Tanks

Been pretty busy at work lately, plus all of the snow we had earlier this week really threw me off schedule. I did manage to do a water change on both aquariums, though. But I did not manage to post to this blog about it... at least not until now. So now I'm trying to remember which day it was that I actually did the cleaning. I'm pretty sure it was Wednesday 1/26.

I also installed the new power filter on the back of the 20 gallon. Unfortunately, my original plan of putting some of the media from one of the sponge filters into the filter didn't work out -- too big for the box. So new plan: I decided to shut one sponge filter down (but leave it in the tank) and leave the other one running. Hopefully the good bacteria growing on the sponge filters will spread quickly to the new power filter. I'll give the it a little time to build up some good bacteria colonies in it and on it's biowheel. Then I'll shut down the other sponge filter and remove both from the tank. So far, all seems to be going well in the tank.

Water Changes and 20 Gallon Filter thoughts

Just a quick post to note that I did a 50% water change on both aquariums on Tuesday, 1/11/04.

Also for xmas, I got a new biowheel powerfilter for the 20 gallon tank. Up to this point I have been running two sponge filters using old noisy air pumps. I can't wait to quiet things down with this new filter, but I think I probably need to approach this carefully. The sponge filters have undoubtedly developed a nice colony of beneficial bacteria on them. If I suddenly remove them from the tank, I may get a sudden spike in ammonia.

So, I'm thinking outloud here... maybe the media from one of the sponge filters will actually fit inside the new filter. If so, I could leave it there for a bit and allow the bacteria from that sponge to move into the new filter. I could leave the other one up and running for ... maybe a week... just to be safe. Then maybe remove the sponge from the new filter after another week or two.

Perhaps an over-cautious approach, but I've heard that Tanganikan cichlids are very sensitive to ammonia, so better safe than sorry.