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.