Upon getting home from work I discovered another platy dead – just floating at the top of the tank. We think it was as a result of our nitrites sky-rocketing – the colours are hard to differentiate, but they’re at least two, maybe higher. Ammonia seems to be stable in the 0.5-1.0 range, and has maybe gone down a little. Many more water changes…

And a cloach just died. We spent a good 10 minutes looking for this third, fearing the worst, and then he suddenly turned up. A little bit later James noticed that he was doing a headstand and breathing very rapidly. We caught him in the net and left him in the water to see what would happen… he died about an hour later.

I am very, very sad. We clearly got way too many fish way too early. James had been under the impression that the ammonia cycle started when there were no fish in there, which is obviously not true. So much for our amazing ammonia/nitrite results! We were also probably a little too enthusiastic about feeding and so on.

I’m actually a bit annoyed at the fish shop. Maybe it’s me trying to negate responsibility, but especially with fish like the cloaches – which apparently prefer mature tanks, at least 6 months old – the staff there should have asked about the tank set-up and advised against us getting them. So I’m a bit peeved, as well as very sad.

The plants seem to be doing well, including the two new sorts we introduced – one with round, succulent-looking leaves, and one with leaves like lily-pads.