Nitrates around 5ppm – wonder if they’ll go higher? So we bought more fish. We wanted more sunset platies, but they didn’t have any – well, if they did, they were in a tank with several types of platy, and it would have been pretty hard to get only platies so we didn’t bother; we’ll keep looking though. We got eight silver mollies, which are pretty much fully grown, apparently. They are beautiful! And they’re currently schooling, too, and as I look now they’re attacking a plant – I hope they’re just sucking off algae. Which reminds me:

a) we have brown algae on half our plants, which is particularly unsightly. I’m not sure whether to be concerned or not. The SAE eat it occasionally, but not as much as I had hoped – maybe they don’t like that sort of algae. I wouldn’t.

b) The buggers have totally eaten and destroyed my succulent-looking plant. It no longer exists at all in my tank. And the bottom half of several other plants only have the veins of leaves left.

We also bought another cloach. I think the two we had were sulking a bit – they have been hiding out in their cave a fair amount of the time. They have discovered a convenient ledge on the bottom of the rock forming the top of their cave – when they are on it, they cannot be seen. We’ve panicked twice, now, and discovered it there.

James is annoyed because apparently we got dudded on our filter – other aquarium places have the Eheim filter for less than the Fluval (what we got), and the Eheim is meant to be a whole lot better – something about the way they actually do the filtering, apparently.

The mollies are still beuatiful.

Floating pellets are something of a failure, especially in the auto feeder. We tried it last night, and when we got home there were heaps of pellets floating around the tp of the tank, and a distinct lack of interest from the fish. I managed to get probably 2/3 out, and then fed them some flakes, which they devoured (of course, they could have eaten some pellets, and just be greedy little fish). This morning, however, there don’t seem to be any pellets left – there are none floating, anyway, so maybe they make perfect midnight snacks (or the filter got them).

Our angels have grown so much, compared to those at Coburg today! It was a bit exciting to realise, I must admit.

The mollies definitely seem to be eating algae. It’s nice to have silver fish, since the angels have definitely decided to go more yellow.