I can’t believe I am finally up to date, and that I am making this up as I go along rather than copying what I have already written. I must say, it was a bit traumatic to read back over what has happened since we got the tank; we were truly clueless when we first got it, although I think we learnt fairly quickly (read a couple of months). I cringe to think how fish-happy we were at first, buying them whenever we wanted and chucking them in. Anyway… gotta learn somehow I suppose… I am looking forward to basically starting again and having a really good go. For today, we have started on the Moving House project fairly drastically: we moved all the fish and the filter over to the qt, and it has never looked so exciting and clean in its entire existence. The main tank now has nothing in it except a bit of gravel down the bottom – vacuuming out the water was one of the more gross things we have ever done, I think, because there was just so much poo…

So from here: we move the main tank and stand to the new house (settlement is Monday!), fill it up with water and put the heater on… Then we move the fish over in a bucket, and viola! the tank begins anew. Then we move the rest of the house on the weekend, but that is another story entirely and one I am really, really not looking forward to. Urgh. Anwyay. James is still trying to tell me that upgrading to a new, bigger tank when we move is a good idea, but I am not convinced yet at all. He’s proposing to use either the current main tank or the qt as the filter for an enormous tank. This is really just part of his whole grand scheme, which also includes a webcam, automatic water changes and automatic pH and ammonia monitoring. Originally the webcam was going to be a roving submersible, but that has been negated as impractical (what a surprise). I will believe all of this when it is actually attached to my tank.

The idea that the bristlenose cats would totally clean up the tank in a couple of days was, as suspected, a lie; however, they have done a very good jon indeed. I am quite happy with them, and very glad we got them; they’re cute, and apparently liable to mate some time, as long as we’ve got a male and female; not really sure what I think about this proposition.

And it’s my brother’s birthday.

We decided that for the sakeof our plants we should get at least one SAE to eat some algae. Most of the plants have algae on them now, such that leaves are dying. We’ve also cut the light-on time to about 10 hours, thanks to a recommendation on TTT that since the tank also gets sunlight it doesn’t need as much artificial light. Anyway, Coburg had no SAEs – they had Flying Foxes, with the stripe through the tail that I thought was the way of telling the two species apart and meant that they were SAE, not FF, but we decided not to risk it (since have heard that FF don’t eat much algae and can be a bit annoying to others). Asking one of the sales people, he said bristlenose catfish were the best fish for algae – agreeing with someone else at TTT suggested. So, because they are quite smalle at this stage, we bought two. They should grow to maybe 5 inches, which is something to keep in mind when we finally re-stock the tank. And to keep James happy, I agreed to let him him buy one gold angel (which is actually mostly silver, of course). So now the tank is slightly more interesting – I must admit it is wonderful to have an angel again. Impressively, the sales person actually checked whether we had any small fish like neons when we asked for the angel. He also said the cats would clean up the algae in two days: this I do not believe. Currently they hang around the heater or on the main rock; there is quite an obvious clean patch on the rock.

James is starting to push for a discus tank when we move – make the qt a molly tank or something… or simply buy a new, bigger tank: he saw a 4x2x2 foot tank at Coburg for $300.

He had some red on his belly, and he had not looked happy for a couple of days. The last few days I have noticed a huge amount of algae growing on plant leaves, so clearly the SAEs were actually doing their job.

I have just noticed that the beautiful alpha molly looks a bit dropsy-ish around the middle, and might also be red around the mouth. Perhaps I am just paranoid.