Five dead babies in the qt – not sure if this is from hunger or toxins – have done a water change and will check the levels soon. Other tank looking fine, except that there is another lot of babies. So they came earlier than expected; 2 months’ gestation was hopeful. Not sure what to do about them; James is offering to kill them, but I’m not sure about that! Maybe we really should get a betta. So, interesting… I guess… It’s nice to see the tanks after a week; I wonder if that is pathetic.

Ammonia zero in both.

To no effect, until just now. He’s safe, just hiding all day I guess. The Dropsy Gourami is really not looking well, though.

I started writing this up to RandomAlex today [later note: what a long process this has been…], which is cool – I hope it might actually be vaguely useful to someone. I’ll keep going paper-based until I catch up with myself.

The cloaches have been very active recently. I wonder how the tanks – particularly the babies – will go while we’re away? It will only be a week… I’m not going to put the feeder on either tank: I know the main tank will be fine, and I think it would overfeed the babies. I might put it on the main tank when we come home in between weeks away.

We really have to catch Bitch Fish (is it obvious that she is annoying me?). Given the record, she’ll drop again while we’re in Ballarat, which will be annoying. I may well be close to despair – what will we do with these babies?! I made another attempt at catching her tonight, to absolutely no effect.

I had been wondering where the other was, and found it today. I noticed two male babies in the qt, and so wanted to catch them and put them in the main tank – last thing I need is a pregnant young molly. I did the removal, and then noticed there was a dead rasbora floating on the top of the qt. I can only guess that it got caught when the net was last in the main tank (and came out when the net went in to catch the babies) – although I thought I checked the net pretty well. One other remote possibility it that it went over when I put some cuttings from the main tank to the qt and then didn’t like the change in water.

All the babies are now in the qt – that’s a lot of babies – except for the two males. There is still a possibility that Dave’s friend will want them – and God willing, Miss Molly as well. Just have to catch her first…

I don’t know what can have happened to it – haven’t seen it against the filter, but I guess it could have been eaten quickly. Sigh.

A couple of days ago I noticed one of the cloaches seemed to be, for want of a better description, be blowing bubbles. It’s very odd; there seens to be white stuff coming out of its mouth every now and then. Not sure whether or not to be worried!! And two of the SAEs were having a serious fight earlier, although they seem fine now.

I must admit I haven’t looked at all closely for them specifically in quite a long time. I wonder is one constantly hiding, did I miscount ages ago (although I think that would be quite hard), or has it died and very quickly been eaten – it’s certainly not attached to the intake, and hasn’t been. How confusing.

The neons are growing on me, slowly.

So long, in fact, that I have kept putting it off because there is too much to write and I am lazy.

Every single one of my angels is dead. It happened quite suddenly and, as far as I can recall, there were no symptoms. They were still in the qt. I called Coburg afterwards and asked if they’d had any problems with them; they got snooty and said no. However, someone on TTT said they’d also had angel issues from there, took in a sample of their water plus ths receipt and got a refund. I only found this out ages later… lesson learnt.

The last batch of babies are in the qt and having much fun, it seems. They are always hungry, or at least act it, and almost seem to know how to go about getting fed: whenever I am in the kitchen, they cluster in the closest corner of the tank (where I do usually feed them). I did buy an ornament: a large Grecian urn-type thing. It’s a bit tacky but I like it, and some of the fish seem to like swimming around in it. Whenever I prune the main tank, I have taken to putting the cuttings in the qt; seems like a good idea for dealing with the nitrates, and gives the fish some shade. The reason I’ve been induced to write today, actually, is… more babies. Miss Molly hatched them last night. I wasn’t expecting her to for a few more weeks, actually, and I see that today is 2 months to the day since the last batch were born; how interesting. But what a pain… what am I going to do with 80-100 babies? I might advertise on the Boronia forum again. I am a bit distraught, I must admit.

We came home to discover a SAE on the floor, quite a way from the tank, three weeks ago; that too was a bit distressing. It had obviously jumped out of the tank, through quite a small hole, and wiggled over there. Probably I should not fill the tank quite so much, so there is a greater gap between the top of the water and the lid.

One more gourami has dropsy – has looked ill for maybe a fortnight now. He’s the one who was looking constipated ages ago… I had thought he was getting better, although never entirely losing the constipated look. Now, though, it’s quite clear he is sick.

We went fish shopping about three weeks ago. We got nine harlequin rasboras – who are just gorgeous, happily schooling and zooming around – and ten neon tetras. They are just about to go in the main tank; I wanted the tetras to be qt fish, but James insisted they be moved. Actually, we’ve left one neon in the qt; he doesn’t look very happy, perhaps a bit bloated.

The main tank now contains:
three cloaches
three black widow tetras
four gourami (one ill)
four adult mollies
? baby mollies
three SAE
two male platies
nine rasboras
nine neons.

It’s looking quite beautiful, too.

Well, that wasn’t quite as hard to write up as I had thought. I may now get back to writing more regularly.

I am still intent on getting a betta at sometime – if it wasn’t for the gourami, I would be tempted to get one right now to eat some of those pesky babies. Maybe I will get one – qt for a few days, then into the main one – and qt the gourami (all of them), because apparently they might have relationship issues. I wonder if I can convince James…

No visible symptoms – guess it’s a good thing they’re in quarantine. We caught the one baby we still have from the last batch and moved her to the qt – because she’s a she and we don’t need more babies. She seems to enjoy swimming with the white angels.

As well, we got a parcel from Aquamail yesterday – very exciting. So we now own a 25 foot gravel vacuum, and a huge amount of food. We had given up on our order ever turning up, so we bought a bucket of flakes from Coburg anda some sinking tablets, and then Aquamail comes through with a bucket of flakes and two containers of freeze-dried tablets (the sort we originally had). Well, I guess it will keep. James insisted on trying out the vac; it worked well in the qt, and then we tried it in the main tank – it worked quite well; there’s a small section that looks remarkably clean – but it stirred the crap up a lot, too (or that might have been James’ technique). Of course, it’s a bit hard to do with all the plants. We may have to do as I heard someone else say – de-plant and vacuum sections at a time, do the whole tank over a year or so.

Probably close to 30, I think; so exciting. She is looking much slimmer, naturally… but a little harried. I’d like to catch her and put her in the qt, but a) she’s very hard to catch and b) there are 5 angels in there, so that might go against the whole idea of having a qt. So yes, we got angels on Friday – which was also highly exciting – three white, veil-finned ones (long fins), and 2 mostly black fairly normal looking ones. They seem to be quite happy in there today – eating, etc.

Ammonia is 0, nitrites are 0, and nitrates are very low – I guess because there is little ammonia entering the system. This happened on Monday; I added some more ammonia then, just to be sure, so I will check again today. SO tomorrow we will probably go to Coburg and get me some more fish – angels! hooray.

The other exciting thing at the moment is that all three cloaches have been out and about heaps. It happened after we moved the rock to check that the cloach lying in there really was still alive – we didn’t move it to a different position, so that doesn’t really explain why they’ve recently come to play more. I’m not complaining, though – it’s very exciting to see all three cruising around together.

The molly still hasnt’t had the fry… poor girl. The tank is quite overgrown at the moment, so I think I’ll leave it like that until after the babies are born and grow a bit.

Quite sad about that… again, no visible symptoms. Guess it’s the poisoning catching up – can’t think of any other reason.

The tank looks quite good at the moment, with the plants etc.