Oh dear, Chuck’s fish blogging again…

On July 5, we went out for fireworks, and I came home with a new 29 gallon fish tank. I was getting a little frustrated with my twenty gallon, which served me fine for about two years, but was starting to feel small (and seemed to kill livebearers in a way I wasn’t happy with). And, this one was a good deal.

So, I tore down the old tank, and binned everything inside but the fish, reinforced my stand (which cost me about a buck seventy-five in materials beyond what I already had lying around), and set up the new one. I used some of the old hardware, but I made sure it was completely and thoroughly cleaned and sterilized (in case any nasty bacteria came along), and a bunch of new plastic plants (not enough light to grow good real ones), aeration stuff, and a spiffy new heater (that took a whole week to ship to me, damnit!).

It’ll be up two weeks on Sunday, inhabited right now by my seemingly indestructable three each of cherry barbs and corydoras. Once I get a really good biofilter working (probably another three or four weeks), I’ll start filling out the population (more cories, a couple of platies, I think, and some shrimp), but for now, I’m just happy to have it up and running and fully decorated.

Here’s a photo I took of it this afternoon, once I had all the plants and stuff in (click, as always, to enlarge):

There are about two dozen plastic plants in there, but I tried to get it as close to natural-ish as I could (I’m done with the little plastic castle look). I bought the smaller black rocks, but those bigger round rocks I collected from the edge of the Potomac river flood plain near Crystal City (after testing and discarding a couple others after they proved to jack up the pH of the water too much). Anyway, I like the look, the fish like the hiding places, and it’s as close to the “planted” look I’m going to get with one 20w bulb.

As I said, there are only six fish in there now, but I managed catch three of them, representing both species, in one shot here; the cories are cavorting, as a cherry barb looks on disapprovingly:

In case anybody is actually interested, I put some more pictures over in the photo gallery in the pets section. There are a couple of cories there begging for the LoLcat treatment, but I can’t think of anything good.