First pics

Plants are set in, and I have the impression that some alage are starting to grow on them. I managed to anchor most of the stems using pieces of lead weights, but I had not enough, so a couple of them keep jumping up to the surface.

The rainbows are doing fine, although still quite scared: the first day it was impossible to even spot the males, whereas at least two of the three females were brave enough to have quick looks out of the protection of the roots. They eventually got most of the food: natural selection at work.... Today, day 3, they all jumped out as soon as food became available... They also appear to get along quite well with the archers....

Lost track of another glassfish. Yesterday it was impossible to see them around, today at least they were carefully swimming in the planted corner...

A couple of pics, nothing special, just eager to put the first shots in:

Beginning of a long companionship?

Big changes!

Today I have received the Vallisneria americana/asiatica. Three bunches, for a total of 10 plants, in good apparent conditions. The plan was to make a little forest in one of the corners, and finally release the remaining glassfishes, prisoners since about 7 months, and hoping that this will save them from the archers attentions.

One problem, still unresolved, is a good way of planting the Vallis: the crown should remain out of the substrate, and no sand allowed among the leaves. That is already quite hard to achieve, but after you trim a bit the roots to prepare the plant, there is no way the stem will remain in place into the substrate. So, at the moment I'm using some lead weights, but I don't have enough, and I'm not even sure the lead won't interfere with the water...

Glassfishes released, one of them panicked or so, hectically swimming vertically, like in convulsions, and inevitably attracted the attention of the closest archer: lifetime out of the nursery, about 30 sec. Not good. After that, the remaining ones (4) behaved, and to my amazement nothing happened: the archers somehow do look at them, but let them go. Better feed them regularly, though...

The other big news is, expecting the glassfishes not to last long (I still don't know how they will possibly catch food in such a large tank), I got 6 lovely Melanotenia boesemani. Beautiful. And I hope, once settled, they will take the archers out from their mangrove hideout. At the moment, it still looks like an empty tank: everybody hidden among the roots. But that's the idea of mangroves, I guess...

Back from holidays! What's left?

I'm back from a 3-week holiday on the canadian Rockies. Gorgeous.

I had a (paid) guy come twice to feed live mosquito larvae to the Parambassis Ranga, but it was probably not enough: two casualties. The truth is, these guys barely eat, and surely they don't grow. As Neale Monks mentioned, it may be they're not Ranga, but rather a smaller species, or I do have a problem with them: 5 left of the original 10, bought in January. Next week I'll order the Vallisneria, and make a little forested corner, release the Parambassis from the nursery and see what happens: more than of being eaten by the archers, what I fear is that they will never find the food, once free  in the tank.

The archers are doing just fine: they've been fed with an auto-feeder, a small pinch of mixed dried food (Tetra Cichlid Sticks, Hikari Cichlid Gold, and a mix of tiny dried shrimp and crustaceans) per day. Two days ago I bought a box of flies: man, that was fun! They were happy like kids at Disneyworld! And hierarchy kicked in again, in that situation, in spite of the large number of flies available to everybody. It was interesting to see, however, that the two low-profiles fishes did make their "voice" (!) heard, a couple of times: flies are simply too yummy to give up!

On the mangrove side, two old ones I had are slowly increasing their roots. Unfortunately the one with the best root system (about 6-7 cm) is loosing all the leaves (had 4), which are blackening one by one. Only one is left.

The new ones aren't doing really well above water (totally dried up and black), and below only a tiny appearance of root is visible, which still gives some hope.

The best pair of leaves doesn't match with the best rooting system: for some reasons I have seedles with nice roots and bad leafs, and others showing the opposite.

This one has lost three leaves in the past couple of weeks. They started blackening, and then died. The last one left today had the first balck spot, too, shown below. What is it? I showered all of them yesterday with demineralized water, to remove any (invisible, anyway) salt that may have been extruded in the past couple of weeks.

The root systems of some of the mangrove propagulae: one is showing a beautiful, amazing growth of prop roots, whereas the other is rather faster in developing taproots. Why this difference??

The one with the best root system lost most of the leaves, and the one left today started showing signs of the same problem: turning black, and falling.