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.

Poor Ranga!

While away, another Glassfish departed, again for no apparent reason. If I can see a problem among them, it's just that they didn't grow a bit since I got them, back in January. Therefore, they are still in the hatchery, to avoid the archers' attentions. I wonder if this could somehow prevent their growth. But until I get some new plants, I cannot risk to release them into the Big World. Also, they still accept only very lively food (mosquito larvae; live bloodworms are ignored), which limits a lot the possibility of feeding them. For the holidays (almost 3 weeks away) I'll have someone to come and feed them a bit.

Rio!

The lymphocystis, or whatever that was, disappeared in two days, and the fish appears to be fine. It could still have been white spot, and in that case probably the parasite has simply left the first host, and moved on to the second stage of its life, spreading into the tank and looking for new hosts (AARGH!). Therefore I had raised the salinity and the temperature (from 25 C to 28 C). About ten days have passed, so T goes now back to 25 C.

No plants left under water, and only two struggling above the water. I decided to give it a second try, this time with Vallisneria americana. Problem will be, the water is already brackish, although very low-end: with the Hornwort I had gradually increased the salinity from 0 to 1.002 in months, whereas now I don't want to pull it down again; let's see how this supposedly very hardy plant will do.

I'm presently in Rio again, lucky harvest this time: half an hour on the beach in Copacabana during rough sea, and I collected more mangrove seedlings than I can really handle!

In the weekend I'll go to a new estuary I found some 50 km south of town, with a nice manguezal. Locals say it might not be a good idea trying to enter those waters, but let's see. I got the diving case for the little camera, so hopefully I can get some nice shots (since I don't need more seeds!!).

Lymphocystis

The diagnosis is not confirmed yet, but the probability of it being whitespot is quite low, given the salinity of the water (it's now finally SG 1.002 @ 25 C). I have just discovered it, and tomorrow morning I'll look at it again, hopefully being able to exclude the whitespot scenario. Apparently, not much can be done against lymphocystis, apart from letting it develop, and hopefully die out, but it is a virus, and in the small confined environment of the nursery where the glassfishes are kept, it may spread... :-(

Meanwhile, I got probably the best picture of these little guys:

Status

I never really got rid of the diatoms, and for some reason (I removed for some days the aerial vegetation cover, therefore giving more light?) they're somehow blooming again.

The other species of algae totally overcame the moss, which I removed, and are doing the same with the hornwort:

I'm adding some fertilizer, which clearly helps the plant, but the algae don't stop growing on it, and all affected needles soon rot, polluting the water.

The whole result is a quite unsightly mulm resting on the substrate, in spite of the weekly siphoning. I'm soon going to lower the water outlet from the filter from its elevated position down to the water surface level, hopefully increasing the flow and helping move the material into the filter.

One of the glassfish is gone, and the other ones do not grow by a bit. Possibly, they are smaller than before... They still eat only mosquito larvae, which attract them with their continuous movements. 

Not very happy, at the moment.