It’s with a heavy heart that I’m here to report that I have a rather large vacancy in my fish tank now.
It wasn’t even from the same issues that my plecosthamus had been facing before – that had basically all cleared up months ago, but earlier this week I started noticing him “sleeping upside down” in the tank, although he was still technically breathing, so I kind of had a feeling that his days were finally numbered. I’ve had that fish for a long time, plus he was getting freaking huge despite the tank not growing proportionally, so in a way I’m kind of surprised to see that he lasted as long as he did!
He was still really gross to get out of the tank, though – filled up an entire gallon ziplock bag from corner-to-corner diagonally – and was so big that I was actually worried about him breaking the bag even post-mortem…
Anyways, now I’m faced with a new situation with this tank that I probably haven’t faced in 4-5 years – I need to choose some new fish to put in it again. Right now there are only two lone tetras swimming about, no doubt still a bit traumatized from me not getting the big, dead guy out of there quick enough, and I think I’d like to stick more to fish that size than the giants that I’m used to having in the past. Nothing fancy – maybe a school of two or three more of them, plus something else that’s kind of unique and stands out.
Also, I think I want to try a different kind of algae eater this time for keeping the tank clean, even though we tried something else with Sara’s tank somewhat recently and it didn’t last too long. I mean, plecos are ok when they’re small, but this guy has just been a monster the last couple of years, to the point where it was almost intimidating to try and move him when we moved earlier this spring! So something that isn’t capable of displacing half the water in the tank when he’s mad, I guess, is more along the lines of what I’m looking for…
I’ll probably also change out those sharp, white pieces of plastic coral – they’ve always been a pain, but the big guy would just knock whatever I put in there around anyways, so it wasn’t really worth bothering with anything cool before. Maybe some of those joke, novelty pieces like a shark or a scuba diver in a beach chair – I’ve already got the snorkeling M&M guy!
Any suggestions???
I don’t know how he did it, but no thanks to me it looks like somehow my behemoth of a plecosthamus will continue to terrorize the smaller fish in my tank for another day…
A month later and looking at him now you’d have no clue that five weeks ago he was nearly choking to death on some strange infection-thing. I’d still be curious to know what in the world it was, if there are any freelance marine biologists out there who could diagnose over the interweb via these photos.
I honestly don’t know how this poor fish is still alive…
I know I haven’t exactly been taking the best care of my fish lately, but this is just plain gross…
And granted, I’m sure it’s not exactly a picnic for my plecostomus friend here, either, but there’s not really much that I can do about it at this point, now is there??? My best guess is that it’s some sort of infection that got out of hand – I’m honestly surprised that it’s not already impeding his ability to take in food, although maybe it is. I did notice that he’s a lot more jittery than normal – it was hard to get him to keep still even just for the picture, whereas normally he doesn’t really give a crap about anything that’s going on around him inside the tank or out.
I tried dumping some fish antibiotics into the tank and I guess I’ll continue to do so, but I have a feeling that ultimately I’m just going to come home and find that gigantic beast floating upside down at the top of the tank. I mean, I’ve had him a long time at this point – at least 5 years, maybe more, and he’s probably over a foot long at this point. He’s also getting too small for even the 35 gallon tank that he’s in now, even though I’d hate to move him to a bigger one because he’ll just keep on growing again … and Sara doesn’t want him in her 55-gallon tank because she thinks he’s ugly.
Well, he is, but try finding a better bottom feeder to help keep the tank clean – you can have pretty or you can have efficient, but you can’t have both.
super-grossed-out (but I’m sure that it’s worse for him) zoomed-in view
I spent the better part of an hour fishing them out of her ginormous tank this evening so as to prevent them from getting gobbled up by their parents and other adult fish neighbors. I was able to find 8 of them total, which was impressive to me because they really only had one little fake anemone-like thing for them to hide in.
Needless to say, I kept myself greatly amused during the hunt by comtemplating how kinda messed up it is that adult fish can’t even be trusted with their own babies. You can probably expect something funny about it next week, but in the meantime, enjoy squinting to try and see the new baby fishies!
P.S. They’re baby swordtails.
When we were out for Sara’s birthday last weekend, at one point when we were BS’ing with the other couple at our table, the topic of scuba diving came up. I told all of my fun stories that I remembered from long ago – seeing baracuda and nurse sharks and eels in Florida and then returning back to Michigan to dive with basically nothing. The ironic punchline of the whole thing is always that I moved to the Tampa area so I’d be close to the water for diving, even though I’ve lived here for 7 years now and haven’t done anything of the sort since…
To add insult to injury, I pulled out my old dive log off the shelf this morning and realized after flipping through it that I technically haven’t been diving since 2000 – over a decade!!! Sure, I guess I’ve been “busy,” but sometimes I look back at diving much like playing the guitar and it’s another one of those things that I really miss doing, even though I have no idea when I’d have the time to do it anymore these days.
Of course, the truth of the matter is that I’ve got a ways to go before I think I would let myself go out again. First and foremost, I’m not doing so great with my weight right now, and I can only imagine how much lead I’d have to be carrying to actually get my fat ass down to the bottom! I don’t want to make this post about being overweight, so let’s just say that there have been some advances recently that I’m really hoping are going to help and leave it at that.
Secondly, in addition to actually losing weight, I kind of need to get comfortable with the water again. I’ve never really been super comfortable being in water over my head, but somehow during the dive class that I took over a decade ago, everyone managed to help me calm my nerves in deep water at least when I had my gear on … maybe it helped decrease that whole fear of drowning – I don’t know! That said, having been away from the hobby for so long has definitely caused that fear to return – specifically, I had a couple of problems when went snorkeling during the cruise last year, and even the deep parts of the lazy river over at Stormalong Bay at Disney make me nervous, even with lifeguards literally every five feet along the wall.
That’s basically two things that I know I need to work on if I want to don a regulator and explore life under the sea again. I think I can do it – the weight loss coming before the swimming proficiency – but it is something that I’d like to start working more actively towards, maybe next year. Sara has expressed an interest in diving as well, so it could be something cool for us to do together, plus I know that my old dive buddy Tim would love to do a little exploring the next time he’s able to bring his family down to visit.
One last reason that I want to get back into diving – this entry this I found in my old dive log:
6/21/98 : Davis Reef – Islamorada, Florida
Best dive so far!!! Saw a nurse shark, two eels, two lobsters, and Buddha! Tons of beautiful fish…
Who knew I’ve been a Buddhist all this time?! Apparently only King Triton and his court.
It’s kind of funny – out of all the possible outcomes after this, the last thing that I ever would’ve expected was that the tank would, in fact, get too clean…
It dawned on me sometime the following day that, while it’s certainly nice for me to have an uber clean fishtank, at the same time there was another certain someone who might particularly object to it … that someone being the now gigantic plecostamus that I’ve been employing for many a year to do the jobs the filter wasn’t able to handle! And granted, he certainly wasn’t doing the best job – I mean, you saw the before pictures in the last post – but still, nothing punishable by removing one’s entire food source from their ecosystem!
Fortunately, I had an old bag of these algae disc thingys that I had picked up a while back, so I’ve been throwing a couple of those in every day when I do the rest of the feeding and so far he hasn’t died, so I’m assuming that he’s eating them. Who knew that finally getting around to properly maintaining my tank would also result in putting a hard working bottom-feeder out of a job?!
So anyways, this weekend I made a big purchase that I’ve been putting off for a while now, in that I bought a new filter for my fish tank. It’s needed something new for a while – I only have a total of three fish in it, but they’re huge (3-4″ each, plus a plecostomus that’s nearly a foot long!) and thus they all poop like crazy!!! Trying to clean out the filter is a fool’s errand at best and it just plugs right up again in a few weeks anyways, but lately the water’s been getting particularly cloudy and seeing as we’ll be going on vacation in a few weeks, I thought it’d be a better idea to buy a new one now than come home to a stinky fish tank for an entirely different reason…
I ended up getting a canister filter because I figured that it was about time for a change in direction entirely, and I know that I’m only about 24 hours in, but so far I absolutely love the thing. It literally went from cloudy to visible in a couple of hours, and then crystal clear by the following morning. When I got home this evening I felt like I had an entirely different tank!
Before… (I did stir the water up a little adding some, but still, gross, I know!)
About an hour later…
18 hours later! (damn…)
The thing was pretty cool to setup, albeit just a bit intimidating – I actually had to cut hoses to run into the tank and everything! The filter itself is entirely self-contained and uses three different kinds of filtration media to do its thing – foam for mechanical filtration, carbon for chemical, and then these weird ceramic things for the biological part. I’m actually thinking that it might be the ceramic things that make all of the difference because in most hang over the edge-type filters (like I was using before), you’ve got the carbon and a small amount of foam or felt to filter stuff out, which seemed to get clogged up pretty quickly. There wasn’t really anything to actually break the waste down, and thus it just piled up and got all disgusting. On the other hand, the ceramic pieces are supposed to breed bacteria to do exactly that, so we’ll see.
Regardless, I think the proof is in the pictures – it’s already made an amazing impact to the clearity of the tank (i.e. it now has some!), and now I’m just curious to see what the inside of the actual canister looks like. Admittedly I’m a little concerned about opening it up and just finding a disgusting, pressurized poop bomb waiting for me to break the seal, but maybe I’ll get lucky this time! In addition to the actual filtration, this puppy has the power to cycle through 180 gallons per hour at full tilt, meaning that it should be able to filter the entire contents of the tank more than four times an hour, which I’m sure has got to be a far cry from what that little clogged bio-wheel was doing before! Maybe between the improved filtration and now actual circulation throughout the tank, my fish will actually have a chance…
I think the best quote, though, is one that I found in a comment from a reviewer on Amazon or something: “It’s like we just upgraded to an HD fish tank.”
I don’t really speak fish, but I’m pretty sure so far mine are just loving their new 1080p home! I’m only sorry that I didn’t cough up the dough and buy one of these things years ago… 
While we’re on the subject, there’s something else that needs to be brought to light – I’m beginning to think that I have a lazy fish on my hands.
Everyone remembers the stink that came about a month or so ago when I took on the task of establishing a second aquarium in my apartment and ended up having to fill it with distilled water from the store because apparently pretty fish can’t stand the “water” that comes out of my tap like my other fish do. Nonetheless, I bought jug after jug of water to fill this newly constructed tank, the inside of which I had gone to great lengths to make a pleasant environment for its future inhabitants. In one corner sits an artificial antique jug, much like one might find in a pirate ship at the bottom of the ocean – I purchased this because I figured that the Neons in this tank might appreciate something to hide in should I opt to walk around my apartment naked on any given day…
If anyone’s calling PETA right now – that was a joke.
However instead of providing a place for these smaller fishies to frolic and play, this artifact now instead plays home to my lazy plecostomus who’s never cleaned that tank a day in his life! He could spend at least a couple of hours during the afternoon making the tank presentable for when I come home, but no – my filter is left to do all of the work and he just lays there and eats. One of these days he’s going to get so fat that he’ll get stuck trying to get out of the jug, and then myself and all of the other fish will laugh…
Of course, until then we’ve still got a filthy tank on our hands / fins – I might consider getting snails or something, I don’t know. Remember that time when fish used to be dependable pets?
