Year: 2024

Planting Salvinia minima

Posted on by Andy Pierce

I have been considering floating plants for a while, but they always looked kind of big and dangly and nasty to me which has put me off.  Then the Aquatic Plant Society had a get together at Aquarium Gardens and I saw this pretty new (to me) much smaller floating plant from Tropica:  Salvinia minima. I picked up a pot to try it out in the Shrimphaus.

It’s a floating plant, so “planting” Salvinia minima is dead-easy.  Starting with an in vitro pot, you rinse off the media it came with and then I floated it in a bowl of clean water and forked it over into the Shrimphaus.

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Bigger disposable CO2 tanks

Posted on by Andy Pierce

I have been using 600 g disposable CO2 cylinders to provide CO2 gas to the Fireplace Aquarium and that has been pretty good.  One cylinder lasts two or three months and they are a reasonably unobtrusive size.  Recently though I have been going big.  Welder’s Warehouse has a two extra-large cylinders combo deal.  Each cylinder holds 1300 g of CO2.  Surprisingly, the larger cylinders are not much taller than the 600 g cylinders I have been using so they don’t take up massively more space.  The other nice feature is they come with a flat bottomed plastic collar base and stand stably upright on their own.  The smaller cylinders just have the round bottom and so need to lean up against something which is always a bit of a worry.

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Big rescape

Posted on by Andy Pierce

I like the look of the Cryptocoryne nevelli and the Schismatoglottis prietoi as well, but it seemed like they were on the wrong sides of the tank.  The C. nevelli got larger than I thought it would so blocked the view of the Alternanthera reineckii ‘Mini’ and the recently re-attempted Alternanthera reineckii ‘Rosanervig’.  (Must… get… Alternanthera… to work!)  Meanwhile the shorter S. Prietoi left a lot of empty vertical space on the right side.

A good amount of the original biOrb ceramic filter media was pulled out by the roots of the plants being extracted.  I replaced the lost volume with aquasoil.  Pulling up major amounts of plant mass like this always releases lots of fine debris and it took several large water changes and repeated cycles with the portable filter to get these particulates cleared up.

Shoaling ember tetras

Posted on by Andy Pierce

Ember tetras are a great little fish with lots of colour and activity.  They are a ‘shoaling’ fish which means they like to stay together in a loose group – this is different from ‘schooling’ fish which exhibit a tight formation with highly synchronised movements.  Filed under “there’s always one”, we have this one ember, named ‘Jerry’, who does not shoal with the other embers and instead hangs out by him(her?)self on the opposite side of the tank.  The shoaling embers are generally in the upper left of the Fireplace Aquarium, whilst Jerry is inevitably on the middle/upper right side.  Why Jerry doesn’t go along with the group is a mystery but it’s very consistent behaviour and always from the same fish, and if I’m honest, it’s not without its charm.

The embers replaced chili rasboras in the Fireplace Aquarium.  The embers are big enough not to get eaten by the rummys or the barbs – this was less true for the slightly smaller chilis.