Download adobe photoshop cs5 and draw your own designs.
Cheap 3d studio max 2012 design help you create 3d graphics.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2008.
I got really lucky a few weeks ago. While traveling on business I received an email from a gent that had seen some of my threads over at www.plantedtank.net. Seems he works for Tropica, and wanted to send me some plants to try. Woohoo! Tropica does not export to the USA, so I was thrilled! Just in case you are not aware, Tropica - a Danish company - is to my knowledge, the world’s premier aquatic plant supplier. Visit them at www.tropica.com and you’ll see.
In fact, if you check my “Links” tab, you’ll see that I count their web site as one of my most valuable references. You should to.
Anyway, I told this gent that the average plant may have a tough time in the warm water of my discus tank. And to my delight he sent three plants, two of which look like the may do very well. He sent Staurogyne sp., a foreground suitable plant from warm Amazonian waters. It looks great already.
He also sent Myriophyllum mezianum. It’s an interesting looking stem plant from Madagascar. But I’ve had bad luck with other Myriophyllum in my warm, very soft water. So I’m trying not to get my hopes up on this one. Both of the plants are featured on the Tropica web site, and I’ve never seen either in the states.
The final plant in the shipment was Lindernia roundifolia ‘variegated’. I can’t find much on this plant. Looks a lot like ‘baby’s tears’, or Hemianthus callitrichoides, commonly called ‘HC’ or ‘cuba’. I only got a few cut stems of that. These are not doing as well. Getting a lot of stem melt. But that could be due to the low Potassium in my tank.
Before I planted any of these plants, I took half of them and rooted them in a tank of very wet ADA aquasoil, in a small covered aquarium, and top a grow light over them. They all appear to be in their emersed form, and are already putting out new buds in this warm, humid simulation on natural emersed conditions.
The rest I put into shallow plastic dishes of ADA aquasoil, then covered the aqauasoil with sand to keep the aquasoil from getting all over the sand in the tank, and put them in the tank under direct light. Obviously this is not a permanent arrangement, but one that will let me try our the plants. The emersed set of plants are both my insurance of something going wrong in the thank, and hopefully a nursery for more plants. All of these should be slow growers, so this test will likely take a bit of time.
Unfortunately my PC died on me this week, so my ability to post pictures is really limited. I’m composing this entire post on my iPhone, which is a real PITA. But I’m grateful that I have an alternative until I get a new PC up and running. I’m going to try and post pics with the little iPhone camera. They’ll look like crap, to be sure. But it’s the best I can do at the moment.
I’m thrilled and grateful for the chance to try out these plants. Wish me luck! 
Well the tank is springing back nicely. And my persistent algae problems are massively diminished. So while some of the leaves of plants have algae on them that they acquired several weeks ago, no new leaves have algae. And that is a nice change.
The Hygrophilia corymbosa is slowly filling in and getting bushier. I initially let it grow too tall before I trimmed it. Now I’m topping it off every week so that it will fill in better. The Hygrophila difformis snapping back. And my Cryptocoryne wendtii and Echinodorus ‘Rubin’ are both totally algae free! Only the Echinodorus bleheri - the sword plant - has any algae. But that plant is off the the side and not getting enough light, and it appears to be underfertilized too. I’ll have to look into that…
I’ve put in an Eheim autofeeder to make sure the new red 3R2’s are getting enough food, often enough. The upshot is that ALL the fish are getting more food. I can see them all fattening up, and getting larger. Good for them I suppose.
The overall tank is still unbalanced visually, and improving the aquascape will be the focus of my efforts this year, now that I’ve got this algae licked. Well, I say “licked”… the GDA on the glass is still there. But it is quite manageable - requiring one 15 minute session of glass cleaning every week. And that persistent algae on the sand has stayed away for a few weeks, thank goodness. So it’s all controllable.
The new red 3R2s are still hiding. Three of the five barely ever come out. If anyone is in the room at all, the skittish three hide. So I have no idea of they are coming out to eat. I hope so. I’m just hoping that they will get over this with time.
I made a number of important changes to the tank to get ahead of this aglae. I know you can only change one variable at a time if you want any idea of what does/does not work. But I was desparate to control my algae problem and changed multiple variables. Problem is, I just don’t know which one was responsible for the change, or what combination:
- Started using a “siesta”, or 90 minutes in the middle of the day with no lights.
- Reduced the photoperiod to seven (7) hours total time of lights on.
- Eliminated macro dosing, except potassium.
- Reduced potassium dosing way back to one tenth of its normal volume.
- Reduced micro dosing back to one tenth of its normal volume.
- Reduced CO2 back to around 15 ppm.
A lot of people will tell me some of those things are real “no-no”s. But it’s working, and it’s hard to argue with success. Over time I’ll pick up the CO2 dosing. And I’m sure I’ll be forece to tweak the macro/micro dosing. But for now, I’m happy to have the tank healthy.
Wow. Been a while since I last posted. Sorry.
Things in the tank have been going fairly well, all but the recent CO2 goof up I posted about. And the fact that I massively over-trimmed the plant AND simultaneously did a filter media change. So the tank has been recovering from that. But the operative word is recovering. But the big news is - NEW FISH! I love new fish!
In the first pic you can see two little 3″ (well almost 3″) reddish discus in the background. They are “3R2″s from Wayne Ng, a breeder/importer. My wife was jonesing for some red fish, and these were the best I could do. I got a total of five, and they are expensive little buggers.
I’ve actually had them for seven weeks. The first six were spent in quarantine. They were maybe 1/2″ smaller when I got them. They were healthy as can be. So after 6+ weeks I dumped them in the tank. But before I did that, I took my runt Cobalt out and put him in the quarantine - to see if it had any pathogens they couldn’t deal with, and visa versa. You can see the “runt” in the pic below behind one of the 3R2’s.
But to my dismay, I could not leave the runt in their tank. He is normally the most shy, skittish, beat-up upon fish in the tank. I guess that goes with being the runt. But once he got in with these little guys he decided he was BMOC, Hot Sh*t, Top Dog, and all that! He would NOT let my 3R2’s eat! As far as he was concerned, the food was HIS. Quantity did not matter.
So, knowing I was risking my whole tank - I dumped him back into it, so that the 3R2’s could get some food. About five days later i just tossed the 3R2’s in the main tank… since the cross-contamination test was effectively blown. I figured both populations looked healthy, so dump ‘em in and hope for the best.
As I stated up front, I got five new fish. But these pics only show two. Good reason… these fish are wicked skittish. Two of them will only come out when no one is around. One walks the line, but certainly will not come out for pictures. The two in the pics are pretty “up front”. But as I walked around with the camera they got nervous and retreated. That’s why they are in the background in the first pic. And from the difference you can see between the two pics, they darken up a lot when hiding near the plants.
Apparently 3R2’s are pretty skittish as a breeding line. But that said, my Cobalts hid in the plants for darn near a month when I first got them. So I think this is one of those “time will tell” sort of things.
My wife (and I - truth be told) wanted RED fish. Not orange. But orange is the color discus tend towards. If you see red discus - as far as I can tell - it’s either because they have been fed hormones, unnatural amounts of food supplements, or the tank light has been altered. Failing that, PhotoShop can always redden up your digital fish pics if needed.
I got these fish because I trusted the gentleman i bought them from - Al Sapetta - the owner of www.simplydiscus.com. Al’s a stand-up guy, and he knew my wife wanted red - and he knew of the natural orange tendencies of discus - and he recommended these fish. That is good enough for me.
I’m feeding them frozen blood worms, Tetra Color Bits (now renamed something like Color Granules) and a little bit of NaturalRose red color enhancer. So yes, I’m cheating. But not so much that it jeopardizes the health of the fish. Problem is, my other fish are eating it too! So if my blue Cobalts start looking purple, you’ll know why! LOL
More about the tank itself soon. But all is fairly well. But not perfect. Otherwise… why post?
PS - I forgot to mention! That darned runt is a runt BECAUSE he won’t eat Tetra Color Bits. All the other fish do - they got big, and he didn’t. Well, while bullying my 3R2’s he started eating the Color Bits, aparently just to spite them. WELL… since putting him back in the main tank he has participated heartily in the multiple Color Bit feedings and has grown VISIBLY in just one week. Sounds unbelievable, I know. But true.
This is a test of new software to post from an iPhone. The first version of this stuff did not work for me. Hope this will. Would be MUCHO convenient.
Will post an irrelevent pic taken on my iPhone in the hopes that picture posting will work too.
Translate Site
