Percula Clownfish

Posted by Sarah on April 23, 2008

Here are our two Percula Clownfish! They live in our 55 gallon saltwater tank with our Yellow Tang (you saw her yesterday) and seem to be very happy.

Yellow Tang

Posted by Sarah on April 22, 2008

Here’s a picture of our yellow tang, Tang.

She came with our 55 gallon saltwater tank when we got it.

Tang loves her algae, and she loves our clownfish.

I think she’s trying to move out of her cave, and in with them, but the clownfish don’t like that very much!

Happy Earth Day! To celebrate I’ll be posting fish pictures all week.

After all,we need to keep the environment clean so that we can continue to enjoy fish in nature, as well as in our fish tanks.

Green Spotted Puffers

Posted by Sarah on April 18, 2008

While browsing at The Tropical Fish Shoppe last Friday, I came across a tank filled with adorable Green Spotted Puffers.

Jeff and I had originally considered getting green spotted puffers when we decided to get a puffer, so I was already familiar with their care requirements.

I’d just decided that I didn’t want any Shell dwellers, so I had a fish tank open, with no prospects.

We ended up getting two green spotted puffers, Spot, and Stripe.

I recently read that most dogs are now named “people” names, and the old fashioned names like Spot and Rover aren’t used any more, so I thought it would be funny to name one of the fish Spot.

Besides, they do say puffers are the dogs of the fish world.

Rover just didn’t seem like a good name for a fish, and Stripe has a little line of connected dots along his right side, so Stripe seemed like a good name.

I do keep calling him Spike (Spike is our male adult bushynose pleco), so we might have to change Stripe’s name.

Spot and Stripe are doing very well in their new home, although we are going to have to get some more plants to break up the line of sight so they don’t see each other as much.

Spot tends to chase stripe around, but we haven’t seen any evidence of biting yet.

Biting ususally causes black bruises where the puffer was bitten.

The day after we got the puffers home, Jeff decided he should hold some krill in the tank and wave it around to see if the puffers would eat it.

Spot wouldn’t come near it, but Stripe came out of nowhere to get the krill.

You should have seen how fast Jeff dropped it!

Now both of the Green Spotted Puffers will eat out of Jeff’s hands, although he is careful, since the puffer’s teeth could wound him.

Our Figure 8 puffer, 8-ball doesn’t eat out of Jeff’s hands yet, so Jeff is happy that the Green Spotted Puffers Do :-).

The picture above is a picture of Spot a couple of days after we got him. Isn’t he cute?

Do you have puffers?

What kind, how many, what are their names?

Leave a comment and tell us about them!

Is Spinach bad for fish?

Posted by Sarah on April 11, 2008

After Jeff posted a recipe for a homemade fish food on the Northern Lights Aquatics Fish Forums, one of the members asked him to do his research before he posted recipes because spinach was bad for fish.

Since I’ve been browsing fish forums I’ve heard that spinach was bad for fish several times, but I’ve never seen any studies saying why spinach was bad for fish.

I’ve only seen people saying don’t use spinach because someone else told me it was bad for fish, but I never really looked into whethre or not spinach was bad for fish until I read that post on our forum.

I looked and looked online, and in scientific journals, and I couldn’t find any concrete proof that said that spinach was bad for fish, or that it wasn’t bad.

While I was looking I did find out that Ocean Nutrition uses Spinach in several of it’s frozen food formulas.

We currently feed our marine fish Ocean Nutrition Formula One and Formula Two Flake and Pellet foods, and although they don’t have spinach in them, they were highly recommended when I was researching the best type of food to feed our marine fish.

I knew that they wouldn’t be so highly recommended if the company intentionally put items that were bad for fish in the fish food, so I decided to email Ocean Nutrition, and see what they knew about spinach being good or bad for fish food.

I was fortunate enough to get a response from Scot Kohler, Vice President of Sales, North America for Ocean Nutrition, who was unable to find any reference that spinach was bad, except for the fact that the oxalic acid in the spinach might bind with the calcium.

He also noted that many authorities within the fish keeping hobby, and many public aquariums feed their fish spinach.

Although I won’t be feeding my fish spinach any time soon because I don’t make my own fish food, and because Jeff doesn’t like spinach, so we don’t buy it, I would feel comfortable feeding spinach to my fish, and feeding fish foods that contain spinach to my fish.

As with anything that I put into the tank if I noticed that the fish were acting wierd after I fed them spinach I would stop feeding them spinach.

Scott was nice enough to allow me to quote him on the forums, and you can read his reply to me at Ocean Nutrition’s Response to spinach being bad for fish.

Do you feed your fish spinach?

Do you make your own fish food? If so I’d love to have the recipe!

Who knows, I might even try it.