Posted by Sarah on March 3, 2009
I’ve mentioned before that we’re currently redoing the floor upstairs, so we’ve had to juggle around our fish tanks a little.
This has resulted in a power strip from one of the tanks being placed in a high traffic area of the house.
I’ve woken up twice to find one or two of the Pangio anguillaris swimming around at the top of the fish tank.
Usually they are all hiding in the bottom of the tank, and we don’t see them very often, so I thought that was pretty strange.
After a few minutes I realized that the filter was off, and that’s why the fish were acting so wierd.
I have to admit that this has happened twice and each time it took me a few minutes to realize why the fish were swimming around.
When fish are acting unusual there’s a chance that something is wrong.
Maybe the water conditions are getting bad because there are too many fish in the tank, or because you’ve been neglecting the water changes.
Maybe a new fish has stressed out the other fish, or fish that have been in the tank are becoming more aggressive because they’re getting older, or getting ready to spawn.
Maybe your fish are pacing up and down the sides of the tank because they are bored, and adding some new decorations or rearranging the tank can help eliminate some of the boredom.
Maybe the filter got turned off, and all you need to do is turn it on.
Maybe the fish are starting to get sick, and by noticing this early you can help get the fish back on track asap.
If your fish are acting unusual, take the time to try to figure out if there’s a problem, and how to fix it if there is.
Have you ever noticed your fish trying to tell you that something was wrong?
What were they doing, and what was wrong?
How did you fix it?
Posted by Sarah on December 31, 2008
If Jeff and I ever get better (we both have colds) we are going to tile the upstairs – since we have a 20 gallon long (20L) aquarium and a 20 tall (20T) that share a stand, and a 55 gallon aquarium that need to be moved this is going to be one interesting project.
In order to make things a little bit easier we decided to move all of the fish from the 55 into the 75 downstairs, which only held a pair of Blue Gularis killifish.
The killies are now happy in their new 29 in the fish room, and the other fish are all happy in the 75.
We were planning to move the German Blue Ram Fry and the Discus fry into the 75 and use that as a grow out tank, but I think we will put them in the 55 instead.
I don’t want to move all of those fish again, and it will be nice to be able to keep an eye on them a little bit more, since we spend most of our time upstairs.
While Jeff was in the process of moving the plants and caves out of the 55 so we could catch the fish more easily he noticed something streak across the tank.
Yup – we’d forgotten that the Pangio anguillaris were still in there.
Oops.
They only occasionally pop out while we’re watching, and we’d only seen two of them at a time when we had see them, so we had no idea how many were left.
We caught two relatively easily after we’d drained all but 6 inches out of the tank and caught all of the other fish, and then Jeff figured out that if he ran his hands along the sides of the tank he could find the loaches.
After he’d exhausted that method he started scooping up some of the substrate into the net, and when he caught a Pangio angullaris in with the substrate, it swam to the top of the net, where it could be easily caught with another net.
We have a lot of nets.
With a lot of work Jeff caught 4 of them, and then he started wondering if we’d only gotten 4 instead of 6.
We fired up the old computer, looked up the Aquabid auction, and sure enough – we’d gotten 6 of them.
Jeff managed to catch one more loach that night, then he waited until the next morning to see if we could find the other one.
Sure enough it was swimming around in the water when we got up, and Jeff caught it easily.
I still can’t believe that we forgot all about them – and it’s a good thing we noticed them swimming in the tank before we drained it completely.
Have you ever forgotten your fish, or found some sign of life in a neglected tank?
Leave a comment and let me know.
Posted by Sarah on November 17, 2008
This is a picture of one of the other fish we got from Lotsoffish on Aquabid.
These guys are so much fun, although they do hide a lot.
The main selling point was that they were the most eel like loaches the seller had ever seen.
We normally see the Pangio anguillaris swimming around the tank as fast as they can trying to find somewhere to hide, although Jeff did see one of them swim up to a Queen botia and take away a shrimp pellet.
I was pretty surprised at that – the botias are fiesty little things.
Every now and then we’ll see of the Pangio anguillaris out, or one poking it’s head out behind something.
They’re so cute that it’s worth it, even though they aren’t out too often.
