Saturday, June 20, 2009

I so enjoy my aquarium. There's always something to watch. The veritable feeding frenzy when I drop in an algae wafer always amuses me.



All those panda cories are ones that I raised from eggs spawned in my tank. The littlest one is the baby I found in my filter in January. As you can see, he is thriving.

The other catfish are Otocinclus vittatus (I think, or possibly O. mariae. Or possibly both!). They're very peaceful and unobtrusive, and VERY good at hiding. I had one originally, then got four more in January to keep him company. A few weeks later, I thought I had lost two of those, since I only ever saw three at a time. A month ago I dropped in an algae wafer and was shocked to see all five otos in view at once! They get in among the dense plants and under the driftwood and just disappear.

They must have recently developed a taste for the algae wafers, though. In the past couple months I've noticed them eating flake food and wafers in addition to cleaning algae off the glass, plants, and driftwood. I purposely don't clean the glass at all on two sides of the tank, to let the algae grow for them, and they keep it pretty clean. I was glad to see that they have adapted to other foods besides the soft algae. I drop in a slice of zucchini or some peas every so often, and they go to town on those as well (as do the rest of their tankmates.) Anyway, otos have a reputation of being sensitive fish, but mine seem to be thriving. They always have nice round bellies and are quite active.

They get so excited about the algae wafers that they try to suck onto everything, including the other fish... Normally they are very calm, but the wafers drive them into a hyperactive fit!

2 comments:

Caroline M said...

We used to have a tropical tank in the living room but we reached the stage where we just didn't see it any more. It was handy as a tiny baby sedative, he used to sit in his bouncy chair next to it watching the fish and then he'd be asleep.

Anonymous said...

My dad had fish tanks in the house during most of my growing up years (the fish even traveled from Virginia to Rhode Island to Florida to Virginia with us - over the course of about 6 years) - always the more peaceful community fish. I hadn't had fish tanks for several years, but was thinking about it when dh "rescued" some fish...3 medium and 1 large jewel cichlids (or Jack Dempseys, I'm not sure which), 1 pleco, and a large number of about 1.5 to 2 inch long babies. So I now have two fish tanks, one rather large and over-crowded (pleco, the bigger jewels, and those babies who survived - maybe 12 or so of those?). Just not at all what I was picturing, a 20 gal. with plants and community fish...Thanks very much for sharing your fish, I really enjoyed seeing them!