Happy New 2012!

Well, it's almost there...

Another year is passing by, and this is a perfect moment to summarize things. Finacially, this 2011. was harder then recent years. On the other hand, some good things happend, I guess things are still in some balance. You've probably noticed I was absent from blog this entire year, my aquarium was pushed into second plan due obligations at university, new job and finally to admit, my laziness. Let me summarize the most important events:

Late 2010: Disaster
My aquarium suffered mysterious desease last year and in matter of days all my fish perished. The cause? As you know, I use(d) Spirulina rich food on ocasion those days, all in good faith, and trouble with it are tiny, microscopic leftovers which form a thick Spirogyra clouds in you aquarium in matter of weeks. If you leave them untreated, with good conditions like lighting and food you will come to this stage in matter of days. One day I finally found time and determination to clean that. As it turned out, that was a shock for my fish, since those algae, no matter how harmless and ugly at the same time, acctually had a huge (positive) impact on water chemistry! My fish started vanishing couple of days later, one by one, luckily I had only couple of them since I don't overcroud my tank. I tried to cure early survivors with Furanol, carefully read about correct amount of water I should put in smaller quarantene tank, but 1 tablet for 9 liters was too much. The medication acctualy killed all my Tiger Barbs! What a sad day it was... and a shocking experience when I got home later afternoon to meet disaster. After that time I got 10 Amano Shrimps and up to this day almost all of them are still fine. They are real positive force in any aquarium, they really keep things under control, of course, with my little help.

2011 First Half
The very end of 2010 and early 2011 will be remembered as an episode of my Amano Shrimp breeding trials. As it happend, I had 7-8 males and 2 female shrimp (1 male was lost in the start by a complete mistery), and one female was older and very active. One morning I got up and saw a wierd behaviour of my shrimps. They were jumping and moving like flashes in aquarium (there were no fish inhabitants since disaster, so they were the kings and queens of 130 Liter empire alone). By the time I took my camera, they've stopped. It lasted only a minute or two. Later on, I discovered that was a love game for them, when female releases pheromones and males get crazy :)

So, every 2-3 months my older female was pregnant and I tried to raise little shrimps, read scarce resources on the web, even developed a LED Ring Flash and old lens mod for my camera in order to capture microscopic creatures, but it turned out they require special green food to survive first month. Unfortunately, green phytoplankton culture it is not available here in Serbia, and to import it from United States would cost as high as 100 EUR. Too much for that adventure I'm afraid, so I gave my best with alternative food. I tried egg yolk, yeast, Spirulina food... but after 15 days at most, my population of small Amano Shrimps would perished. After 4th trial I simply gave up :(

2011 Second Half
One day I received a call from my younger cousin asking me for an aquarium advice. It was out of the blue, since I thought he would never be infected by aquarium hobby. Turned out everything began with his father getting small aquarium (around 15 liters) with pump and couple of fishes for just 2 EUR! And so, for couple of months fish survived, but eventually population was down to one. Then his son got an idea to build larger 80 liter aruarium and from there things rolled pretty fast. He had nicer tank in just 8 month in comparison to my almost 3 years old! On the other hand, he likes to overcroud his tanks, in my opinion, having way too much fish for such a small tank. But, good thing is, he cleans it and changes water frequently, so the fish can survive. Anyhow, can you beleive he had 7 Angel fishes at the time with doesen of other, smaller ones!? So, I said to him, listen, in couple of months you will get into trouble, those fish will grow and they will be unhappy. So, he called me after a month and said he wants to give me 3 Scalars and if I was fine with it. After a thought, I said yes, after all, Angel fish was THE REASON to get my aquarium in the first place, but since then I was pushed by friends that 35-37 cm water column is below the recommended limit. No, the oportunity arised, and I had no choice but to help :) At the moment he owns two tanks, one larger 100 Liter is for the Angels.

Back to my place. After a month, one of mine Angel fish got sick and didn't survived, but the others 2 are fine so far. Last month, one got wierd behaviour, pushed into the corner refusing food with pale white colors (it's a tiger Angel kind), so again I got pannicked from that deja vu, immediatelly tranfered her into quarantine, went to store and bought green/blue medication with "icht" in the name as a general cure. Apparently, the fish was simply stressed for some reason (the other Angel was pushing sometimes towards first), but everything was back into normal the very next day.

So, that's the situation in the moment, still no plants in my tank, the tank was "plant-free" for a full year now. Plants require proper conditions and are much harder to keep than fish and shrimps. I had a misfortune with my aquarium lighting which I forgot to mention, so I was developing an idea for a solid-state (so popular word these days...) DIY LED Aquarium lighting. Trouble with white LED's is that the cold white ones look a bit greenish to my eyes in comparison to ordinary white CFL tubes, but that could be simply because I tested only 60-70 5 mm LEDs with 12,000 Candela.

But, that's a story for another time, I wish you all a good 2012 and happy holidays!