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In keeping with a sensible way to start the 75 gallon running, I need more plants. I considered just driving down to Petsmart and getting some cheapie Ludwigia and Anacharis, etc, but ugh… I then considered going to That Pet Place and getting slightly more interesting plants, but eh… I finally decided just to order interesting plants. It turns out that most places are out of stock, heh. It’s either out of stock, they simply don’t sell the plants I want, or they charge ludicrous shipping, or they ship in uninsulated/unheated boxes, making the likelihood of receiving mushy black disgustingness pretty high, or the owner of the company is a jerk. I decided to just go to the source, Singapore.

So, the likelihood of receiving mush is still there, unfortunately, but I guess that’s just par for the course. I’m pretty paranoid about having problems with the shipping or customs or just the weather for that matter. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake in not getting overnight shipping, but I figured that one more day shouldn’t hurt, if they do ship as described it’ll arrive in this country to go through customs and reshipping to me all on the same day, then it’s just the shipping time to me, another day or two, right? I hope it works out, I did order a lot of plants.

I did, unintentionally, something horrible the other day. My semi-quarantine/reject fish tank crashed. I tell myself I could have avoided it if I looked for dead fish immediately upon noticing a little tiny bit of either fungus or bacterial fin erosion on the tetras. I’ve never actually had a single fish get sick in my care until now; though I have had a few just randomly die with no apparent cause. So, apparently one of the fish had died, I suppose of natural causes, spiked the ammonia extremely high, most all of the other fish became ill and died within a day or two. I did ‘ice’ two of them to put them out of misery, otherwise I lost a bloodfin tetra (I thought three were left, apparently only two… I’ll probably find a dried up one on the floor someday) and all five of the white skirts. I, coincidentally had moved Samantha the Gourami up to the 75 gallon, along with the three little Otocinclus a day or two earlier.

All that is left now in the reject aquarium is the Betta Max (hehe) and a solitary bloodfin tetra. The whole situation is a bit convenient, as I just didn’t know what to do with those reject fish. I had been considering putting them up on FreeCycle, sending them off to hopefully a good home. I do feel pretty bad about my negligence in correcting a water quality problem, if I’d immediately changed water when I saw the first sign of sickness, or perhaps looked harder for a dead fish, the outcome perhaps would have been different. I just didn’t realize or otherwise notice there were only four white skirts swimming around.

I’m doing my best to reduce the number of aquariums down to just the 75 gallon, which isn’t really possible. I still have two Bettas, I’d prefer to keep just Max and find the orange Clyde a new home. I plan on using the 25 gallon as a quarantine once I have moved the fish over to the 75, since my quarantine has a Betta in it that I’d rather not expose to possible sickness, obviously.

Leonard the Angelfish had been fighting with Oliver the Angelfish quite a bit, mostly due to the cramped nature of the 25 gallon, so I went ahead and moved him over to the 75, hopefully there won’t be too much of a territory problem in the future.

I also ordered three more pieces of driftwood, they arrived Friday. They’re smaller, but also the African Mopani wood. My goodness, that stuff is full of tannins! I boiled it for a while, but for now it’s just soaking. I do have a 100ml package of Purigen in the 2028, it seems to be collecting all the tannin from the bigger piece of driftwood already in there. That piece was too large to boil, so it just had about a week of hot water baths.

I’m still utterly stunned at the plant growth since I switched over to the EI methodology. I apparently was horribly underdosing… everything.