Dietary Changes

Before Christmas I ran out of granules and when we went to buy some more, they did not have the same brand as before. So I bought Aquarian as a replacement and found it to be better than TetraPrima. The granules are rounder, work better in the automatic feeder and the fish love it.

I also bought TetraTabimin, which is a tablet for the bottom feeders. With each feed I drop one in while the flakes are been eaten, to ensure that the bottom feeders get a chance to eat before the rest of the fish find it. This has also become one of the fishes' favourite food.

Automatic Feeder

When I bought my tank, I got with it an automatic feeder. As I like to watch my fish when feeding and use the time to see if all are present and well, the automatic feeder got assigned to the cupboard. But when we decided to go on holiday, I realised this could be very useful tool to feed the fish. So a week before we went on holiday I set it up to feed the fish every 12 hours, so that they could get used to it.

The automatic feeder consists of two parts, one that controls the motor and the timings of when to feed the fish; and the other is a compartment where the food goes into. This compartment has an adjustable gap where the food falls out of when the motor rotates the compartment. Getting the right size of the gap took some time as too big and the fish get overfed and too small and the food does not come out. After a bit of trial and error, I found that the granules worked best for feeding, as the flakes kept getting stuck when a bit of moisture got into the compartment.

The first time we went on holiday, the feeder worked fine and the fish looked well fed on our return. But just before we went on our second holiday, the baby Mollies arrived and this meant that the feeder would only feed adult fish and not the babies as they were in the breeding trap. So for that holiday I had to get external help to come and feed both the adult and baby fish. I have since used it again with success and unless I need babies to be fed, I will use this when going on a holiday.

Box the Juwel automatic feeder came in

Automatic feeder installed on the lid of the tank

Abundance Of Fish

We are back from a lovely cold holiday. The fish have survived again using the automatic feeder, so it is a worthy investment for feeding your fish when you are not around. The tank is doing well, too well in fact. A few posts ago I mentioned that we had a 7 babies in the tank. Well that number has gone up a bit, to about 20. I say about as they are difficult to count because they keep moving around and hiding amongst the plants and bogwood. Still not sure which fish species it was that dropped them, hoping to know when the fish are a bit bigger.

Holiday

Over the last few weeks L and I have been away on holiday, which has led to a lack of blog posts. One of the dilemmas we had was how the baby Mollies were going to be fed as the automatic feeder would either not give them any food or empty all the food into the breeding trap. Luckily I was able to get a friend of mine to come in once a day and give them all their daily feed. It worked well and all the babies are much bigger now. We only lost a Danio, which was looking old before we went away. I was surprised to see how much algae had grown on the glass, so will be doing a bit of cleaning up this weekend.

Disaster

Disaster! After being away for a week, we came back to a healthy working tank, no deaths and the automatic feeder working well. Tonight I noticed the Kuhli Loaches swimming around the tank which was a bit unusual, when I suddenly realised that I could not hear the pump running in the tank. After a quick investigation, I discovered that the pump has packed up. So I am off to the pet shop tomorrow to see if I can get a replacement. Luckily it did not happen while we were away!

Baby Suddenly Eaten

The baby Molly has been eaten! Not sure why the fish decided that is was time to use it as a snack. We had setup the automatic feeder, so not sure if we had under fed them and they were still hungry or that it was lucky at avoiding their jaws up until that point.

The plan for next time is to get a floating container that is kept in the tank, that the babies can live in until they are big enough to survive.

Pruning

I have had to do some pruning of the Vallis, as it was starting to cover most of the top of the tank, causing the main source of light to be blocked out. Some of the leaves that were removed were longer than the length of the tank. I was amazed at how few leaves you had to remove to suddenly see a difference.

The other problem is that there are so many leaves in the way that when it comes to feeding, a lot of food gets trapped on top of the leaves, preventing the fish from getting to it. As I also want to setup the automatic feeder this week, I did not want the food getting stuck there.

Tank viewed from above