by Erik Olson
October 1996

Well, I haven’t gotten a chance to write about my various exploits in the hobby for quite some time... all this serious stuff to discuss the last few months. I figured it’s time to rectify that and grace yall with some pointless fish rambling. First, I’ll get through the official business I’m supposed to mention in the president’s column.

The Official Business I’m Supposed to Mention in the President’s Column

This month we are proud to announce Ilene Alvis as our speaker. Ilene is an active member of the Kitsap Aquarium Society where she is a frequent contributor to their newsletter. Her fish room contains over 65 tanks in which she breeds angels, anabantids, and a few dwarf cichlids, killies, and livebearers. She’s the only aquarist Dave knows who has been successful in breeding chocolate gouramis. Her knowledge and experience in breeding anabantids (bettas, Gouramis, etc.) will be shared in her talk.

Board meetings have resumed. We had an excellent start (see minutes in this issue), and I was really glad to see so many members eagerly volunteering for committee chairs. We’ll be alternating the board meeting locations between eating establishments and member homes; watch for the monthly announcements.

Something that came out at the last board meeting was that I failed to introduce Dave Sanford as a new board member. Oops! Dave has actually been lurking at almost every board meeting last year, so we’d practically thought of him as being on the board already... but it’s official now.

Another thing coming out of the board meeting is that we’ll be holding the Helpful Hints Contest again this year. The rules are simple: Write a little paragraph about something you’ve found to be helpful to you in the hobby; it may be something you’ve discovered yourself, read years ago in FAMA, whatever. If you want, you can include an illustration (if applicable). Mail, e-mail, or FAX it to us (inside front cover), or just give it to someone at the meeting. We haven’t voted on it yet, but I’m guessing the grand prize will be the heavily-touted Magnum 350 Filter system that we’ve awarded in the past. Here is a classic example from a member, submitted couple years back (which I now use regularly), to get the juices flowing:

When on vacation, a common problem with leaving your tanks in care of a friend is that they can overfeed your fish. An easy solution to this is to pre-measure portions of food for each tank, each day. Put the portions in either small envelopes, or if you’re real fancy, those 7-day pill portion holders you can buy in a pharmacy.

See? Easy! We’ll be including all the entries in the newsletter until the contest closes (at time of writing, the May newsletter). The winner will be announced in June. Get those entries in!

Yet Another Big Plant Tank

Back in May, my fiancee Kathy and I put together a 75 gallon planted tank to replace the aging 45 in my living room... a real exciting prospect, because I got to look into all sorts of new and exotic hardware to buy. (Judging from Kevin Ord’s article, which can be found in this issue, he was bitten by a similar bug!) I picked up some high-efficiency fluorescent bulbs at a local commercial lighting vendor, built a new cabinet and hood (spending more cash on the expensive tools than on the actual lumber and other materials), tossed together an overdesigned acrylic sump (I got tired of having my old 5-gallon capacity sump evaporate down to the bottom every week, so I built this one to hold 12 gallons), and updated my CO2 system a little. Lots of stuff (plants, heating cable, fish, some bogwood, etc.) were inherited directly from the old tank. Gravel and substrate additives (pottery clay, to be precise) were brand new, though.

I have said it before, and now after this experience, I’ll be preachin it again: It is the front-to-back depth that makes the difference between a tank and a fun tank! The 75-gallon tank has almost 20 inches of clearance, which is great for layering lots of tall plants in the back and sides. We bought a big piece of bogwood for the center, of the tank, giving it a very open feel amongst the dense plants. The bogwood also provides little caves and nooks for our cichlids to spawn.

It hasn’t been all fun and games... There are a few things we’ve learned from having larger tanks that I thought I’d pass on: first, there’s always the danger of the tank damaging your floor. The experts always say you need to start worrying about this in tanks larger than 55 gallons; We dealt with it by keeping the tank in the corner of the apartment, near a corner support. Some more cautious folks will actually reinforce their floor underneath the tank.

The other drawback is just the size of the tank makes it awkward to maintain. I have a lot more buckets of water to carry (you might choose to get a Python^TM water changing system instead, but I can’t stand the thought of wasting all that water), and a lot more chances of flooding my floor with the new bigger plumbing. Every time I clean the tank, I wet the front of my shirt bending over to reach in. It’s much harder to get to the skimmer in the back, and thus a challenge to net out fish that have gotten trapped in it. A couple weeks ago, I had to pull out a poor checkerboard cichlid, and accidentally got her by the tail, which subsequently rotted away (it’s grown back now; some fish are very resilient). When planning a large tank, having access to the back is important.

The Rack, Part II: Fun With Glass

Meanwhile, off in the other corner of the apartment, we’re experiencing that scary phenomenon I alluded to about a year ago: tank tribble phenomenon. Oh, it was cute when I got four little 10-gallon species tanks last year, and put them all in a row on my new wooden rack. What a wonderful way to keep overflow fish and plants from the big planted tank. Well, now it’s grown to ten tanks of various sizes, all full to capacity with breeding cichlids, and I’m just plain scared. We have two brine shrimp hatcheries offset from one another 2 days so that there’s always fresh nauplii for the baby fish, and I find myself pre-mixing water in the kitchen just to get the pH buffering right. Aw heck, it’s worth it when you see a pair of fish herding their young around...

Recently, I built two tanks for the bottom row myself. I’ve never worked with glass before, just acrylic. Glass isn’t so bad, once I found out:

• a place to buy it... I had been struggling with a local glass place which was generally unresponsive to making lots of pieces for aquariums, until Kathy found that Home Depot has a glass department, where you can buy all the pieces pretty cheap, and they cut it on the spot for you. Other home improvement stores are equally good.
• trim the edges... glass cuts (duh). When they do the cuts for you, the edges are particularly sharp. Sandpaper or emory cloth does a great job of smoothing those edges. Actually, what it does is to make small chips along the edge, reducing the sharpness. Take care in handling the edges you have not sanded!
• get a caulking gun for your silicone sealer... don’t even think of using those dinky little tubes that look like toothpaste. You’ll run out too quickly, and it’s much more easy to control the bead from a caulking gun. Remember to get silicone that says it is safe for aquarium use, because many varieties have fungicides which will kill your fish.
• an accurate plan for the pieces. Think about how all the pieces will fit together, and take into account the thickness of the glass when calculating side wall sizes. The one disadvantage of building your own tank is that you don’t get those nifty simulated wood-grain plastic edging things on pre-built glass aquaria, so you need to construct the tank differently, closer to how an acrylic tank is made. I still haven’t come up with a good design for a top yet.

So far, I’ve built two glass tanks. One is a 10-gallon extra-short tank measuring 16x20x8 inches, and the other is a 13-gallon somewhat short (16x20x10). We’ll be using these tanks for rearing Apistogramma fry, who don’t live in very deep water to begin with. The filtration on these tanks can be problematic, because most air-driven systems rely on tall uplift tubes. So we’re using powerhead-driven sponge filters instead. I think I’ll save that topic for another month.