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Shrimp Eggs
Mar. 16th, 2007 07:46 pmMy downstairs goldfish tank suddenly got cloudy a week ago. I'm still not entirely sure what caused it, but I've slowly been fixing the problem. First, I cleaned out the bio-fliter and changed the carbon. Then, after seeing all the leaves and gunk gumming up the filter, I decided that maybe a couple of the plants I bought which had been dropping leaves like nobody's business was the problem, I removed those as well. When that didn't work, I bought a new filter (on sale!) and plugged that in. I also bought some "intsy clear" or some such product that's supposed to help make tiny particulates stick together into big enough clumps for the bio-filter to catch, and put those in.
After waiting the requisit 24-hours only to discover the water was still cloudy, I turned to my trusty friend the internet. Shawn said that most of the sites she found said that cloudy water meant a dirty tank. I started cleaning. I used my vacuum and changed the water (almost fifty percent of it) several times over the next several days. I'm happy to report that after this morning's cleaning, it's looking much, much better. There was a lot of shit (sometimes literally) that I somehow missed in my weekly cleaning. I couldn't believe that stuff kept coming and coming up from the substrate.
Also, I should note somewhat sheepishly, that while at my various trips back and forth to my local pet store for cleaning/filtering products, I bought another ghost/glass shrimp. We named this one "possum" because he was so quiet in the bag that at first I thought he was dead. I even nearly took him back to exchange him, but the sales clerk saw him move.
I can pretty confidently use that pronoun for Possum because, well, Jacques is pregnant. After this morning's cleaning they both pranced out into the open, Jacques carefully holding her dark green eggs under her tail with her swimmeretes, as if to say "ta-dah, look what we did!"
Their chances of the baby shrimp surviving in a tank full of gigantic goldfish is slim. (Another reason our tank is so fouled, I think, is because Jo and Fergus are thriving to the point of becoming... well, carp.) Even so, I read up on the care and feeding of shrimp fry, and, though I'm not quite willing to put Jacque in her own tank (since we don't have one and the time it would take the eggs to hatch isn't nearly long enough to condition a new fry tank), I am going to try to give them a fighting chance.
If nothing else, it should be cool to watch how all this unfolds.
After waiting the requisit 24-hours only to discover the water was still cloudy, I turned to my trusty friend the internet. Shawn said that most of the sites she found said that cloudy water meant a dirty tank. I started cleaning. I used my vacuum and changed the water (almost fifty percent of it) several times over the next several days. I'm happy to report that after this morning's cleaning, it's looking much, much better. There was a lot of shit (sometimes literally) that I somehow missed in my weekly cleaning. I couldn't believe that stuff kept coming and coming up from the substrate.
Also, I should note somewhat sheepishly, that while at my various trips back and forth to my local pet store for cleaning/filtering products, I bought another ghost/glass shrimp. We named this one "possum" because he was so quiet in the bag that at first I thought he was dead. I even nearly took him back to exchange him, but the sales clerk saw him move.
I can pretty confidently use that pronoun for Possum because, well, Jacques is pregnant. After this morning's cleaning they both pranced out into the open, Jacques carefully holding her dark green eggs under her tail with her swimmeretes, as if to say "ta-dah, look what we did!"
Their chances of the baby shrimp surviving in a tank full of gigantic goldfish is slim. (Another reason our tank is so fouled, I think, is because Jo and Fergus are thriving to the point of becoming... well, carp.) Even so, I read up on the care and feeding of shrimp fry, and, though I'm not quite willing to put Jacque in her own tank (since we don't have one and the time it would take the eggs to hatch isn't nearly long enough to condition a new fry tank), I am going to try to give them a fighting chance.
If nothing else, it should be cool to watch how all this unfolds.