Recent content by Max Action

My old house (built 1910) had uneven floors, which got worse with the weight of a 75 gallon tank. I corrected the problem with a jack/support strut in the basement, beneath the corner of the tank nearest the center of the room. It works like a charm, and is easy to adjust. Of course, it helps...

Well, mine are total lurkers, and I gather this is pretty common. So I don't see them a lot, but I kind of like that - I don't like all of my fish being immediately obvious, all of the time.

It's a fired clay sculpture I made in high school - was originally intended to be a light, but the notch in the back for a power cord worked just as well for running an airstone line in.

Yep, that's me, and yes, I'm an explorer, too. Calgary ... hmm ... do you know Mr Sable? Or more recently, the UEA crew? I run the Action Squad site. This is the first time I'm run into another explorer on a fish messageboard ... pretty cool!

Hmmm ... As far as "creepy" goes, I'd go with the dolls' arm poking out of a sink filled with rusted metal electrical components, found in an abandoned mental institution: But since the previous entries are more about "gross" creepy than mood creepy, here goes .... A seething wall of...

For now only a couple crappy pics, but when friends with digital cameras come by, I'll try to take more. Pardon the horrid glare. 75 gallon tank: 7 Tiger Barbs 3 Upside-Down Catfish 3 Fundulopanchax Gardneri Killifish 3 Black Kuhli Loaches 3 Chela Laubuca (? - or Chela cachius - ? - mystery...

Came home from work today and most of the barbs seem to be looking a BIT better. A couple look worse, though - red ulcerous looking sores all around the base of the tail fin, badly frayed white edged-fins, and a few red, bleeding--looking sores on the body. Although they are all still hanging in...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Crap. Everything was going GREAT. But one of my 9 tiger barbs had just a touch of fin rot that was not going away on its own. So I bought some Melafix and Pimafix (for fungus), and added them to the tank at recommended doses. Why not - it can only help, right? Harmless stuff, stress reducer...

I had 2 female gold gouramis at first. One was larger than the other. She harrassed, nipped, and stressed the smaller one to death within a couple of weeks - even with a 75 gallon tank to spread out in. Now, she does sometimes chases the German Blue Rams and the male Killifish around a bit, but...

Barbs sleep nose-down, but if they're swimming in place like that and look stressed - as though they are fighting to prevent floating upward, it could be high Nitrites or some other problem with the water. Mine did that when the tank was cycling, but not anymore.

My yellow apple snail regularly slides up to a high point in the tank and then "jumps" - gliding down to the bottom, foot down, for a perfect landing. When he's not busy attacking my other snails, that is.

Someone posted a link to this in a similat discussion on another forum: http://biodiversity.uno.edu/~worms/docs/glasby99all.pdf

Mine accepts flakes readily, but I feed him lots of freeze-dried bloodworms and some live bugs as well. I have no idea how it would get along with a betta though - mine is not aggressive toward the tiger barbs or blind cave fish that often feed alongside it at the surface. Very very cool fish!

I sometimes feed mine the 15 year old Tetra Flake my parents gave me, and it seems to work fine. It was all I fed my fish for awhile and they were doing great, but then I got paranoid and bought new stuff anyway.