saltwaterbeginners
Aquarium Advice Freak
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2013
- Messages
- 232
Can you guys post your blue rams? Going to get them but I want to see how pretty it is! ?
sorry some are a bit fuzzy. these are 2 different male rams. great fish. about 3 1/2 inches long.
here' are a few articles on the blue ram
German Blue Ram Cichlid
German Blue Ram
please take the time to read up on the ram before you get one. one thing i can't stress enough is clean water. frequent water changes are key to a healthy aquarium and fish. i do a 15 gal. water change every 3rd day (i have a 50 gal. aquarium) clean fresh water will keep your fish in top shape and keep disease out of the aquarium. i have some of the same fish for over 3 years. i credit that to water parameters and gravel cleaning on a regular basis. good luck.
Thanks!
My small experience is they cant live through poor water. I got a pair a ~ 18 months ago, and long story short, had a big bunch of plants melt on me at the same time and had a horrible water issue didn't notice until it was too late.
Then it took sooooo long before I was even willing to try them. I saw this handsome little guy (the one in the pics) and thought I would try. It is a mature tank and has a light bioload.
My pwc are about every 10 days -2 weeks. The hob filter has double media with a sponge prefilter and a chunk of media filter pad to soften the hob's outflow as well and it is over sized for the tank, 16G bowfront. I do 25-33% pwc. He has been getting more bold and friendly. Also had a big Koi Angel in there temporarily and that scared him, now there are 4 Diamond Tetras and a Betta, and the little Ram comes up to the top of the tank for food.
Looking for some local bred additions myself to get him some Ram friends... If not, then back to the lfs. When I got him he was in with about 4-5 other Rams and he was the only one with a lively brightness to him and very active. Gorgeous fish which I really love.
So was it hard to keep them?
No, very easy with a stable, mature tank/filter. Don't over feed, and I don't use flake food almost ever. Personally, I tend to over feed and the flake food generally breaks down to ammonia very fast, which I don't like! I use Hikari as a base food. Micro Bites and Betta Bio Gold food, Sinking wafers, Algae wafers. Brine shrimp, Tubiflex worms, freeze dried. Frozen Brine shrimp and baby Brine shrimp.
Probably if you don't have to worry about it being a showpiece for a while, I would add new DW and half of the sand in there, kind of mix it together, and let it go for a few weeks. When you make your plan for a date for the change over, clean the filter pad with treated tank water at least 10 days to 2 weeks before, light feeding till the change. This way when you change everything over, you don't clean the filter pads right away, so you don't loose any significant BB. You can use half of your old tank water, the top clean half. Then use a kitchen sifter to pull out the gravel from the sand, sand goes right through.
Use only treated water to ever rinse stuff in the tank so you don't loose much BB.
When I changed over one of my tanks to new substrate, I ended up with a big mini cycle. That is the only reason I suggest that way.
Otherwise just do it like you normally would, just do it all at once, and the other stuff I mentioned, except combining the sand and DW. Just monitor the tank for awhile afterwords to make sure you don't have a mini cycle.
Wait what?! I would be so glad if you do it in bullet point or in order. I am so sorry. Since this is my second language, I can't understand big orders without any bullet points.
How about my other fish?
What's Dw and BB