Gold Tetras, mass to oxygen, bugs, plants, worms, the universe and everything
Thinking of movement needs, I have these gold tetras in my li'l tank and that was a mistake. They seem to be a bit stifled to my eye and I'll guess that their experience is even more stifled. Shoot, time to adopt out six of my favorite fish.
Also, I foolishly put one male endler's in with three female endler's livebearers. I hate euthanizing fish, so now I have three broods of babies to grow out a bit and then adopt out. Sheesh. I've thought about adult sizes and bioload but really was a tad careless with space needs and breeding habits.
The cool thing is that my tank foliage is exploding from all the waste from the 4x to 6x daily feedings for the fry. Oddly, the water is still clear(ish) and nitrogen levels are 0 NH3, 0 NO2, and 5ppm NO3. I think my deep sand bed is helping with all this. So are all the flatworms, snails, shrimp, and other tiny mysterious li'l guys eating up the mulm and crapping out bacteria food.
Aeration is being accomplished by one weak internal filter with its outflow at surface level - no bubbles or anything and nobody is gasping. I guess the plants are taking up the CO2 and preventing toxic levels from occurring.
Now how am I to figure out how many fish is cool? It's all so complicated.
I was thinking of switching to all male endler's, sundadanio axelrodi, bororas maculatus, some ottos and keeping my pigmy corys. Maybe some nana rasboras. All the bugs and worms and plants can stay.
Oh, I meant to mention I've been studying Walstad's book, "Ecology of the Planted Aquarium". It has an excellent section on oxygen use, fish size, and relative metabolism. As fish weight increases, metabolism decreases-but not at the same pace is weight increase. So, more smaller fish DO indeed use less oxygen in general, per inch, than bigger fish. That is because the fish weight increases much faster than length increase. Like as length doubles, mass squares.
So as fish get longer, in general their mass increases much more rapidly. As their mass grows, their oxygen needs grow to but much more slowly (though at a faster pace than their length increases).
As the details double, my headache triples.
Now, if only API made a water test kit that measured how happy our fish are!