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Badis badis (Blauw baarsje)
From still waters in India. 8cm. Breeds at 26 degrees Celcius, pH 6,5.
the male guards the eggs of the fry.
The Badis badis male hid behind the left hardwood piece all of the
first 24 hours. Meanwhile, the female carefully and slowly
perused all of the tank. After many hours the two met briefly. The
female halted and the male approached, the female froze, swam
backwards, then slowly turned around while the male sneaked back
to his hideout.
Both have a ballerina way of fluttering the fins while standing still.
Already after a few days, the male changed colour drastically.
In this new more spacious environment, the little feller has selected
a territory to defend: the hollow behind a wing formed piece of
hardwood, where two kinds of fine fern grow. The fern gives away
when he pushes it, he can nibble and hide in it. Occasionally he
pushes forward from this hideout, very darkly colored body, a deep
angry brown, and with fins that radiate fantastic blue light. He
then approaches the little female (who's often cruising with the
Barbus pentazona P.) and impresses her greatly, then he dashes away,
back to his lair, trying to lure her with him. She's interested, but
doesn't follow him all the way. Which is fine, as they are both
very young and about 35% of their adult size.
After one month, the male Badis was mostly invisible behind the wood
or in the shrubs. I added another couple, this time with an adult,
fully grown `granddad' Badis for a male. He selected the best
territory in the tank for himself. A higher plateau with large dark
thickly planted back room and two side exits. This used to be the place
where the younger Badis badis resided.
Sometimes it was like the stage for a comic show, granddad Badis entering
the backstage planted section, son Badis coming out of there through a
side doorway and entering the front plateau of the territory again,
granddad slowly peekabooing into that open plateau and son scurrying
away to enter through another back way again. This way, I get to see a
lot of both of them.
Baby badis!
(notes entered january 26 1998)
I was sitting close to the front pane of the tank, studying the goings-on
generally and scanning the surface of the hardwood for any remaining shrimp. A
couple days ago, I found one dead shrimp but of the 11 that I got, I have seen
at most a group of three in the past week.
I fear some of them bought it when I had some trouble with my filter system the
other week. A tube connected to the hose got disconnected in a place in the
corner deep in the sand plateau behind hardwood that's very hard to get by with
my hands and although I reconnected it three times, it slipped loose every time
and sucked out sand instead of water, clogging up the pump.
Although I finally repaired it and improved the system thoroughly, in the
process I'd been groaning and crying out for an hour or so. Plants and leaves
started to float around depressingly and garbage from the floor sailed up,
clouding the tank. It cleared up quickly once the repairs were done but it
struck me that I didn't see as much shrimp afterwards and father Badis was
invisible altogether.
A day or two earlier I had added a fully grown 2 years old Badis Badis male to
the tank with another young female. Since it's the father of the other Badis
fish (from the original breeder), I call him granddad Badis. The two females
sometimes swim along with each other, the large male regularly sails along the
perimeter of his territory but the younger male hasn't been seen at all after
the filter system havoc. Is he killed somewhere and are six shrimp consuming his
corpse somewhere in the back?
Now, yesterday when I was scanning the tank I couldn't believe my eyes for a
second when I saw a very tiny fish hovering close to a steep piece of the dark
hardwood and under cover of a slender plant leaf on the plateau. It hung there
silently, unbelievably small and wise. Dark in colour like the dark wood behind
it and with a white stripe like the fine stripes of light sand that sticks in
fine creases of the old wood.
It was unmistakably a Badis badis baby, looking like its mother although it's
just about 4 millimeters long. Tiny and vulnerable as it is, its body is stout,
with an almost straight belly line and a highly curved back line. It turned
slowly under the leaf, climbed some without making a visible move with its fins
and slowly it floated away from me into the darker shrubs farther back in the
tank.
I'd softly called the family to the tank and not all of them saw the fish. It's
camouflaged so well! Once you've seen it, you can more easily find it again
since you'll know where and how to look, but if you haven't seen one before, it
proves hard to find it even if someone points it out to you. Proudly showing it
to someone who won't see it is really frustrating! ;=}
A little while later I saw an identical fish on the other piece of hardwood,
acting the same way, this time hiding under a protruding stub of wood and a few
threads of moss that grow in the `armpit' of the stub. First I thought that was
the same Badis baby, but I saw them both the next morning, so there are at least
to of them out there!
Who knows, the father Badis may be still alive and guarding his fry somewhere
way back where the new grandfather Badis can't find them. Maybe I shouldn't have
added the new couple at all, even though there's room enough for two couples in
the tank.
I'm glad I'm providing live food every day, since the fry lives on the tiny
cyclops in the live food mix. The fry is approximately 2.5 weeks old so if I'd
been feeding flakes, it would've had only the aufwuchs in the algae and other
chance organisms to grow on.
I feel a little guilty towards the father Badis in the tank because I unleashed
his father, the now granddad Badis in the tank. Granddad is getting into his
beautiful love and war colours and he's `defending' his territory which happens
to be the same place where the fry are trying to grow up...
Naturally, if he finds them out and if they're still small enough, he'll eat
them as he will only tolerate his own fry. He's slowly moving about like a man
eating giant who's smelled man meat but is so far unable to find out where it is
hiding.
One day later I logged:
I'm pretty confident now that at least some of the badis fry will survive.
During a few long business phone calls this morning I've been studying the tank.
Sighted one tiny Badis next to the hardwood, but also one, slightly bigger in
the corner of the tank with lots of space around it.
Then a playful B. pentazona came slipping around the hardwood corner, sighted the
Badis and jumped forward to catch it. Now the B. pentazonas seem the fastest
sprinters in the tank and the tiny Badis had quite a distance to go before it
could enter into the background of hiding places between plants.
But the tiny Badis was gone instantly. I think I remember seeing it turn, but
then it was just gone totally, without any trace, somewhat like the DeLorean in
Back To The Future when it hit 88mph, only there was no accelleration to the
vanishing speed. Just BENG! and it was gone.
The B. pentazona may have blinked but it relaxed promptly and went back to play
with the others.
a late january day in 1998 I logged:
These past days all ponds and ditches froze over. I fed the last bit
of live food from my stock and then I started to worry about the baby
Badis... they're small and they need cyclops / nauplii and small water
fleas. I had plenty of white midge/gnat larvae (how *do* you call
these in English?) but they're too big for the babies.
To add to the worry, we didn't spot the tiny guys in the past 24
hours...
I chopped up a few white larvae with a fine knife, but no baby Badis
came out of the shrubs to get them.
Then yesterday evening the weather was very foggy and almost warm.
This morning was bright weather, the chilly wind was not too cold and
many ditches and most ponds had opened up partly. Time to rush out
with net and buckets.
I wanted to try some ponds close to our home. Two kids with fishing
rods told me that in summer they don't need to use nets to get larvae
and fleas, just filling a bucket with the water gets enough for a
sizeable fish tank.
Now, in winter, it was harder, but possible! I first tried two ditches
closest to home. These were still very cloudy after the city service
people dredged the ditches around here a week or so ago. I filled a
murky bucket with tiny twisting and jerking creatures, but I must wait
'till the dirt sinks down before I can determinate what's it.
Then I walked over to a place where, about ten years ago, tons and
tons of clay were dug out and wheeled away by endless lines of power
trucks, leaving behind a deep lake. Later, the lake was cut in half by
a freeway and some money was also spent on throwing in sand and
creating a wide beach-like bank with smaller ponds here and there. The
soil is sand with slick clay beneath it.
A first spot yielded only a few fleas in about ten sweeps. It was the
downwind end of a larger pond. Then when I went upwind, closer to the
part where there was still ice, it got better. It might have been just
plain luck, but I caught more when I swept the water at the thin icy
part, breaking the ice there.
Every time I lifted the net above the water, the wind blew in it and it
froze up hard within seconds.
It got real fun though when I tried another downwind spot of another
pond. This one had a shallow end with some reeds growing in it. It
looked muddy but a few lemniscate-formed sweeps about filled the
bucket of water full of life!
First I had the impulse to keep on sweeping for more (wow! I found it!
And it is free!), but what's the point, I left the rest for next time.
I poured the yield into the net again and washed it in a clearwater
spot, then went on home.
After I poured a cupful of the live water into the tank, the fish had
a ball...
And then, after a few minutes of scrutinizing, I saw a baby Badis,
very small, with a red throat, swimming between the high and thick
R. rotundifolia! A striped body, so delicately striped, the top fin high
and proud as if it knew it would be noticed.
It focused on a cyclops nearby, narrowed its big-for-its-size eyes to
just black pinheads, curved its tail fin and in a snap jumped towards
the cyclops which had been just happily jerking this way and that,
like a child's battery driven car with front wheels that turn around
on a disc, driving, bumping, turning back in all directions.
Right after it caught the cyclops, the eyes got huge again. I also saw
a baby Badis much smaller, like just the two eyes looking at me with a
pinkish haze around it, shaped like the head-and-tail of a frog fish
right out of the jelly.
Then, when I called the family, we discovered more. Ha, they weren't
deceased just yet! One was out in the open for a few seconds, where
any bigger fish could've taken it for live food. Such courageous
fellows...
And as one good thing never comes alone, while we were looking real
good we counted six of the bee shrimp, so they are still alive and
kicking as well!
Barbus pentazona
Malakka, Singapore, Sumatra, Borneo. Calm waters in the lowlands. 5cm.
Breeds at 26 degrees celcius, pH 6-7
pentazona
The Barbus pentazona pentazona, after their
first release in the tank, grouped in the center around a few strings of
Rotala rotundifolia. Although they were *not* in a "safe" place, almost
in the widest open space, they kept together there and only after a half
hour or so they disappeared to hang like a small cloud on the high
plateau, almost invisible. The next day they swam all around, sometimes
individually or in pairs. A few days later they became the most playful
and visible group, merrily playing and incredibly fast when dashing for
live food.
With the tank a month old, I wrote: It just struck me
while drinking tea and watching the tank, how utterly fearless and cool
the Barbus pentazona pentazona's are.
I added a two year old, fully mature big Badis badis to the tank yesterday
and he has selected the best territory in the tank for himself. A higher
plateau with large dark thickly planted back room and two side exits. This
used to be the place where the younger Badis badis resided.
Sometimes it's like the stage for a comic show, granddad Badis entering
the backstage planted section, son Badis coming out of there through a
side doorway and entering the front plateau of the territory again,
granddad slowly peekabooing into that open plateau and son scurrying away
to enter through another back way again. This way, I get to see a lot of
both of them.
The B. pentazona's often get the big old Badis bullying after them. When he
really puts his energy in it, getting all dark and angry, hovering in a 45
degrees angle up or down, slowly approaching and suddenly dashing at one
or two of them, they do jump away for a second but one second later, when
big Badis is retreating, satisfied with his established authority, the
Pentazona just swim past right under him, or over his high top fin as if
he's completely transparant to them ;=}
They're only impressed when he insists 100% that they do but when that
flick of a moment is over, they absolutely totally ignore his authority. I
like that!
Hemirhampodon pogonognatus
The single Hemirhamphodon pogonognathus has been calmly cutting
through the surface ever since day one. It's a weird form and a
totally cool character. I'd like to give him company, but haven't
found other specimina yet. He likes red mosquito larvae, and I provide
these for him by easing in a few of these slowly. Of every three, two
will sort of `cling' to the water surface, so the lone long fish can
approach it slowly and snap it away.
Pangio kuhli
One p.k. sumatranus and one p.k. semicinctus ---
the sumatranus has thin rings and two pink dots exactly in the middle
between the 6th and 7th and between the 8th and 9th ring, counting the
12 rings from the nose backwards. These dots are about as thick as the
rings are wide and they are exactly on the spine top.
The two Pangio kuhli seem to have felt okay from the start. They don't
usually act as a twosome, but each of them is lively.
Sometimes at night they race vertical circles close to the left window pane.
I see one lie around, head
slightly lifted, taking in quick gulps of water, then nosing the sand,
swallowing sand and spitting it out in pulses backwards from holes
behind the cheeks. Then he suddenly wriggles up, crawling up, up, up
in the water and dropping back like a kite after the wind falls away.
Sometimes one saves the altitude he climbed by hanging over a few
plant leaves or over a bog oak root. Comical guys.
Close up they look like funny seals. Sometimes, one of them is
leisurely hanging over a piece of hardwood, close to the front pane,
looking out into our room, into the human tank so to say. His fore
fins support his head a little above the wood and thus he resembles a
bored bewhiskered teenager on the side of a swimming pool, chewing
gum, leaning on elbows. All the time he is puffing, swallowing and
chewing away on the water and whatever was in it and the short
whiskers / moustache / feelers around his mouth move along restlessly.
Humans have no idea about what fish feel or do or want, but if I may
take the liberty to let myself get carried away, I might say
this P. kuhli is in a happy mood and mightily satisfied with the cool
place he's found.
The two Colisa sota arrived healthy but quite pale. After 24 hours, they both started to grow darker, a light creamy brown, and one of them developed a dark streak on the lower fin. The male is smaller than the female. They travel around together and they often hang still, close to one another, nose-to-tail. They're more snug than the Badis badis couple.
After a month, during dinner (when we were watching the aquarian life like some other family would watch a Melrose Place) it struck me again how the female Gourami sometimes gets it into her head to hunt away one or two of the Barbus pentazona's. She darts after it and seems to want it to leave a certain part of the tank immediately, and when she's close to the Pentazona, she spits a bubble of air at it!
(There's an page contents index on the top of this page.)
Within an hour, we had dozens of fistfuls of the dark matter that when gobbled into the bucket falls apart to be tens of thousands of live wriggling creatures...
The weather this January 1998 has been unusually ``warm'' for winter but miserably wet also, but today was a springlike sunny day, with ducks playing and hunting one another for mating, so we felt like two very lucky fellows, grownups sloshing through a mud bank in the sun and meanwhile catching an amount of food that would cost more than $50 in the shop (I don't need that much but Nanne has lots of tanks to feed).
I have given a portion of the mix to my fish, and all enjoyed the hunt. A few Barbus were merrily tearing away at a larger bug that neither could have swallowed whole, and towards the end only the tiniest of fleas were whirling around in the tank. I trust that father Badis, in his brooding/hiding place, got some that passed him.
A few days later, Nanne and I went out hunting larvae and water fleas again. Went to two ponds and a brook. Two grownup men with large nets and poles over their shoulder and buckets in their hands... in a heavy rain. The ponds yielded a reasonable amount of mainly white larvae, the brook immediately landed us great red clogs of red water fleas. Sensational to see the pocket at the end of the net turn deep red. Us, in between reeds, climbing over trees and half hanging in the water, we could've made a picture poster for a pall mall survival adventure. That is, if we had good looking faces which we don't. ;=}
The B. pentazona's meanwhile have great fun. They have discovered that among the live fleas that I caught and fed them, there's another bigger creature, white, longish and a very very fast swimmer with two outstretched swimming arms that are about five times as long as he is thick. So he crawls through the water in big swoops, as yet uncatchable by the B. pentazona's who have taken up the sport to track him down and then dash in after him. When he keeps still under a plant leaf, they get confused and after some searching give up, but when he wants to start swimming around like live food, the pentazona's rocket to the spot where he will blitz away... He needs to get up to the water surface too get air every once in a while and he weighs the dangers of dying for lack of oxygen and dying in the beaks of my fish...
(There's an page contents index on the top of this page.)
Hier komt het recept voor het kweken van fruitvliegen, na enkele
wijzigingen op het oorspronkelijke recept dat ik 4 jaar geleden bij mijn
eerste fruitvliegen kreeg, heb ik een mix gevonden die niet gaat stinken
voordat ik eerst volop fruitvliegen heb geoogst.
Mijn moeders bezwaren tegen de lucht op mijn kamer zijn de drijfveer
achter al deze veranderingen geweest.
Nodig:
Werkwijze:
Mix de wijn en brinta door elkaar tot je een stevige brij hebt, die wel
vochtig is. Voeg vervolgens de overige ingrediënten toe (gist als
laatste) en voeg water toe.
De massa wordt bijna niet dunner door het toevoegen van water, omdat de
brinta nog veel vocht opneemt. Een redelijk vochtige brij is belangrijk
want in een te droge cultuur sterven de vliegen af.
De wijn zorgt er voor dat de boel niet gaat rotten (ethanol), en remt
het gistingsproces enigszins.
De wijn is ook het fruitbestanddeel van dit mengsel.
De azijn (zuur) werkt schimmelremmend en creëert een zuur milieu
voor de vliegjes.
Jan Busser vertelde mij dat fruitvliegen dol zijn op sinaasappelsap, dus
het is misschien een idee om hiermee te verdunnen i.p.v. water.
Gistocal is niet direct noodzakelijk, maar bevat wel veel waardevolle
sporenelementen, die via de vliegen bij je vissen kunnen komen.
Bovendien kost een blik van een halve kilo maar iets van 10 gulden, en
met zo'n blik kun je jaren vooruit. Baat het niet dan schaadt het zeker
niet.
(There's an page contents index on the top of this page.)
Alternative possible far future fish choice:
The chairman said the water in his tank was about that good after one year of running it.
Then, he and Nanne discussed the way to go about a small patch of blue algae around a little group of Cryptocoryne beckettii (which is also the only plant that hasn't grown considerably yet).
Nanne says treat it with some medicine, chairman Wim claims that the algae will eat itself to death in it's own time. Both are very close friends of one another and they're used to having big fights about aquarist issues, both enjoying the rows and not admitting much to one another, and here was I, in the middle, holding the sword to decide which advice I was about to follow.
Clearly, as Nanne is the one who has supervised me to his point of having perfect water in a tank after only a few weeks, he is the one to have the last say about it, but meanwhile I am hoping that the blue algae will kill itself quickly before I have to make this choice...
Luckily, the signs are good. One C.Beckettii plant which was veiled in the algae yesterday morning, is clear of it now. I also suspect the survivors of the population of water fleas that I am adding daily are eating away at algae...
Stock lots of styrofoam. First cut a piece covering the back wall (and if
you wish the sides as well and then carve variformed pieces to stick on
top of that. It helps if you know what vison of background you want to
create, i.e. one that resembles the bank of a stream which rubbed away the
soil between lots of tree roots, or a rocky site with stubs and slabs of
stone sicking out.
The several layers of styrofoam approach the forms you have in mind. You
may have sketched them on paper. Not a lot of tiny forms, more like large
forms, merging. In some places it's just the one layer, in other places
there's lots of layers.
Also add the bog wood that then protudes from the back matter, and
sometimes a curly branch or root comes out and gets back into the
wall.
When the backscape looks done, you get out the kind of blow dryer that's
used to burn off paint from painted wood. Mind you, under the heat of that
the styrofoam melts and crumbles away fast, so use it with feeling and
tenderness. Don't make any hasty movements and don't get too close up to
the matter.
This heat ray is used to mellow up the forms you created. Some parts are
five layers deep, some only the one first back slab. You've cut and
scraped at any flat areas so they'll unevenly crumble away at the heat,
leaving an attractive uneven background mass.
When you've bogwood or hardwood in some places that might hold a plateau,
use strips of the styrofoam to build a kind of wall supporting the wood
matter. make it not a straight wall, but one with a hollow, curved form.
Mellow this out too with the heat.
Then take a special type of synthetic resin, which hardens when the two
parts are mixed together. Dab it on the walls quickly with a cheap brush
(which will be lost while the hardening sets in), avoiding the wood and
the glass to be spattered. Then take many handfulls of good fine sand in
the tint that you want and throw it hard on the sticky matter, avoiding
damage to the glass.
After an hour or five, you bring on the next layer with freshly mixed
resin, and a new cheap brush and lots of new sand, then later another
layer.
While hardening, the resin covers the sand and you'll have a background
that's unbreakably hard in the form and tint you want. If you used the
right resin mix, it'll be strictly neutral to your water, not leaking
anything to change the pH. Selecting the right resin is the hard part.
This was made easy for me by Nanne who had done his selecting by trial and
error. Maybe he can send you resin to work with.
(There's an page contents index on the top of this page.)
Are these Tanks of Horror or not? Some aquarists say it's merely a matter of taste, that fish won't find a difference between plastic objects or live plants and that some of the prettiest fish are bred in a puddle of sewage. My `top three' quotes from tanks of horror (although I have the sources of messages where the quotes came from, I am not out to `nail' anyone with quotes pried loose from their context):
``(...) my pleco in my other tank is too big - s'alright if he up and dies (...)''
When I clean my fish tanks, I get the strong smell of the ammonia. (It smells awful). I heard that one can actually get some disease from inhaling the vapors emitting from dirty water. What would you say?
After I had put my 3 Cories in my aquarium, about 2 hours later one had been eaten by my 1 of my 2 crabs. [...] I was wondering what to feed crabs, I had always had them in my other tank but didn't know exactly what they were eating. Do they need flakes or what? And what else should I put in with them that they won't eat? I am tired of buying fish and having them dead in a few hours, I just thought you guys'd know.
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