fish day

again posting a little late; I usually do maintenance on friday. The tank still has good parameters, still no Nitrates even though I fed the plants last week- and to my dismay the pH is still climbing. It's 8.2 now. I thought perhaps from crusty white stuff that accumulates on edges of things exposed to air- mineral deposits where water evaporates away. When I refill the tank it reaches those deposits sometimes, maybe re-dissolves them into the water? so I took extra care to clean that off all around the upper rim. But not sure that's the issue here...

I took note of plants. The driftwood fungus is growing back, but not nearly as much this time. My Anubias have new leaves, and the floating Watersprite is growing little root hairs that hang down. The Amazon Sword and Rotala don't look nearly as robust as the other plants. Lots of Vallisneria has brown algae and some leaf decay but there is new stuff growing too so I think those will bounce back.

I took a risk and moved the two best plants out of small now-empty tank which I'm not going to keep around. But want to ensure they don't spread disease back into my main tank so I gave them a bleach dip (after reading lots of various recommendations online). This was a 1:20 bleach/water solution, the plants stayed in for two minutes, timed exactly, then were rinsed extensively (more than a dozen times, I lost track) with gallon of dechlorinated water until not the faintest scent of bleach remained. Then I rinsed a few times more for good measure. Hopefully this will kill any pathogens that might be on the plants. I moved over a Java Fern and lovely big Anubias.

I never noticed before the pretty striations on the underside of the Anubias leaves. The leaves are also rounder than the other Anubias I have.

This one was already gripping strongly onto the decor piece it had been tied to in Hector's tank. I've found it's very difficult to tie a plant onto a piece of wood with wet thread floating around in the water, and I don't want to lift the wood pieces out w/all the other plants attached. So instead I wedged this one a little bit and held it down with a stone. It's the big one in front here (see the Zebra Fish?)

The other moved plant was a Java Fern- also pretty healthy as it has a little baby plantlet under the biggest leaf. Tied the plant as best I could onto the driftwood, also removed two of the largest baby plants from a Fern in the tank, and tied them down in their own spots. They broke away from the parent leaf easily. There's one more baby still on the leaf, I'm waiting for it to get a bit larger. You can see it here with the long fuzzy roots reaching down. The babies I moved are second to the right in the first picture top of this post, next to the parent plant. I held those down with a few large pebbles too (didn't tie very well).

The fish themselves seem to be doing well. Look like they've grown some. They gather quickly at the surface when I lift the lid at feeding times. Still when I glance in the tank I can usually spot six or seven Danios moving about in the upper water level; the eighth one Blip is always swimming low right above the substrate, weaving between watersprite stems. Also looks paler than the other fish. I wonder if he's just picked on, smaller, the omega fish as it were. Or if he's not as healthy...