newbies

I went to the pet shop the other day. Intending to just get a new snail, but came home with a bit more than that! I did get a snail- they don't have ramshorns but I got a Nerite. It's smaller than the ramshorn was, a vivid orange color with black spots. I've read that these kind of snails are excellent at cleaning up algae. This is the only good picture I have of him so far. You'd think that with the bright color it would be easy to find this snail all the time, but it digs itself into the gravel sometimes, so I can't always locate it in the tank easily.

Also I got two Siamese Algae Eaters. I am pretty sure they are Crossocheilus siamensis, even though the pet shop called them Flying Fox, which could name any one of another different species. They have identifying them the clear fins, stripe goes all the way through the tail, one set of barbels, not a sucker mouth, no golden stripe. I've always wanted to have a flying fox or siamese algae eater, but never saw them in the shop before (more often they have chinese algae eaters which grow a lot bigger and tend to sucker onto other fish, consuming the slime coat. I actually saw one doing this to a gourami in a shop tank once). These siamese fish are great algae eaters, eat brush and hair algae (which most other fish and snails won't touch) and are friendly, schooling species. Mine certainly do stick close to each other. I can see them constantly moving around nibbling on surfaces, and am surprised at how quickly the plants got cleaned off. I haven't seen the Watersprite look so brightly colored in a long time.

In fact, they've got things so clean that Tilda seems a bit frantic searching for algae to eat now. I put stones back in from the water-jar-in-windowsill setup, and the oto was all over that.