the new trio

The new serpaes settled in very well overnight. I uncovered the tank this morning. They ate a bit of flake and are pretty lively. Not nervous of my presence but they are camera-shy so this was the best I could do for photos. You can see that they have wonderful color and their fins are in good shape- and they were flirting and displaying to each other. (Upper left is the one with very faint side mark)

One looks like a gravid female-

lower right, the one with the faint almost-missing mark.

My new box filter came in yesterday- a Lee's economy corner filter. Before that I had this QT set up with just small sponge. I suspected it wasn't enough for three adult fish. I filled the corner filter with the bit of blue/white media and larger gravel pieces out of that sponge filter, also added from the 38's canister sintered glass media, three layers of sponges and two of poly.

I thought this would house plenty of bacteria- it is easily five times or more the surface area of media than the smaller filter had (whose sponge piece I dropped back in the tank for the bacteria it holds, btw). But this morning I have ammonia reading 0.25. I guess it still needs to catch up to the fish load. (The sponge pieces did get a bit of a rinse when I added them to the filter, just because they got dunked in tank water- but I didn't squeeze them out.)

So between this and the window tank, I now have two different styles of box filter- both made by the same company. They each have pros and cons, I have found out. The triple-flow one in my window tank has better design for drawing up water flow from underneath- but it is trickier to cut media size to fit- and the plastic seems thinner, more prone to breaking. It is quieter of the two, the air stone inside breaks up the flow into small bubbles. I don't mind its sound. (Granted, you're actually supposed to put in loose carbon and filter floss- that easily fills up the space. But since I wanted to use media out of the other filter I did it this way. Just have to be sure there's no bypass. Same with below).

This newer one feels sturdier, and it's a lot easier to fit media inside- I just cut a simple wedge, then poked a hole in the sponge or poly and tore it to make space for the air tubes. It also sits on the bottom well, I have no issues with it floating up. Downside is the noise. There's no airstone, it makes loud bubbles. I reduced the air flow a little. I guess it doesn't matter so much as this is temporary setup, and if I'm going to set it up in a hurry sometime for hospital tank it's easier to have a simple design for fitting the media in (if the fish go thru QT without needing meds, I will just lightly rinse the media and return it to the main canister until next time. But if I had fish in QT with some highly contagious, nasty disease -and couldn't be sure to kill it by sterilizing- I'd throw away the sponges and media, re-cut new spares next time).