Sue's Tanks And Fish

How did you manage to get the Nerite Snail to sit still? 

In order to get the Endlers (or any other fast moving fish) sharper you need to increase the shutter speed.  Now, depending on your camera, there are a number of ways you may be able to do this.

• ISO Increase the ISO setting.  The default will probably be 100.  Experiment with higher settings.  The downside is that your pictures will get grainier as you increase the setting.
• Program Change from 'AUTO' to 'SHUTTER PRIORITY' if you can.  You can then set the shutter speed manually.  You will need about ¹/₁₂₅ second if you can.  The penalty for this is you get less depth of field.  In other words there will be less of your tank, front to back, that is in focus.
• Lights Add some lighting if you can.  But, don't be tempted to use an on-camera flash.
• Tripod If you've got one, use a tripod.  It won't affect the shutter speed, but it will help with keeping things in focus.
• Finally If all else fails, whack one of the little buggers on the head and photograph him then! 

Lovely photos Sue. The Apisto's a good looking fish - very pretty.

Any chance of a whole tank shot, please - the plants and wood etc look great and I'm always looking for inspiration for the 'next tank'.

A few more pics from yesterday (finally downloaded them) -

First the whole tank.
The background is one of Takashi Amano's landscapes, all wood and plants and shrimps. The plants on the left are synthetic, and the those on the right are real. The reason the left side looks darker is because of the floating plants held down at that end by the filter flow. The live plants are mainly java fern, but there is a small bit of anubias as well, and the floating plant is Silvania (I can't decide from photos if it's S minima or S natans). The wood was sold as a piece of mangrove root. The woman in the shop said it doesn't leach tannins so I didn't need to soak it, and she was quite right. When viewed from square on, the wood obscures the filter quite nicely.

The yellowy fish with the orange tail at top right is the male honey gourami. His territory is between the filter spraybar and the glass - being bubblenesters, male gouramis like areas with minimum water movement. His lady friends are the yellow fish next to the thermometer and the one just at the edge of the bushy plastic plant.
The shoal of green neons is quite easily seen in front of the heater.
At the bottom, you can see the male Apistograma cacatuoides and one of the three dwarf chain loaches (Ambastaia sidthumunki)
And there's a zebra nerite on the glass at the right hand side.
If you look carefully at the leaf right at the bottom of the heater, you can see an amano shrimp.


You can also see the scratch caused by getting sand caught under the algae scraper, that's the white line crossing the filter. And the mess around the piece of wood. That's what wood looks like after it's been through a snail's digestive system.


And some more fish:
A dwarf chain loach
The male apisto and a female honey gourami. And an amano shrimp just above the gourami.
And a better than before photo of one of the wild-type endler guppies. There is a black bar type at 2 o'clock from him.

I took the second set of photos with the curtains drawn - I finally remembered that's what I did on the old forum. The results were a lot better - they're the ones I finally downloaded from the camera today. I still have to play with the settings for the fast fish though.

I spent an hour this morning swapping fish. I've moved the ember tetras from the 50 litre to the 125 litre, and the male endlers the other way.

I don't have female endlers any more. When I gave away the last lot of fry, I gave the females away too. So I have only 8 males.
The ember tetras were not happy in the 50 litre. I think they felt very exposed; it's not got as much in the way of cover as the 125, and it's in the kitchen so gets more passing 'traffic' than the 125, so I decided they'd be better off in the bigger tank.

In order to catch these two lots of fish, I had to remove everything from both tanks.
In the 50, when I lifted one of the pieces of wood, I discovered half a pygmy cory under it. Well, stuck to it. I have the horrible feeling I might have squashed it during a water change on Tuesday - I lifted the wood up to clean under it, and I think I might have put it down on top of the cory  But once the tank was empty, I found a cory fry! It is about 3mm long so not newly hatched.



Since I had all 8 male endlers in a bag, I siezed the opportunity to photgraph them  The photos don't do them justice - they don't show the iridescent patches of colour, only the solid colours. But you can get the idea.

In the first photo, the fish sideways on are the tiger endler at the bottom, and one of the 'wild type' (my name for them) above it.
The 'wild type' have a blue-purple iridescent patch on their backs just in front of the dorsal fin - that's the white blob in the photo. They also have tiny black spots on their abdomens, a patch of green just in front of the tail, and yellow in the dorsal fin.

The second photo shows the black neon at the top (right next to the blob of light reflecting off the bag) He has a dark grey head with yellow behind, then a patch of orange and more dark grey, then fluorescent white at the sides of his tail and dorsal fin.
The one at the bottom right against the white part of the bag is a black bar type. Besides the black and orange you can see in the photo, they have iridescent green on their bellies and just in front of their tails.



Sorry they aren't very good pics. Jesnon's photos put these to shame.

Lovely pics again Sue. I love my little endlers, and I'm pretty much set on getting a new one now to bring my numbers back up ^^; Apparently a LFS has the peacock and wild type ones in atm so very tempted to pop down on my weekend off. But I also still want my shrimp!

Ooh great stuff - glad you solved the mystery! My endler Scutter (he's one of the black bar, though one is shorter than the other unlike Bob where both are the same length) is still about half the size of all the others - will he ever grow!?

That makes sense! I don't mind him being small, I just wondered if he was just younger than the others or something. I've just seen some photos on one of my LFS page of what I THINK are endlers... and now I wish I'd been there this weekend - they look gorgeous!

The ages I spent yesterday trying to catch fish has paid off. In the smaller tank the ember tetras would swim in a huddle in the back corner behind a plant whenever there was someone moving in the room. If I stood still and watched from a distance they did venture out a bit but scuttled straight back when they saw movement. Now they are in the bigger tank they are everywhere. And their colours are a lot more vivid; they really do live up to their name now.
And the smaller tank no longer looks empty with the endlers in it. They are not shy fish. It is interesting that the cories are coming out of hiding as well since I put the endlers in.

The 50 litre is not that small. It has a 60 x 30 cm footprint, the same as the 60 litre that leaked. It's just not as tall as the old 60 litre. Ember teras can be kept in a 45 x 30cm tank, so it wasn't the size that was affecting them. So was it the fewer hiding places compared to the bigger tank or the fact that there is a lot more movement past the 50 litre?

i have 2 of them snails, also them endlers look nice, are they live bearers like guppies? do they get infected easy? nice pics