New Fish!

Most readers will be aware that I lost a lot of fish in my 180 litre tank to camallanus worm back in November to January. And those observant people among you will have noticed changes in my signature in the last few weeks 

The camallanus worms seemed to have gone after several treatments of Kusuri Wormer Plus and two treatments with Sera Nematol. It was very hard to tell with the fish I had left. The worms protrude from the anus when the fish is motionless and disappear back inside when the fish moves. My remaining fish were either small mad dashing fish which never stay still, or fish which like to lie on the bottom of the tank obscuring the view.

I was down to 3 dwarf chain loaches, 9 Microdevario kubotia (3 didn't take well to the medication), 5 ember tetras and 5 green neon tetras. The community creator gives this as 30% stocked. With the decease in fish numbers over several weeks and the fact that nematol can damage the bacteria colonies, I had a substantially reduced bacteria population compared to what I had earlier last year. I have needed to restock slowly, as for fish-in cycling.

The first new fish to go in was a pair of Nannacara anomala. I have had them for 3 weeks, and so far there is no sign of worms.
Two weeks ago, I bought the only three emperor tetras in the shop tank, all male.
Yesterday, I bought 10 emperor tetras and 4 otocinclus.

I am now at 66%, and I'll stop there. I know I should get more green neon and ember tetras but the neons have been in the tank since October 2010 and won't live much longer; and the embers are two years old.


14 new fish all at one go seems a lot, I hear you say. But I thought up a cunning plan.
The filter in my 180 consists of four baskets, the first with a sponge, then three with substrat pro, topped off with a second small sponge. Early last week, I removed one basket of substrat pro, put the media in another filter in my quarantine tank and dosed it with ammonia. The remaining media soon made up the loss as I saw no rise in either ammonia or nitrite.
At first, the media in the QT took a day and a half to drop that ammonia by 1ppm. By yesterday, it could remove 3ppm in 24 hours. My concern was that I had force fed the ammonia eaters so much that I had a rather high nitrite reading in the QT.
Yesterday afternoon, I rinsed the QT media in a bit of tank water and returned it to the 180's filter, then added the fish. My QT is too small for 14 fish so I didn't have much choice. I didn't feed the tank last evening.

This morning I have zero ammonia and zero nitrite!!!!

So far, so good. Time will tell, but it looks as though my idea has worked 

I have another new fish, though not in my 180 litre tank.

I bought my blue betta at the end of April 2013. He'd been acting older and older this year and for the last couple of weeks he was lying  on his side on the bottom of the tank. He hardly moved and couldn't even swim up to the surface to get his food. This was the point I realised that if he'd been a dog, we would have had him put down. So on Tuesday, I did put him down. I hadn't been able to see his fins properly for a few days and found that they were all frayed and tattered.

On Wednesday we went shopping and called at the nearest MA on the way home, the shop that the blue betta came from. They keep their bettas in one of those barracks where the water trickles in the top row, then overflows into the one below and so on down to the bottom row before being pumped back to the top again. The individual 'tanks' might be small but the water is continually being changed. There were crowntails in the top row, half moons in the middle and veiltails at the bottom. But of course there were no plakats, my favourite type.
My husband came in with me and he spotted one betta straight away. Luckily he was also very active, flaring at the next door fish, responsive to humans and no trace of any illness.

I now have a peach coloured half moon betta.

Photos to follow once he's settled in - he is still exploring his new territory.

Sorry to hear you lost your Betta Sue. It's horrible when you have to intervene and end a life, whether it's a fish, cat, dog or any other pet.
Congratulations on getting your new Betta, he sounds lovely! Look forward to the pics.

I'll be thrilled if Barquentine lives as long as that. He was about 4 months old when I got him, so hopefully plenty of life left in him yet. I totally agree about it being more cruel to let a suffering animal live. I tell my kids that they can't ask for help, so it's up to us to be fair and honest about an animal's quality of life and give it relief when that quality is no longer there. Doesn't make it any easier though when it comes to the crunch!