i lost my fish and what a horrible horrible feeling that is and i don't mean that the fish
died i'll explain i mean that when you look in an aquarium the fish that you added into this little
container are just not there anymore they've disappeared now we've all had fish disappear
in our aquariums whether it's a shrimp or snail or small fish it's really difficult to keep track of
everybody in the 2000 because it's just such a big aquarium with so many fish within it i
mean sometimes i see the discus sometimes i don't sometimes i see the sunshine pleco oh spoke too
soon but sometimes i don't this aquarium i've come to realize that i'm not going to see everybody
every time i look into it the stingray aquarium is a whole different story there's only three
rays in here as well as a bishop who's over in that corner but they're so easily spottable and
you know all i gotta do is look in that tank and there's they're just right there
same with the asian arowana one fish in one big tank as soon as i walk in the gallery
it's literally the first two things that i see and i've said this before i take visual accounts of
every fish in the gallery every single day why because i have lost fish out here before i've
lost a stingray out here before and by loss i mean he was hiding behind the background a place that
i should never have gotten to get there but it did and for hours i panicked and that the emotions and
the feelings that i was going through were just absolutely horrible i've also came out to the
gallery where you know a fish jumped and i seen it immediately and you know it sucked and it hurt but
at least it was like an emotional dump all at once and i'm a super emotional guy so when i see uh a
fish missing or a fish is dead or something like that i prefer the fish to be as morbid as this
sounds i would rather go through a fish dying then i can't find it at all whatsoever because maybe
a number of things might have happened maybe it's right behind the background again or maybe a fish
died and the other fish ate it and you'll never know what happened to it you're looking everywhere
it's not in the filters and i mean when it comes to the 2000 i've added things like shrimp in there
tiny tetras discus you name it we don't see all of those fish all the time but i can assure you they
are in sometimes the shrimp are trying to get out of the tank and i gotta say i can't blame
them but like i said sometimes a fish will die and the other fish will eat it before you ever
get to see it and in the brackish water aquarium which is absolutely beautiful you wouldn't think
that if a fish died they would all eat it before you ever got to see it but would you agree that
this is the size of an archer fish would you also agree that this is just beef it's meat
they can and they will rip it apart the moment they think it's food they will eat it so if a
fish were to go missing in here and it didn't jump it's not in the filter there's nowhere to find it
odds of me finding even the body i got maybe three minutes before that fish is gone so yeah as you
can imagine i'd much rather find a dead fish so i can figure out what happened and prevent that
from happening again as opposed to you know it just disappeared now you guys remember i
recently set up that convict aquarium beautiful tank and the fish got along splendidly you guys
also seemed to absolutely love that tank or at least for the most part and the focus of that
video and the focus of setting up that aquarium in the first place was to simply showcase a
you know a very common and very affordable fish can still have a place in our hobby two days
after setting up that aquarium i noticed that the convicts were spending more and more time in the
back corner of the tank the back right corner now in the original video i show showed you guys where
i thought they might laid eggs and that was one of three locations that i assumed they might do it
and uncle on closer inspection they were in fact laying eggs back there now there must have been
something in the air at that point because my uaru started breeding in the 2000 the shell
dwellers are in a breeding frenzy and you guys know the erratas are breeding i'm also showing
signs with the stingrays breeding i'm showing signs of many fish out here getting busy out in
the gallery within a couple of weeks the convict fry hatched and the parents were taking good care
of them we'll come back to that in a minute when it comes to the walru breeding in the 2000 we do
have a problem they've laid eggs about four times out here now they do it in a number of locations
typically in that back corner or over in this corner and maybe they're going to do it we'll
go to the other side maybe they're going to do it there because we do have them cleaning out an
entire area luckily we have at least two pairs of wall ru in this aquarium however the eggs
never hatch and why is that well maybe the tiger barbs are eating the eggs in the middle of the
night unlikely because the walru can chase them off perhaps it's the severums again unlikely
maybe it's the corydora unlikely but these are the questions that i have to keep asking myself
like who's eating the damn waroo eggs and then i realized we have a carnivore in this aquarium
that is more nocturnal than anything and look where it likes to spend its time
that damn sunshine sunshine pleco in the back is probably eating the fry and or the eggs before
they ever get to become fry in the middle of the night the waru can't fight it off because plecos
are armor-plated that's what they're built for and because the sunshine pleco does like a little meat
in its diet it's not unlikely uh that it is eating the fry so i have to admit even though this is a
beautiful aquarium i will say that i would rather breed waru in this than anything else
i've also been thinking maybe we'd take out all the tetras and anything that might potentially
get in the way of my wall room breeding and let them have this entire aquarium i
don't know let me know what you think about that the lake tanganyika aquarium with the frontosa
as well as the african shell dollars is doing remarkably well and it always has we got big daddy
in the background running the show he only shows up for food or comes out for food but everybody's
growing at a really quick rate uh we do have what i would suggest is two males in this tank
one is right there and then then we got big daddy right there and i would i would i would suggest
maybe that's a female we're just looking at their nuclear humps and the shapes of their heads
but i would suggest most of them are female then we have the shell dwellers over here now the shell
dwellers are not necessarily breeding in this aquarium like i had thought originally what is
the difference between these guys sorry what is the difference between these guys if we see them
notice that they stay close to their shells and they're all typically swimming in the
same direction a lot of that has to do with the flow of the water it's coming this way
blowing down like in a circular motion comes this way and constantly circulates in the aquarium
whereas if we look at this aquarium the shell dwellers in the 40 gallon we have a population
explosion the only flow in this tank is the uh air hose in the back because we're running a sponge
filter now if you look closely we will probably see fry absolutely everywhere typically over on
this side they might have just hidden because i came over but that's the only difference
between the two the flow in the tank versus the tanganyika aquarium with the frontosa is one big
difference then of course we have natural predators but we already did this in a 120
and the shell dwellers were breeding so a few days ago i went ahead and i turned the
flow down as you can see on this pump it's had its lowest setting where this one here uh running the
oscar aquarium is almost maximum probably 70 percent so we're gonna see what happens next
the shell dwellers will breed we do have males and females but again we'll have to see what
happens i will say that i had no clue that the frontosa would eat my anubius but they are
look over here this where the side the shell dwellers dominate the anubias are perfectly fine
a little algae and detritus growing on it but for the most part they're just eating it over
here man this tank's awesome look at this house that they built i just showed you guys this tank
the other day but the erratas fry are doing well and uh some of them are hatching anyways back to
the convict aquarium so it's always interesting to watch a pair take care of their fry and convicts
a lot of the times can be fantastic parents however at some point something went wrong
in that tank it appears to me as though the male turned on the female the female
wasn't in the tank anymore i lost that fish i didn't know where it was of course my first
initial reaction was to look around the tank see if there's anything missing or see if there's any
water or unfortunately if there's a dried-up fish then i notice the male in the back corner
spending a lot of interest in that back corner poking at it nudging it almost like chasing it
and then just for a split second i see somebody's little head poke out from behind that background
the female somehow got back there and i don't know how she did it it is tight fitting i don't
silicone them in place anymore because i haven't had any issues with that ever just one time with
the stingray getting under it and we fixed that but that was years ago nothing ever since but
somehow she got into the back of it maybe she jumped over it somehow squeezed in through the
side i'm not sure how she did it but what i do know is she got back there for a specific reason
either she was just curious or she was trying to get away from the mail either way
i had to get her out of there now i'll admit that i didn't do it on day one that i discovered
her back there i thought maybe she's back there for her own reasons maybe she's finding refuge or
food or maybe she just likes it back there fish will do those sorts of things and she'll come out
on her own when she's good and ready the next day no changes so of course i had to act i get
her out from behind the background i add her to the main portion of the tank and immediately the
male starts going after her now cichlids being territorial i decided let's reescape a little bit
create new territories this would have been a high risk to the fry because the male might
see them as a territorial threat and go after them but a lot of the times if you're
having problems with an aquarium especially with cichlids you can rearrange the tank
and it can stop a lot of that aggression at least for a short period of time which is going to buy
you a little bit more time to either separate rehome and or you know figure something else
out and that's the case with the oratus aquarium a lot of people said these fish aren't going to
work out in that tank long term they're nothing but fighters they're just going to fight non-stop
they're going to kill each other and that's just not the case with me here you'll see that in this
aquarium the wood doesn't look great but a lot a big reason was i like the con contrast i know
it looks kind of phony now because i just tossed it all back in after collecting the females but
it's creating a tremendous amount of breaks in lines of sight let me show you if a fish is here
they can't see on the other side of the aquarium the females or the males can easily get away
from whoever's actually chasing them and for the most part that works and that's what inspired me
rescaping the convict aquarium but it didn't work the male kept going after and kept attacking her
and so i have to decide what am i going to do with this female put her in a holding tank
or well if you guys remember how that video ended in the first place we do have one problem with
this aquarium and that is their neighbor is simply not pleased that he has competition beside him
kyle is the flower horn beside that aquarium and for the most part he might have been interested in
the mail and displaying to him and fighting him or he might have been jealous that he didn't have a
girlfriend and the guy behind him got to knock boots and he was just in there all by himself
so i thought let's try the female in with kyle and at first this video was as soon as we added
her in he was chasing her around like a little puppy dog he wasn't biting her he wasn't being
that aggressive but when one fish was running from another fish it triggers a an instinct a
hunting instinct sort of like cats you know you put a laser on the ground it's going to chase it
that's kind of what that little girl is doing for kyle is she was just kind of being playful with
him so i thought let's see how this goes and to be honest it just didn't work out well he started
beating her up by the next day so i moved her down to one of the quarantine tanks kind of sectioned
off and we're going to let her heal up and now we are left with just the male who's an actually a
really good father but not a good husband i feel personally attacked so we'll just go ahead and
see what happens with the mail as well as the fry i'll show you what they're looking like right now
lots of tannins and lots of tannins in the water but the fry are still there if we look closely
we can see them swimming around and the male is actually being defenseful i wonder what he'll do i
don't like to tease too much i don't want to bring too much out of him but he'll try to attack me
which is good that's what daddy should do be there for your babies and that's what i like to see the
fry are free swimming they are actively looking for food and i do feed them baby brine shrimp
i also got to keep him well fed so he doesn't see the fry as food but that's a huge reason
why i don't want to breed fish out in the gallery because i know from past experience
with breeding many types of fish that i'm going to have to be prepared when i have a breeding tank i
might need a hospital tank or quarantine tank for one of the partners that might turn on the other
i'm going to need a fry tank and a growo tank a rearing tank we might need something that if if
you're taking it seriously you're going to need different stages of aquariums to grow different
sizes of those fish like i did with discus years ago and that was never the point of the gallery
in the first place the whole idea of the gallery was to educate and inspire on many different types
of aquariums and fish and the longer you keep a fish into sexual maturity they're going to breed
and i'm going to run into problems like this and some people might not think it's a problem but
i'm running out of tanks all of my quarantine tanks are now holding fry and breeding pairs so
we might just have to recalculate what's going on out here or i just build a bigger building