Last friday, at Feb 21st, I started putting in the last species which is planned for the living room tank right now.

These are a little bit more sensitive fish, so they came now quite late in the setup process of the new tank. They are bottom dwellers, and sift through the sand, so it was especially important to get rid of the blue-green algae first.

They are shoaling fish, and the minimum shoal size is 6, but for now, I only got 3, as I didn’t want to overburden the bacteria in my tank the same way it happened when I added the 4 guppies and 2 ancistrus at the same time. And that turned out to be a very good decision, as the water values in the tank got quite a bit worse over the last days, just not as bad as they had been. But I hate to think what would have happened if I added all 6 at the same time.

So the other 3 will come into the tank at a later point, hopefully towards the end of this week.

Right now, they are very shy, terrified and immediately hiding when one of comes close to the tank. Once you sit about 5 minutes in front of the tank, they start to come out again, and start sifting through the substrate. Very entertaining fish to watch, just like the ancistrus. I seem to have a weakness for bottom dwellers.

The tank continues to evolve, moving things a bit around how they fit better etc. I want to glue the java moss I got in Germany a couple weeks ago to one of the pieces of driftwood, so it looks like it is an old, sunken piece of wood. I hope that looks good!

The weekend away just before led to an explosion of the miniature ramshorn snails, which are now basically everywhere. I hope to get that under control, and the staghorn algae I’m still fighting. Apart from that, I’m really pleased with the results so far!