those look expensive

These are the expensive fish:



This is the bedroom tank

looks awesome bud, wish i had the dedication for a discuss tank like that. How often do you do water changes and how much? I know some people do 20-50% daily which is ridiculous dedication

About 30% every three days. They are in a 55 gallon right now with Aqueon 75/90 and Marineland 250 filters, so it is a 55 with enough filtration for a 180 gallon aquarium Yeah they are finicky. When I go into my room I announce myself and say hello before they see me. If they see me and I surprise them they shoot everywhere and slam into things...heater, walls, Buddha...I worry they'll hurt themselves, poor little things. A couple of them are pretty new and they haven't settled in, and they get spooked and its time for the whole herd to run

I have a nice pylon so the water changes are pretty easy. After messing with the big aquariums the little 55 is fast.

But they'll get more confident.

I more or less cut video games out and took up aquariums. I always enjoyed my cats and enjoyed my plants, and aquariums, when you get the more intelligent fish, mix those things, because I get to do cool things like tie java ferns to driftwood and manipulate the CO2 in the water and all that and it is fun, and then the fish interact with me and enjoy it. Some fish are much smarter than others. I've noticed my flowerhorns (red cherry and red texas) and my biggest blood parrot are much smarter than the rest of them. The Green Texas is smart too...he disagreed with my decision to try out 30 little tiger barbs in the tank, because people say they're tough little bastards or whatever....they're almost all gone now No more of that. I have a couple tinfoil barbs in there, but they're going to grow to be huge and a pain...they might have to go...the three of them are three feet of fish in a 150 that could be a much cooler fish. I'll give them to my LPS in a couple years.

This post was edited by Skinned on Oct 29 2015 05:55am

So my biggest blood parrot, Frankie, bit me a bunch of times last night. No marks but it pinched.

He has always been so friendly!

So it turns out that the Buddha statue my wife loves and bought at a LFS was bought from a place that intended it to be used as a lawn decoration. This wasn't disclosed but I remember him telling me about it anecdotally when asking about another giant concrete Buddha statue he has in a 75 gallon hex.

Well....since putting it in my discus have started to turn gray on the fins from stress...my pH started shooting upward of 1.0 per evening. There were a lot of changes at once and our water here is hard and has high pH so I wasn't sure if it was a buffer issue or something adding to the baseness of the water. After a couple weeks of adding sulfuric acid to keep the pH under control somewhat (still shifting between 7.5 and 6.5...many thousands of times more acidic and back up) and changing variables to see what is causing it, it turns out it is the fucking statue.

End result: The red marlboro, the big peach, the yellow pigeonblood in the bottom left, and one of my smaller snakeskins are dead. Others are stressed and hiding behind a big anubis bush so enthusiastically that they've actually dug a sizable hole from pushing each other in there. They've become so jumpy that they slam into the walls and heater etc whenever I go near the tank.

I've gotten the pH under control and it is in a reasonable range for them...could be lower but the shock of it moving around would shock them more if I lowered it any more today...plus I'm on on sulfuric acid so I'm just going to monitor, add stress coat, and keep the room dark and quiet for a few days and hope that no more of them die.

Aside from sentimental attachment, the marlboro and peach were over $100 each and the other smaller ones were $40-$60 a piece. I know there is no recourse, but I spend a lot of money at this particular LFS, and I'm really curious how he is going to react when I tell him this. He is a capitalist, so he might just decide to fuck people for money like most of them do, but he could warn people about them as well, or post a sign saying "use Buddah for Mbuna, Malawi Cichlids, or other fish that prefer high pH!" because raising the pH doesn't make it useless for fish tanks. I just wonder what else it is letting out into the water.

Now I'm torn between doing a massive water change because the water might have something in it, or keeping a tank full of water at the perfect temperature, at the perfect parameters for once in a long time, that is 0 ammonia 0 nitrite and 0 nitrate. I think I'm just going to leave it alone.

I've been around too much fish death. I'm going to walk my dog.

super pretty!

Omg that sucks dick, I'd shove that statue up that assholes asshole. If that happened to me shit would break my heart cuse my fishes have literally become one of my favorite hobbies.. I hope the rest of the discus recover, probly should do partial water changes daily for a week (not a big one as they are alrdy stressed). Imo

Action shot of one section of the big tank.

The Trimac flowerhorn in the front is about handsize for scale.

This post was edited by Skinned on Dec 10 2015 10:33am