Our Fishies

Playlist

2007-01-11T14:57:00.000-05:00

Here are some videos of our fishies. You can choose from the list on the right. Or you may visit our channel on YouTube. We also have a group on YouTube. If you want to join, please follow the link or send us an e-mail.

Convict Babies

2007-01-10T00:33:00.000-05:00

These little Convict Babies are only two months old. We separated them from their parents to prevent them being eaten. They are getting closer to a half inch.

Albino Oscar, the Pink Beauty

2007-01-07T21:52:00.001-05:00

In this tank, we have a beautiful albino Oscar. She is pretty small yet, but pretty active and certainly a voracious eater! Whenever we get close to her tank, she starts dancing and begging for food. A beatiful fish to keep and fun to watch and feed!

This photo is taken when our Albino Oscar shares her tank with our Red Tiger. At some point, we had to put Oscar and Red Tiger in the same tank. To protect Oscar from RT, we had to put a divider.

Oscar tries to swallow a pellet that is too big for her.

Gang of Bandits

2007-01-06T22:18:00.000-05:00

Jaguar (Monaguense) and Red Tiger (Motaguense) in the same picture

They seem like very good friends.

Jack Dempsey, Bright Colors

2007-01-04T17:21:00.000-05:00

His colors change quite a bit depending on his mood, the angle of the camera or the lighting.

Lady in Red

2007-01-03T21:50:00.000-05:00

Red Devil's Mansion

2007-01-03T01:21:00.000-05:00

This is our 4-foot 55g tank that houses our 8" Red Devil cichlid. First of all, this is one mean cichlid that does not like any other tankmate (except convicts, more on this :)). He is our most personable fish (maybe with our smaller albino oscar) that behaves like a dog! whenever he sees you, he starts dancing, comes to the surface of the water, and does some cool tricks. That being said, he does not like to see human hands in the water, whenever he sees one, he swims towards it to take a bite! Imagine how difficult this makes doing water changes, or gravel cleaning.

He is one big redecorator. No matter how you decorate your tank, one day later you will see him redecorate the whole thing. He moves the gravel to different parts of the tank to make big hills, reaches the bare bottom of the tank to take a peek at the compartment below the tank to see if we left any food for him down there, and he shreds our precious fake plants to pieces (real plants, you can't even imagine keeping them in a Red Devil tank)

Can you see his teeth?

He is a messy eater as well. Some might say a 55 gallon tank is too small for an adult size Red Devil. Ours has not reached his adult size yet, and looks like he is really enjoying his tank. In the future we might look for a slightly bigger tank for him. We have a powerful filtering system for this tank as well. We put two HOB filters that clean about 700 gallons of water per hour. That means all the water in the tank is filtered and cleaned about 13 times every hour. We frequently test the water parameters, and they seem optimal all the time.

Feeding Red Devil

Right now he has two tank mates: two convicts that we put into his tank and thought would be eaten immediately. Well, that did not happen. He seems to have a tolerance towards them. He does not mind seeing them swimming around, cleaning his mess after each feeding. The convicts are small, probably he does not see them as a threat. And they have ample hiding places as well.

Chasing after Red Devil

Family Photo

2007-01-03T00:43:00.001-05:00

Here are the four beauties sharing a 110g tank. 10" Oscar and the 7" Jack Dempsey have been living peacefully together for about three years. The 4" Red Tiger Cichlid (on the bottom) joined the family 3 months ago. The latest addition is the small (3") Jaguar cichlid, who has been bothering our 5" Albino Oscar in another tank. The Red Tiger (Motaguense) and the Jaguar (Managuense) will not be in this tank for long, maybe 2-3 months the maximum. The reason is that these two fish get really aggressive as they mature and probably would kill their more senior tank mates or each other. They both belong to the Parachromis family which are known to be really aggressive. They will get their own tanks as they get bigger, and will have to get used to living solitary lives :)

More about the tank. We use two Emperor 400's for filtration, lots of air bubbles and a Aquaclear 802 powerhead for surface agitation and water movement in the tank. We do frequent water changes and use Python Vacuum gravel cleaner to clean the bottom of the tank, as these fish are really messy eaters :) We usually feed them with Hikary gold pellets, but they occasionally get treated with earthworms, shrimps, and feeder fish that we raise in a separate tank. They are pretty active, but they don't usually fight. As its size suggests, Oscar rules the tank. Occasionally it chases the JD, but JD escapes all the time and no aggression occurs. We used to have a Convict in the tank before we introduced the little Jaguar, it was about the same size as the Red Tiger and they kept fighting for territory. They rarely liplocked though, they usually showed off to each other and one gave way until the next confrontation. We decided to take out the Convict and put him in our Red Devil's tank. He is doing fine there, for some reason our Red Devil has a tolerance towards convicts (more on this later)

At different points in time, we tried introducing giant danios into our 110g for more action. These little fellows swim really fast, and they are usually recommended as "dither fish" that keep the attention of aggressive cichlids that otherwise would fight each other. They are really difficult to catch, when we got them from the LFS, there was this unlucky girl that tried to catch them. It happened to be her first day in the job, and because of us, she looked like she hated it already (we got 6 danios and she spent about 15 mins to catch them!) Anyway, back to our tank. In our case, we just wanted to get our fat Oscar to move more, and we put 6 giant danios in the tank. Well, they could last only for a week, as the Oscar hunted them one by one. It turns out our chubby Oscar was not slow after all :)

Our Fishies

2007-01-02T22:21:00.000-05:00

This blog is dedicated to our fish. We have four tanks at home. The inhabitants of the biggest tank are a Tiger Oscar, a Jack Dempsey, a Red Tiger (Motaguense), a Jaguar (Managuense) and a Pleco. A Red Devil and two Convicts live in a separate tank. An Albino Oscar is the only fish in our third tank. And we have lots of baby Convicts in a smaller tank. We will share their stories, photos and videos here. Enjoy!

You may also want to check Flickr for more photos or YouTube for videos.