Lalani's Pico Upgrade

[cfeist]

Sorry to hear about your missing shrimp, hopefully they turn up soon. I like your FW tank setup, looks nice and the cherry shrimp will really add a nice pop in color, I love their bright red against the green leaves in my tank. Cool betta too... Must resist getting masked gobies...

[Kraylen]

Love the betta tank.... Ive been watching mine everyday with his giant tumor waiting for the day to come

[Lalani]

nice pictures, esp the macro shots...what camera/lens do you use?

Thanks, Canon Digital Rebel XT and Canon 28-135mm IS lens.

 

Sorry to hear about your missing shrimp, hopefully they turn up soon. I like your FW tank setup, looks nice and the cherry shrimp will really add a nice pop in color, I love their bright red against the green leaves in my tank. Cool betta too... Must resist getting masked gobies...

Thanks muchly, unfortunately, I think none of the cherry shrimp are alive either... Charlie saw them as snacks.

I love the masked goby, but I think you would have to keep one by itself or a larger group of 5 or more. Just 3 of them seemed to create aggression issues...

 

Love the betta tank.... Ive been watching mine everyday with his giant tumor waiting for the day to come

Awww, sorry about that. Charlie is a year and a half now and I've grown quite fond of him.

[Timanator]

What is a cherry shrimp? Are you referring to fw Cherry red shrimp or Crystal red shrimp?

 

If your talking about the first one I breed them and you can have as many as you want. just pay shipping.

 

 

Ahh, nice tank and I've been wondering what camera you are using.

 

[disaster999]

Thanks, Canon Digital Rebel XT and Canon 28-135mm IS lens.

 

is that a kit lens?

[Lalani]

What is a cherry shrimp? Are you referring to fw Cherry red shrimp or Crystal red shrimp?

 

If your talking about the first one I breed them and you can have as many as you want. just pay shipping.

 

Ahh, nice tank and I've been wondering what camera you are using.

 

The freshwater cherry shrimp, and thanks for the offer, but it looks like my betta sees them as snacks.

 

is that a kit lens?

Nope.

[FishFreak77]

I just read through the entire thing, and i must say the tank looks awesome! I do have a few questions about your false wall. if the water level got too low, would the back chamber not empty out? Also, is chaeto the only thing you have for filtration? No filter pads to collect debris?

[Lalani]

Thanks for looking! I suppose that if the water level got too low, the back chamber would get low on water but the powerhead is far enough from the bottom that it would not go completely dry. I would worry about high salinity or powerhead overheating in that case, but I don't foresee any of that happening. The only way it would happen is if I stopped topping off.

 

And you are correct that chaeto (along with LR and LS) is the only filtration. I don't believe in mechanical or chemical filtration in my reef tanks. Unless I had something wonky going on and the water was full of junk, then I would use pillow stuffing to clean the water, but I would remove it right after.

[HankB]

Love the betta tank.... Ive been watching mine everyday with his giant tumor waiting for the day to come

 

Is it operable? I had a dwarf cichlid (Nannacara anomala) that developed a large caulliflower like growth on its dorsal fin. I removed it with a sharp knife and cauterized it with a soldering iron. The missing portion of the fin grew back and in the long run, I think the fish was better off for the treatment.

 

As for the Betta eating the RCS... I threw a bunch of Malaysian Trumpets in my planted tank to see if they would survive the loaches by staying in the gravel and found all of my dwarf hairgrass dug up as a result. Grrr... A 5" yoyo is almost as bad as a cichlid when it comes to digging, particularly when a tasty treat is involved.

 

(Apologies to Lanani for the hijack)

 

-hank

[Lalani]

No problem.

[Lalani]

Whew, the tanks survived a 14 hour power outage yesterday.

[lilredneckman]

Whew, the tanks survived a 14 hour power outage yesterday.

I bet that stunk! I hate when the power goes out for long periods of time. I always get worried about my tank.

[Lalani]

Yup, the lights went out at ~2 a.m., so I kept waking up every half hour or so and stirring the tanks. Went to sleep one time and didn't wake up for 4 hours, but everything was fine. In the afternoon, I finally got an extension cord from the generator and into the house to run the koralia nano in the 20H and I used a computer battery backup for this tank. All is well and nothing suffered... BIG RELIEF!

[yardboy]

Looks like the worst of Eduoard is going to the West of you?? So maybe no more outages. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Get some battery powered air pumps. Available from tackle stores and only about $10 each. The run on D cells and will run for over 24 hours to a battery. Keep the water moving and add air. I had 4 in my 150 and survived 2 days. Not much else I could do!

[lakshwadeep]

+1 for battery operated air pumps.

[Lalani]

Heh, thanks you two. I thought about battery operated air pumps at around the 7th hour, but alas, I was not prepared.

Which is silly considering where I live... We tend to lose electricity on sunny days, let alone during storms.

 

And yeah, we're counting on Edouard moving off to the West and hitting Texas instead. It's not much of a storm, but I'm sure it would knock out power for a couple of days. The storm this past weekend had winds of only 30mph.

[nanoty]

::crosses fingers that it hits La::

[Lalani]

::crosses fingers that it hits La::

Now that ain't nice.

But I am a *little* glad it went your way. Last night it looked like it was going to start moving more North than West and we had already has a nice little storm Saturday night. If Edouard would have hit us after the trees were weakened already, we surely would be out of power for a few days.

Ah well, hope you guys are alright!

[nanoty]

Well I typed a huge GD reply but somehow it got effed up so basically I said, "storm wasn't bad, glad your ok, why are you not interested in my thread now that I have water? "

[Lalani]

Cuz I'm jealous that you're getting all the attention....

 

 

I bought a Wii..... does that make me cool?

[Mickle]

Love the thank

The false wall is very similar to what I had planned for a tank of mine, although I was going to put 2 false walls in... riht next to each other, paint the back side of one of them blue then silicon them in next to each other creating a seal all the way round so no water can get in. Hey presto blue glass background!

[Lalani]

Thanks! I also thought about sandwiching two pieces of glass together with paint in the middle, but that would require more cutting and fitting and I'm not sure how well the powerhead nozzle would fit (length) through the two panes.

 

I'm happy with the way it turned out, though. I'll try to get some more recent pics posted soon. The coralline is growing really well on the false wall, but the coralline on the top section of the false wall died from air exposure during the power outage.

[arwndsh]

Well I finally got caught up with this thread and I must say it is fantastic. I am super jealous the feather duster that my sexies killed looks exactly like the yellow one you have. Let me know how the raising the babies works out, my female seems to get knocked up fairly quickly never seen her release them yet though.

[Lalani]

Well I finally got caught up with this thread and I must say it is fantastic. I am super jealous the feather duster that my sexies killed looks exactly like the yellow one you have. Let me know how the raising the babies works out, my female seems to get knocked up fairly quickly never seen her release them yet though.

Thanks a bunch for looking! Sorry that you lost a feather duster because of the sexies.

I've actually taken down the baby sexy shrimp tank, simply because I don't have any time to raise them. Maybe once I start working for myself full-time, I'll have some free time to try and raise them.

 

The initial algae bloom seems to be fading... finally. Also, the front half of the tank was catching quite a bit of indirect sunlight in the morning when the shade was up, so we're leaving it down now.

 

Recent pics:

 

 

 

Big mama cleaning a snail:

 

Green feather duster with a newer, smaller crown:

 

Bully:

 

Brown feather duster and nemastoma (sp?) algae:

 

Hitchers:

 

Coralline and chitons:

[lakshwadeep]

Nice little green feather duster. At first, it looked like the short palm trees I saw in India. I may have missed it, but are you feeding anything for the feather dusters?