Tenney Times: Spring is in the air!!!

Ain't it pretty?!

So we bought this fish tank with our tax refund in March. Jimmy really really REALLY wanted to get a saltwater tank with tons of "cool" fish. Like any good mother, I mean wife, would do I told him he could start small and once he proved that he could take care of the simple fish and not kill them off, we would talk about getting a bigger one. Well we met in the middle by getting a fresh water tank with Cichlids....if you are like me, you have no idea what those are!! Cichlids are carnivorous fish, they can be very aggressive and are very finiky about their Ph level and water temperature. We began by asking the petstore "fish specialist" which ones could live together(because they kill each other!) and which ones were the easiest to keep alive. She pointed us in the direction on Black Convicts and Oscars. She said to watch the bigger ones because they may start picking on the smaller ones and eventually kill them. Oh great!

We took our fish home and put them in the tank. 2 Albino Ocscars and 4 Black Convicts.

We noticed immediately the difference in sizes between the two breeds, and even within the 4 convicts. We also noticed the coloring on one of the convicts was a little different. It was more gray and less bright than the other three. We decided to just keep an eye on them and see what happened, this was a test right?

A few weeks went by and we noticed that two of the black convicts were staying to the top of the tank, each time they would move, they would get chased back to where they were. I knew right away they were being bullied and felt horrible. I also noticed that the Oscars were keeping to themselves and one of them was starting to get a messed up fin. We decided to move the tank out to the living room to show it off. Two days after moving it, the Oscars died. We went back to the pet store and asked the lady what we could have done. She said a lot of time the cause of death in Cichlids is nothing you can do, it is just stress. Moving them, being bullied, ICK, Ph inbalance, you know, fish stuff lol.

We decided to check our tank and treat it for ICK thinking that must be our problem. Still the two convicts stayed to the top as the other two(one of the bold black ones and the lighter more dull one) owned the place. With in weeks the two weaklings were gone too. Now I was starting to notice that "dull fish", that my sister in law so nicely named RaRa, was starting to form an orange cirle on the side of her body. "Great, once these are dead, I'm done!" is what I thought. If Jimmy couldn't keep these alive how was he gonna do saltwater fish?!

We then moved from our condo to the apartment and the apartment to the house. Both of us secretly hoping these two would just die already so we could start over. A few weeks after getting the tank set up at the house, I noticed that RaRa was being a little weird. She wouldn't really eat and she was hiding in the rock a lot more than usual. We also, by this time, purchased two crabs to help with the algae in the tank because they brutaly murded our placostamous. Not only was RaRa hiding but Fred(the name given also by my sister in law) would chase off the crab everytime he would crawl anywhere near the plant. We figured she was just sick and Fred knew it so he was just trying to be a gentlfish and let her die in peace.

About a week later, we had gone out for a little swim at about 8 at night. Walking by the tank I thought "wow, we need to clean that, it's looking pretty bad!" As we were coming back in Jimmy stopped to turn off the tank light as I continued down the hall. All of the sudden I hear "OH MY GOSH, BABE COME HERE!" I thought something horribel had happened or that our dog Lola had gotten into something so I rushed back down the hall. He was standing in front of the fish tank, mouth dropped open and finger pointing. I looked in the tank to try to understand his freak out thinking again, "yeah maybe you should clean it every once in while, then it wouldn't look like that!!!" Then I saw it! At least 300 tiny tiny TINY specks were swimming around our tank. "BABIES, she was protecting her eggs!"

All the events of the last week had finally made sense. She was hiding and not eating because she had just laid eggs inside the rock, Fred was attacking the crab as to keep him from eating the eggs and the other crab was stuck in the rock hiding because he was forced to stay in there.

Now what to do with 300 fish!? I started reading up on it and everything/everyone said to remove one of the adults, some said the male, some said the female. We took the one that was not guarding the babies. We put it in a smaller tank along with the isolated crab. We have been told it is hard to keep baby cichlids alive because sooner or later the parent(s) will eat them. So far it is has been 3 weeks and they are growing strong. As far as I can tell none of them have died or been eaten. Once they are big enough to eat pellets and not just flakes we will either try to sell them or take them back to the pet store. When fully grown, they can be up to 6" in length, my 35 gallon tank is NOWHERE near big enough for 300+ of them!