Hobby mashup

 While the SO and I were on holidays this summer, we came across a few funny little stores that combine several of my hobbies: A shop that sold both sewing machines and bikes (above), and a bike store that was in a space formerly occupied by an aquarium store (below). I guess they decided to keep the old sign and just add their own store name!

I finished a cross-hobby project recently as well, a fabric cover for my bike seat.

The cover is not for saddle protection, but for pants protection: I made the unhappy discovery while biking the other day that the black leather saddle can leave stains on my clothes, especially if I bike too hard in the sweaty summer heat. Since I was on my way to to sewing store when this happened, I was able to sew up a quick solution before I biked home. Now that I have the pattern, I'll probably use it to sew up some waterproof seat covers as well when I find some appropriate fabric.

Woah!

So you know how I've been struggling for months now with a ridiculously green tank? Buying flocculants and changing the lights schedule and doing everything I could think of to get rid of this nasty floating algae infestation? Today the tank lights pop on in the morning to this:


Woah! Okay, it's not clear by any means, but it's also not thick pea-soup green that makes it impossible to see my fish three inches away from the front of the tank (and really, that linked picture was not the worst of it -- it was pretty bad for a while there). I don't know what happened in between yesterday afternoon and this morning, but I'm damn pleased to be able to see my fish again. The plants are looking a little worse for wear, which is understandable since they've been fighting for light with the algae soup for months. Maybe now they'll have a fighting chance!

I'm going to consider this a good omen for the weekend. Happy friday, folks!

RIP, Nemo

Advance warning: This post is about fish euthanasia. So, if you don't want to read a sad post, this one's not for you.

I had to put down one of my fish today. My sweet vegan SO doesn't particularly want to listen to me talk about fish euthanasia, so I thought I would blog about it here.

The fish in question was named Nemo. I don't ordinarily name my fish but this one came to me already named, by way of friend who was moving out of town and needed to find her fish a new home. So, Nemo joined my tank in 2008 and has been living there happily ever since. A few months ago she started changing color, with her scales getting slightly darker. I wasn't too concerned about this since she still seemed to be eating and acting normally. I figured this might be the fish equivalent of going grey, since she was getting up there in fish years.

Yesterday Nemo didn't come up to feed, and when I looked around in my (still green) tank, I found her near the bottom, floating at an odd angle. She wasn't dead, but she seemed to have lost the ability to right herself and was pale and not moving around very much. I thought it might be best to leave her since there wasn't any infection or anything that I thought I could treat, but today I saw one of the other fish picking on her in the tank. That's not a good way to go. I considered setting up the spare tank I keep as a hospital tank so that she could die in peace, but she seemed so listless and weak already that it seemed like euthanizing her would be the best option.

It's been a while since I've had to kill a fish, so I did some research on methods over at Wet Web Media. I wanted to make very sure that I was using a method that would be effective but not painful. I opted for using clove oil to anesthetize Nemo (since I had it on hand), followed by freezing. The combination of these methods seemed to be the best way to address the limitations of each: Some people said that clove oil alone was difficult to use because it was hard to tell when the fish was really dead or just anesthetized, and opinions were mixed on whether freezing a conscious fish actually caused pain. I used the clove oil first, waiting ten minutes or so until there was no visible movement, and then put the container in the freezer to ensure that Nemo didn't wake up.

I'm pretty sure Nemo died of old age (I'm guessing she was at least three years old, which is fairly old for a platy), but even fish deaths of natural causes still get me down. I guess it's inescapable part of owning any kind of pet, though.

So, RIP Nemo. You were a hearty little fish. Nemo is survived by one offspring, a small but fast orange male platy who's still alive and well in the tank.

White outside, green inside

It's been lovely and snowy here the past few days. Normally I'm not one to celebrate snow, but when I'm inside writing anyway, it's kind of nice to feel all cozy and snowed in. We got a really insane amount of snow a few days back, as you can see by the half buried cars on my street!

While it's all white outside, it's all green inside my tank. Boo. What I thought was a bacterial problem has now shown itself to be definitely not a bacterial problem. The tank is now fully, insanely green. Like, I can't see the fish if they're halfway back in the tank green. Big sigh. I guess this is what the WetWebMedia people mean when they tell you that killing off BGA with antibiotics isn't really going to solve the problem.

I'm a bit at a loss for what to do here now. I've still been doing weekly water changes, but do I do more? Less? Fertilize or no? Add a flocculant? Opinions are so mixed on what seems to be the source of the problem. Generally, most people seem to think that when you get a bad algae outbreak, it's because there's an overabundance of one type of nutrient, or a lack of another type that prevents the plants from actually being able to make use of the nutrients properly. I know it's not an excess of nitrate (can you say ZERO nitrate?). It could well be phosphates, but I don't have a kit to test for that. I'm tempted to keep adding fertilizer in case the limiting nutrient is something like iron, but it could be that I'll just be making more algae soup. Another tidbit that I found from the interwebs is that algae don't grow as well in blackwater conditions, so I could try adding some blackwater extract, which would probably be nice for my fish anyway. For the first year of the tank it was probably a little full of tannins from the driftwood, so maybe this kept me from having problems before.

For today, I think I'll just do a water change and be patient. But I'm setting the timer on this one -- if the tank looks this bad by March break, I will 1) do a 50% water change, 2) add flocculant, and possibly 3) add blackwater extract. It sucks majorly not even being able to see my fish.

Cloudy fish

Poor fish, nothing seems to be going right for them these days. I seem to have nixed the algae problem... I still have some hair algae and stuff growing in there, but the antibiotics really did clear up the nasty BGA. Now I have new weirdness in the tank, though:
Cloudy water. WTF? I honesty don't know what's causing this problem. A little interweb research suggests that the main causes of this problem could be diatom blooms, overfeeding, or bacterial blooms (usually from cycling a new tank). I'm definitely not overfeeding (fishies have been down to a once a day feeding schedule since the BGA problem happened), and diatoms seem unlikely given the color of the cloudiness. I'm thinking this must be bacterial then, perhaps a side effect of the antibiotics or something. Maybe my bacterial colonies are reestablishing themselves post-nuking.

The fish are looking fine and don't generally seem to care, but just to make sure I tested all the levels today when I did a water change.
Ammonia: 0
Nitrite: 0
Nitrate: 0
pH: 7.8

Looks pretty good. The lack of nitrates may eventually be detrimental to my plants, but for now they seem to be doing fine. The water sprite is even showing some new growth, which is very encouraging. I did a 20% water change and a bit of algae removal, but nothing else. I guess I'll sit tight with the cloudiness for a few days and hope it resolves itself.

Bacteria attack

Okay, I finally broke down and did it -- I put the antibiotics in my tank today. I've been hesitating on this for a while, because I really don't want to cause some sort of disaster that would end up taking out all of my fish along with the bacteria, but my SO pointed out this morning that my plants are starting to look really sad. And indeed they are. My water sprite, which was once so prolific that it was nearly taking over they tank, is now all but dead, and my java ferns are getting totally sad and brown looking.

So I dosed the tank today, with as many precautions as I could think of -- I cleaned out as much junk as possible by hand so it wouldn't foul up the tank when it died, did a 20% water change, tested the levels (nitrates down to 5pmm this week, and the freakin' BGA continues to grow!). I also took out the bio-beads from the filter and stored them in a little tupperware container of tank water in the fridge. I don't know if the bacteria will actually survive for five days this way, but I figured doing this really couldn't hurt. The other filter media should have more than enough bacteria to keep the tank going, and if the antibiotics take those bacteria out this might work as a backup plan.

Nothing to do now but sit back, cross my fingers (or press my thumbs) and take the levels tomorrow AM. Send my fish positive thoughts, and my BGA very negative ones....

Supplies for destruction and construction

Much as I enjoy being a hermit in the winter, even hermits eventually have to leave to get supplies. First up, a trip to the pet store to get some supplies for destroying blue-green algae (BGA). I've been having BGA wars for the better part of a month now and am starting to get really annoyed about it. I've had my share of algae in the tank so far, but surprisingly no BGA, so I was pretty unpleasantly surprised to find a BGA bloom when I put in some new lights in December. Two weeks ago, I did a huge water change and scraped a whole bunch of it out by hand, and last weekend I did a 25% water change and more gunk removal. It's not as bad as it was, but my plants are still getting covered and beginning to look a little worse for wear. So, here are the supplies for my two-pronged attack:
I've decided to give the BGA one more good cleaning, and see if this will help things, and I also bought some clearmax to remove phosphates/nitrates. The nitrates are not particularly high in my tank at the moment (around 10ppm last week when I tested them), so this is probably going to make my plants pretty unhappy, but hopefully it will make the BGA unhappier. If the BGA is still back with force next weekend, then I'm going to consider just nuking it with some antibiotics. My friends over at wet web media advise against this, and I know it's a little risky, but we're getting into last resort territory here. Doesn't this BGA know I have a dissertation to write?

I also popped by Michaels to get some sewing notions, notably some loops for the tie back on the vest that I'm making:The fabric is a really awesome linen with teal and peach threads in it, and I'm going to make it into a vest and pants outfit. I thought I could use a little break from the quilt again and do a quick and easy something that I could wear around, and so I cut the vest out last night. I also wanted to try at least one vest before I draft one for my top secret project, which I will reveal soon! Amazingly, I managed to walk out without purchasing all kinds of stuff that I only kind of need, although I was sorely tempted to get a new Olfa cutting mat. I probably will break down and get one at some point, maybe Joanns has one of those nice 20% off one item coupons out.