I purchased the fish at 18.01.19. Earlier I have furnished a 54 l fish tank with gravels and aquatic plants. Two weeks later the fish moved in.
I didn’t want to force anything, just observe and see what happens, what ideas come up, familiarize myself with the fish, and gain aquaristic experiences. The tank is in my living room and so I can see it from the desk and can make occasional observations.
Step by step I got more fish, also some colourless mutants. In November 2019 there were 13 in total. I was feeding them with ordinary flake food and sometimes frozen mosquito larvae. The vegetation changed slowly with time but all in all the system seemed to be stable.
becoming familiar
To become familiar I learned how to identify individual fish. For example, this is hook:
hook is a small fish. I think it is a male. He and leopard were the little ones. Apart from the size hook can be identified by irregularities of the the stripes [close to the gill cover].
fish tracking:
In order to learn about the fish’s navigation I followed individual fish with pen on paper [3 min].
experiments
In November 2019 I started some experiments.
I wanted to learn if the fish would swimm through a tube or could be trained to do so. I started with a short tube.
They swamm through it, although not enthusiastically. When I put mosquito larvae in the tube all of them entered.
I installed a longer tube and deposed mosquito larvae .
Not all fish entered. The experiment was conducted several times and 5 fish turned out to be the most frequent visitors of the tube.
That was not to their advantage. They first got obese and later lost appetite and weight
calamities
oszilla, a female, was one of the eager eaters. The two images show the same fish. Time difference: 6 months
The aquarium has apparently lost its balance. I tried small adjustments; slightly raised the water temperature, increased the water flow, cleaned the ground and panes, made water changes. But none of the measures were really successful.
Four fish died. pale, ecaille, white and at the end oszilla.That made me sad and I still can’t tell what’s going on. The water parameters that can be checked with a test strip were all in the regular range. oszilla died at the first of April.
