About time

I have a bunch of photo-related stuff to post, mainly from clearing out my closet full of crap and heading down to Ada for a couple days for Sarah and her mom's college-type graduation of fancy book-learnin', but for now, here's the one that I can get done in a few minutes with a handful of pictures. I'm lazy; that's how these things work. But anyway, I finally got some fish for the 14 gallon tank.

Freaking out in the bag

I'm still undecided as for what'll be the main featured fish in there, (leaning toward guppies, but that's subject to change) so for now, I went and got myself a cleanup crew. These two are otocinclus catfish, basically the freshwater fish keeping world's perfect engines of algae removal. Unlike the plecostomuses, (plecostomi?) which are mysterious poop-factories who never seem to actually eat algae, (or even algae wafers) yet are constantly taking a dump at all times, and more often than not turn into tank-busting behemoths, these dudes eat algae like crazy and stay small. And unlike Chinese/Siamese/etc. algae eaters, (usually just labeled as "algae eaters" in the store) otos don't grow into vicious little shits who'll suck a hole in the side of any fish big enough to get a grip on, and pretty much work and play well with others.

Chillin'

I've needed something along these lines for a while, because with all the excess plant-growing goodness that my fancy $25 gravel put in the tank, the algae has been running wild like Hulkamania, and while I can scrape that stuff off the glass, it's not so easy to get off the plants. And the shorter plants in there have been looking nasty lately, all with the brown algae from starting the tank and these gross little worms that apparently dig on said algae, but not enough to actually remove any of it. And an oto is gentle enough of a suckerfish to not shred your leaves when they take algae off a plant. Real service-oriented fishes. For the worms, pretty much any normal free-swimming fish out there will polish those off, so they'll get theirs in due time.

NOM NOM NOM NOM

Overall, though, I'm having to be cautiously optimistic at the most for these two since I added them to the tank, because there's one huge problem with these fish: Otos die like crazy. The way they catch them in the wild screws them all up, they acclimate to a new tank really badly, and half the time, they're starving in the pet shop's algae-free tanks. I'm hoping for the best, because the place I got them from is a way more seriously fish-oriented place than the normal chain stores, where they seem to actually give a shit about the fish and know how to take care of them, and these two fishes I got seem to have too much of an algae-gut to have been starving. Still, I'm holding off on naming them for now, to make it less of a bummer if I have to flush one of them, although I can guarantee that if I can ever tell them apart, one should end up being named Otto.

Anyway, check back in a week or two for an update on the alive-ness of these two, plus possibly pictures from a quarantine tank full of their future neighbors.

I just spent like an hour scraping algae out of the fish tank.

And there's still some in there, but I think I need to seriously start thinking about putting a fish or two in there. Meanwhile, in the 2-gallon, it's business as usual.