Walstad Goldfish Tank Update June 2009
Here’s how the tank looked at the start of May after pruning:
There hasn’t been much of a change this past month in the tank. I’m putting that down to nutrient output being balanced with plant uptake for most of the month, at least as far as Nitrates go.
I did a water test yesterday and got a reading of <5 Nitrates, 7.6ph and 12deg of kh which I'm happy with.
Now that the plants have settled my focus is on the algae that has colonised the tank in dribs and drabs. I've got green algae attacking the plants and black beard algae in random patches on the gravel bed.
A week or so back I took out one of the t5 55w HO tubes from the twin reflector that I use at the back of the tank, this dropped my watts per gallon from 2.5 down to 1.6 which I'm hoping is enough to keep everything happy and lower my algae a bit.
I did have a sad start to the month losing Tiger. I went on holiday for four days and when I came back she had a small white fungus spot on her.
She was fine for 3 days and then began to bottom sit and was dead within 24 hours. Given that the fungus cleared and didn’t come back I’m assuming the recovery was too much for her or something else might have been happening internally.
It was slightly depressing seeing as I’d had her for a while now and she was the biggest goldfish I had with the longest tail. She’s been perfectly healthy since I got her and then goes and gets sick as soon as I go on holidays.
I’ll miss watching her eat my plants.
Patch has also developed a bit of what I think is swim bladder disease (ie. it’s not working). He’s always been an extremely weak swimmer since I got him and he balances a lot on his head. Now he can’t seem to control his floating properly and spends most of his time near the gravel where he can balance himself better.
He’s eating fine and still swims about so I’m not too concerned at this stage.
I got two new goldfish mid May and had them sitting in quarantine. I have just recently added them to the tank and they seem to bet getting along with everyone. A jet black moor and a orange/white oranda. I’ve wanted an oranda for a while now and couldn’t resist this one’s big mouth.
I also got two albino bristlenose plecos to help the other two brown ones in the tank eat away some of the algae.
I won’t be doing any pruning on the tank this month, here’s what it looks like currently:
September 27th, 2009 at 9:25 am Peta(Quote)
Just had to add that my old fish had swim bladder problems for about 5 years before the death, and was as happy as Larry, feed well, and managed the top of the tank for the food ration. So long life your your baby yet. PK