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The fish had been in quarantine a number of weeks before shipping out and were already colored up a week or two before I purchased them (and they were shipped about 3 days after I bought them) 🙂 And this in less than ideal water. I thought having additional fish other than the pair would result in the ‘extras’ eating any fry produced? The tank, as stated, is a half filled standard 10 gallon/38 litre, 45 cm by 25 cm by 30 cm (the water is only 15 cm high)
They have arrived 🙂 No pics, sadly (that will have to wait until I get a micro sd card for my phone), but all three are in very good condition and the male is already far darker than either of the two females. I will be feeding all three of them BBS later today.
GUESS WHAT????? The male, as of yesterday, has started courting the females! He’s a real spaz about doing it…I was under the impression that paros are calm, retiring fish, but this male (affectionately named ‘Huffy’) seems to believe that everything needs to be done at light speed (when he goes up to grab air for his implied bubblenest, he looks like he is going to go into orbit :O) His colors have darkened…in particular, his fins are jet black, to the point that it is often hard to see the blue in them. Unfortunately, his cave appears to be in the back of the tank…if he succeeds I won’t be seeing much of him for a while…
On a side note…I once also saw one of the females grabbing air. This confuses me…I’m assuming she is not building a bubble nest, and there is nothing particularly wrong about the water conditions (temp around 27-28 celcius, PH 5.6, conductivity somewhere around 30-35 microsiemens…don’t know water hardness, but it couldn’t possibly be high enough. NH3 is negligable, although there is a significant amount of ammonium, NH4 – about .5 ppm: wouldn’t think that is enough to bother the fish, though…)
Just used an online ammonia calculator, and with the current ph of 5.6 and total (NH4/NH3) ammonia concentration of .5 mg/l (or .5 ppm…they’re the same), the NH3 concentration is only 1.4 * 10^-4 ppm NH3, toxic ammonia…guess that’s definitely not the problem…The total ammonia would need to be extremely high before that became a problem (some 34 times the current value would be required before it exceeds the EU standard for NH3 in drinking water…about .005 ppm).
I thought the EU legislation says 0.5 ppm AMMONIUM for drinking water, and that it actually means TAN (Total Ammonia Nitrogen) ? If that is the case, then your 0.5 NH3/NH4+ equals 0.39 ppm (NH3/NH+)-N. For the low pH, I have disregarded the tiny amount of NH3-N.
Anyhow, I do not think it is correct to assume that NH4+ is “non-toxic”. I have seen aquarium fish suffer long time damage from exposure to such low levels. But of course, the damage would be much worse if it was NH3.OK! Just in case I decided to put a small air filter in with established media from one of my other tanks.
On another note…Wednesday, 4 days ago, I set up a bucket with rabbit pellets and rainwater to get mosquito larvae for my paros. How long will it be until mosquitos start laying eggs in it? And what will they look like?
You’ll have to wait until green water developes, the smell of such water attracts the mosquitos. The start can be seen as small “rafts” of brown/dark eggs, then you’ll see the larvae moving in the water. After a while you can observe them hanging head down from the surface. That’s the time to harvest them.
Hey,
And the temperature also plays a major role. Her in Belgium the weather is very bad at the moment. Unfortenately no mosquitos!
…the tank is turning into a disaster 🙁 I did some water changes Friday and added a filter, but doing some tests today revealed that the total ammonia had jumped from .25 ml/l after the water changes to 2 ml/l in only 2 days! Did a 40% water change in response, but I am extremely frustrated…feels like nothing is going right in this tank 🙁 🙁 I guess I’m lucky the paros aren’t dead yet
Hi A.J.,
perhaps I overread it, but I can’t find any informations about what you feed your Paros beside microworms at the moment. Arthemia? Or dried food?
Or do you have many plants in the tank, which don’t like sour water and which are dissolving themselves?
There must be something in the tank which causes these many degradation products.Artemia and WAS feeding microworms. However…I’ve decided to stop the microworms for now, as the paros don’t seem to enjoy eating them. I’m guessing I’m feeding too much and will be resolving that…I will now be feeding 1/16th teaspoon artemia every other day and nothing the other days until I have other foods the paros actually consume (this trio doesn’t seem to eat nearly an eighth of a teaspoon of artemia). The bottle filter has yet to produce any noticeable nitrate…not a good sign 🙁 Maybe too little air going into it? Anyhow, after 40% water changes yesterday the total ammonia read out at .5 ml/l (implying I misread the test kit…that still means 1 ml/l total ammonia was in the tank, though 🙁 ) Until I figure out how to keep this tank reasonably clean, I will be doing 40% water changes twice weekly. There are thriving water sprite and java moss in this tank, so not sure why they seem to be absorbing so little ammonia.
I assume you feed living, fresh bred arthemia? And the “spoon” is just an example for your measurement???? (I can’t imagine to feed living arthemia with spoons … that would only be possible with dried, dead anthemia …)
I wondered about that, too…fresh artemia naupli can’t be ‘spoon-fed’. A half teaspoon of fresh naupli would be gross overfeeding, and would foul the water. I use a long pipette to direct the naupli at the fishs’ hiding places.
I was feeding them the brine shrimp that hatched from an eighth of a teaspoon of eggs…which might still be overfeeding them 🙁 These fish are really difficult to keep track of and target feed with leaves…I am really considering replacing them all with small terra cotta pots, as unnatural as that looks. Even the 16th of a teaspoon of artemia might be too much if I could target feed them better
In other news…today I found an issue of amazonas dedicated to licorice gouramies, and one of the articles was about their wild habitats. Quite a few of the wild habitats had absurdly low conductivity levels…one P. deissneri habitat had a conductivity of 4 microsiemens! More pure than my distilled water after it comes out of the distiller :O Not all the habitats were quite that brutal, of course, but quite a few of them were still considerably softer than the 20 microsiemen minimum listed on this site. Makes me wonder if it is safe to go that low with aquarium (and especially wild caught, which are presumably more used to it) specimens…
Oh, here’s the link (I think it may be linked to the parosphromenus project anyway, but oh well): https://www.parosphromenus-project.org/attachments/article/192/AMAZONAS%20Licorice%20Gouramis.pdf
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