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Feel like pulling my hair out with this project…I had set up a future, 20l spawning tank with rain water and 2 ml distilled white vinegar per gallon to hold the PH down until I get alder cones (no fish in this tank currently, fortunately). Like the main tank, the ammonia in this tank was too high, so after doing a water change I decided to encourage a cycle (or at least the proliferation of the duckweed I added to help keep the nitrogen down) by adding a tiny pinch of flakes instead of a couple ml of very microworm rich water…failing to notice the calcium carbonate on the flake’s ingredient label 🙁 Today I found the tank has jumped to a PH of 6.5, prompting me to restart it. The main tank’s PH was at 6.7 this morning…various reasons for that. I think I will also be restarting that tank as soon as I can move the paros to the 5 gallon…for a person that has been seriously considering paros on and off for almost 3 years, this is being a very bumpy start…
Target fed my paros today, as suggested…fed them a mere fraction of maybe 1/24th a teaspoon of BBS egg :O Worked quite well, though the male’s obsessive attempts to court one of the females resulted me in feeding slightly more than planned.
Thank you! On another note…if the male spawns and you can see neither the spawning nor the cave he used, will he show any behavioral differences that betray the fact that he spawned?
OK! Thankx 🙂 I happen to already have some of those eyedroppers lying around for aquarium purposes, so that shouldn’t be too hard to start doing. Need to keep reminding myself that I am dealing with a fish that comes from an extremely nutrient poor environment in the wild 🙂
By the way, how do you culture moina? I’ve heard that some people have enormous success with daphnia, at least, with – curiously enough – hay (which apparently produces an enormous amount of microorganisms they enjoy eating).
‘ello all! I have good news, and I have bad news. The bad news…only a few days after a 40% water change, and the total ammonia is back to 1 ml/l 🙁 Still not 100% sure why, but it’s possible that when I was giving microworms to this tank, I was giving a lot more than I thought I was…only gave microworms once since the last water change, so not 100% sure this is the sole cause, but it’s worth a shot…
On the upside, in spite of my very stupid newb mistakes (water with significant hardness, excess nutrients, etc), my paros are doing fine…in fact, I caught the male trying to court one of the females a matter of minutes ago, and she was paling a bit…maybe she was considering it seriously? I don’t think I will succeed in spawning these fishes until I fix the goofed water parameters, though.
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
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
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.
…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
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?
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).
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…)
OK! Thank you 🙂 They arrived yesterday…they are in VERY good condition, and the male is already colored up. They are eating microworms and bbs.
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.
Thank you! By the way…do you think that there are any substrate-dependant plants that could work in the paro tank? I thought that plant-bolstering substrates were not compatible with paro keeping…however, then I discovered the tonina style planted tank, which similarly requires acidic, very low TDS conditions :). While Tonina itself would likely be a bad paro plant (it needs very bright lights and strong circulation…it comes from the shallows of blackwater rivers in the wild…would need a large tank so that it could be brightly lit on one end and the paros could take refuge in the other when they wanted to get out of the spotlight 🙂 ), are there any other substrate loving plants that would do well if I could find a substrate that would not play havoc on the TDS/PH? (Funny enough, even some forms of a car product called safetsorb would work…it reportedly absorbs nutrients from the water well, barely affects TDS, and is infamous for ‘eating’ KH and GH in aquariums, thus causing PH crashes in normal planted tanks). I was thinking barclaya would be a good candidate, as they naturally come from blackwater environments and are not nearly as demanding as regards lighting.
