Comings and Goings

Most of the time I go to a nearby pet market in downtown to buy pets and aquarium supplies, but of late I've started considering Taobao -- the Chinese eBay -- as a shopping option.  Now, I don't think Taobao is a wise choice if buying a high-end pet.  If I was going to get another chinchilla, for example, I'd go to a local dealer instead.  But for supplies and pets it seems like a good choice.

The point of this exposition is that I found a nice Taobao dealer here in Tianjin and ordered a smattering of shrimps and plants and picked them up in-person across town.  He has some very cheap red cherry shrimp and some very cool bamboo shrimp, which are a pricey ($2.00 a pop) and rare item.

Now back to that pet market.  My girlfriend and I bought a female hamster to replace the one we lost, and we did a kind of stupid thing -- we didn't pay attention to the seller as she grabbed it and tossed it in the box.  We ended up with a bum hamster.  She was a poor little thing, with both of her ears nicked and hair missing from her nose and neck.  Once it got home it closed its eyes and sat in one corner of the cage, not interacting with the male.  I took it back the next day and the seller -- who, n.b., we've bought from for nearly a year -- insisted it the hamster was hurt by our hamster (yet these open wounds miraculously healed overnight!) and refused to exchange it, offering me a separate cage to keep it in instead.  I wound up buying a new hamster and crossing the shop off my "frequent visit" list -- another win for Taobao I suppose.

When we picked up that hamster we also bought a cute-ugly (cugly!) freshwater aquatic turtle, who, at adult size, could easily fit into a closed hand.  I have a number of tanks it could be kept in, but my girlfriend decided after advising the laoban (store owner) that the turtle would be just fine and dandy in my crayfish tank.  This was a mistake.  The crays terrorized the turtle for one day, with the final act being a darkly comic scene of a crayfish "flying" through the water holding the turtle from behind by its front legs.  The turtle was not amused.  He promptly died the next day upon relocation to a cray-free environment.  Thus always to turtles.

Aside from serving as a Taobao evangelist, this week's main project has been to teardown both of my fighting fish nanotanks and replace the HOB filters with UGFs and Volcamia shrimp sand.  The end result is a couple of much cleaner, quieter tanks, but also too much current for my older fighting fish, Dazi, to take.  The young white one I have, Diamond, seems to have adapted well, but all the environmental stresses may push the other one into early "retirement."  Problem is, finding a filter head smaller than 5W to use on the UGF.  No can do here in Tianjin.  Still, I'm getting faster with aquarium teardowns and rebuilds and hope to follow-up on this work with a renovation of the cray tank, which gets diatomlicious in no time.

Coming soon -- a video of that bamboo shrimp doing his bamboo shrimp kung fu.