Unfortunately, this renovation comes a little too late, since the tank already crashed late last month. I lost one cray, my shrimp colony, and one tiger barb. My red cray has been infected with a fungus and lost one of her claws with the other on its way out. I wound up having to remove a set of her limbs to avoid further infection. The big blue cray has molted twice in the last month (one normal molt plus a tiger barb carcass-powered molt) but is still down one claw.
Obviously I'm hoping that the rebuild will save the red cray but if she goes down I may try to find a home for the big blue and buy a pair of Australian yabbies instead. Regardless of the fate of my crays now I'm going to stock their tank with a few shrimp next month plus a couple snails once the algae growth returns.
Other highs and lows:
- When buying chinchilla bathing sand, fine powder (like ash) seems far more effective than grainy sand at keeping chins clean. My little guy has been getting murdered by the humidity in Tianjin and his fur was looking pretty ratty until we switched to the powdered bathing sand that my girlfriend found on Taobao. Taobao 1, local pet shop 0.
- Speaking of Taobao, I'm lusting over this chin cage, though it almost seems like too much.
- In my main mixed fish/shrimp tank I lost a couple of cory cats, a couple of shrimp, and my dwarf crayfish, so I added a cory, two female guppies (one is a guppy, the other an Endler's -- both were given free), and 2 dwarf plecos. I also threw in some "fire red“ shrimp to improve the color of my red cherry shrimp stock, plus a gold mystery snail (love those snails) and a "mated" (?) pair of dwarf crays. Since this pushes the bioload I added a sponge filter attached to a powerhead and a top filter basket that was built into the tank but went unused once I added the UGF. I figure this tank will be good for another six-seven months before a monster teardown in spring.
- A side project in July and August has been to find homes for all the baby crays my red cray had in spring. (An extension of this project has been teaching people how to raise crayfish.) I've still got a handful of crays left. The biggest white one will be relocated to my main cray tank and a few more will be given away. The baby tank itself will be refurbished with a UGF once I get around to it.
- Lastly, I cleaned up my office space at work and made room for a little desktop betta tank: a Penn-Plax Bow-Front Double Betta Tank. It's better than a common betta bowl and considerably cheaper than the fish themselves.
