Since I Last Blogged ...

A few updates since I haven't posted in months.

I lost my red cray when she climbed out of her hospital tank and took a scenic tour of my apartment.  My electric blue cray is still kicking, albeit with only one arm despite molting again.  I gave away a huge batch of baby crays during spring and summer but to the best of my knowledge only one is still around.  If my blue ever dies I'll consider investing in one of the cherax species with big, club-like claws.  For now that tank is seriously overloaded with fish, snails, and seaweed, and my blue cray isn't doing very much to police his tank since winter is already here and he's feeling sluggish.

In my big tank, I've added a couple new cory cats, a suckermouth catfish, and a small school of tetras, plus lots of new super fire red shrimp and tiger shrimp.  I've started to learn how to tie moss down on driftwood and my first two experiments are now "developing" in this and another tank.  My biggest challenge thus far is getting the shrimp to mate.  I've decided that I don't have enough long mosses, just flat, slow-growing ones.  Shrimp like to be able to hide in the moss, not just walk over them.

My hospital tank (formerly the baby cray tank) has been changed into a wild Neocardina and snail breeding tank plus fish relocation home.  The fish in there are hardy, even the one-eyed(!) mini green barb (at least that's what I think it is) and I really ought to give them their own aquarium soon.  Since the hospital tank has higher PH I'm hoping that my Sulawesi snails can produce some successful babies before their shells are eaten to death.  The shrimp, on the other hand, aren't doing so well.  You can buy them in massive batches here in Tianjin, which means massive dieoff once they get into any tank at home.  Every day turns into a dead shrimp fishing exercise.

And now some quick notes:

• My girlfriend successfully bred her Robo hamsters and is looking to breed them again after finding a few hamster-homes for the first litter.  We lost one male a couple months after his birth but the rest are doing strong, especially the females.  I've suggested mating the original mom and dad again plus buying a new male next spring to mate up with all the girls from the first litter to avoid diluting their genes very much.  Robos are social hamsters and we have a large cage for the females and a medium-sized cage for the males.
• In other Robo news I recently bought two platinum Robo hamsters for my girlfriend and they, amazingly, are the only Robos that will sit still in your hand for a few minutes.  This pair we also hope to mate and build two final colonies of regular and platinum Robos.
• We've added another chinchilla as well, a female, but we won't be housing her with our male chin until spring of next year.  She's a bit of an odd one.  Having them together means we get to hear a wider range of chin squeaks and barks.
• I've observed that buying dogs and most exotic warmblooded animals is considerably more expensive in China than in the US.  On the other hand, if prices here are any indication, the aquarium side of my hobbies is ten times cheaper in China than in the US!

Summertime Blues

My biggest project so far this month has been to rebuild my crayfish tank into a Volcamia-mud powered clean UGF tank instead of using the powerhead-and-basket filter combo. After removing the not-very-cooperative inhabitants and cleaning the tank, I dropped in the UGF, strapped on two uplift tubes, and connected one to an in-tank powerhead plus the powerhead-and-basket (with some active carbon slipped into the filter). I added a one-pound bag of crushed coral to help the crays with their calcium and then topped everything off with the Volcamia, which is just awesome stuff.

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.

Weird, Wild Shrimp

Bamboo Shrimp Feeding from Matthew Stinson on Vimeo.

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. 

July Is the Cruelest Month

For some reason known only to God and/or the universe, the creation of this blog coincided with the death of several pets.

Several of the fish in my 60L tank died in rapid succession this week, including two forktail rainbowfish and one of my cory cats. After the "plague" hit, one of my neon tetras turned gray and swelled up, balloon-like. I've isolated it in a hospital tank but I'm afraid the whole lot of fish have gotten so-called "neon tetra disease" or something similar.  Their shrimp tankmates seem unaffected.

Besides the fish casualties, one of the Roborovskii hamsters my girlfriend was raising -- a female -- died of something that looked like "wet tail," but the amount of information about "Robo hamsters" and their diseases are pretty sparse even on today's Wikipediafied Internets.  We're observing the male to see if he stays healthy, but he seems pretty down without his girlfriend to play with.

A Hobby in Search of a Blog

I've been blogging off-and-on for 9 years, and most of my writing online has focused on the expat experience in China, the US political scene as well as international politics, and some day to day musings.  I haven't left a lot of room thematically for all of my hobbies, however.  This is probably because readers expecting posts and Tweets that slice and dice Chinese economic news or pinpoint a president's successes and failures aren't likely to enjoy a sudden foray into discussing barbecue rubs or camera filters.

But my hobbies are still important to me and they do tie in, in part, to the Florida Cracker-in-Mao Zedong's Court experience.  Enter this blog, which will look at one of those hobbies -- raising various kinds of pets as a foreigner in a Chinese city.  In the US, keeping pets is a bit of a no-brainer: you do some research, go to the mall or find a dealer online, and bring your pet home in short order.  China, on the other hand, presents a set of unique challenges to the pet owner, including:

• The language barrier.  Raising pets is not a focus of most Chinese language study books nor is it the kind of thing students will consider in their HSK prep.  This is kind of a shame, because for most expats, keeping a pet is a good way to fight homesickness and make our often-spartan apartments seem more "lived in."  Like other hobbies here, finding and caring for a pet requires a willingness to learn language as you go along.  Remember the first time you walked into a restaurant in a foreign country and pointed to dishes and asked what they were called to learn the language?  That's what I do when I go pet shopping.
• Animal health.  We often talk about the Chinese health care system having disadvantages, but the animal health care system is arguably worse.  On the front end, many animals are sold to their new owners with life-threatening diseases and conditions, resulting in either immediate death or lengthy, sometimes expensive, medical care and possible recovery or a delayed death.  But even if you're lucky and your pet is okay today it may have trouble tomorrow.  While animal hospitals have started to appear throughout first- and second-tier Chinese cities, most vets specialize in dogs and cats and have little knowledge about exotics, leaving many buyers at the mercy of the pet store owner.  If you take things into your own hands and do the research, home treatment is possible but also problematic, owing to the next challenge ...
• Supply.  The Chinese pet market is developing as an offshoot of the rise of the Chinese middle class.  The more money and more time and less children -- thanks to that pesky One-Child Policy -- that Chinese people have, the more they are willing to turn to pets for entertainment and company.  Now, it should be noted that Chinese have been keeping small dogs and goldfish for thousands of years, but the last two decades have seen a remarkable diversity in the kinds of pets Chinese can choose.  And yet many of these pets are sold without good enclosures or the correct dietary products available in the market, not to mention proper medicines!  Beyond that, the high demand and low availability of certain pets means that Chinese -- and expats in China -- must pay a premium for all but the most common forms of dogs, cats, birds, and fish.

At first glance it might seem like I'm down on the idea of keeping pets in China.  Not at all.  I'm simply mindful of the kinds of difficulties that one will face when investing anywhere from a handful to thousands of RMB in a pet in China.  I'm not a hardcore pet buyer -- I save most of my money for photography gear -- but I've invested a few thousand over the years, so I'm always on the lookout for ways to protect my investment, er, pets, and find new scaly, furry, or fine-feathered friends to acquire and care for.

With this front matter out of the way, let me talk briefly about why I've started Critters at an Exhibition.  The twin functions of this blog will be to serve as a guide to raising pets in China and as a pet diary of sorts.  Here's a little backgrounder on the kind of animals I'm raising now as well as their facilities (note that my hobby is heavily slanted towards fishkeeping):

• Two 2-gallon betta tanks with HOB filters and a few snails and shrimp to clean up the place.
• One 10-gallon crayfish tank with a small school of tiger barbs, a pleco, a mix of large snails and some shrimp to keep the crays company.
• One 20-gallon tropical fish and shrimp tank with about ten small tropical fish, a few nerite and mystery snails, a small colony of red cherry shrimp, some Amanos, and a dwarf crayfish.  This tank formerly housed a colony of crystal red shrimp but they were pretty much annihilated by the summer heat.
• A 3 gallon nursery tank with 30 or so baby crayfish who are rapidly growing -- and feeding on each other.  Yikes.
• A small turtle tank with two young yellow-eared sliders.
• A pair of hamsters experimented on cared for by my girlfriend.
• And, lastly, a six-month old male chinchilla named Mao Mao ("Furry" in Chinese), who is as cute as he is unsociable.