ROOM TOUR #1: Meet dem Pets

So, today I shall do a tour of the plants and fish in my room; it’s the first in a series of room tours I’ve decided to do! This marks the third little miniseries on this blog, the other two being Favorite Creatures (a list I post at the beginning of every month of my favorite animals I wrote about last month) and KoC Facts (short articles with a snappy title, such as KoC Fact: Stings to the Brain Really Calm Bugs Down! and KoC Fact: Grunions are Piggies in Fish Form!).

So anyway, I have three tanks—my sister’s 10 gallon hexagonal tank (dimensions: 7 inches on the sides by 16 inches tall), a 20 gallon high tank (dimensions: 12 inches wide, 24 inches long, 16 inches tall) and my sister’s 2½ gallon bowfront-style tank (dimensions: 8 inches long by 12 inches tall by 4 inches wide). Yep, I keep all my sister’s fish in my room. :)

First, the bowfront-style: it has blue gravel, two rocks (including a Hakkai seki rock from Japan), and a few artificial plants. Here’s the shy Siamese fightingfish (Micracanthus splendens) who calls the tank its home:

He’s extremely shy and his name is Tracks.

Onward to the 10 gallon! It’s got some silver sand at the bottom and is kind of overstocked; our mistake! :) It’s decorated with a fake Amazon swordplant, a fake “GloPod™” plant that glows in the dark, a large fake shell, some fake bamboo, and a ceramic sign that reads, “No Fishing!” Yep, everything’s fake. Sorry.

Here’s my rainbow shark minnow (Epalzeorhynchos frenatum), who I keep in the 10-gallon because he’s much too aggressive for my 20-gallon community—wait, two of the fish in the 10-gallon are mine, like the southern platyfish (Xiphophorus maculatus).

Here are the two skunk loaches (Syncrossus morlet) squabbling over something, maybe some food—who knows? They’re skunk loaches. A green GloFish tetra (a genetically modified blackamoor tetra, Gymnocorymbus ternetzi) looks on.

What, you may ask, do I feed my fish? Simple question to answer; all my fish (except the Mastacembelus circumcinctus) eat these:

Left to right (prices are from Amazon.com): TetraMin® Tropical Flakes ($13.59), Wardley® Shrimp Pellets ($3.49), Wardley® Cichlid Crumbles ($5.36)

Stocking in the 10-gallon (seven fish in all)…
2 GloFish™ tetras, one orange and one green
2 skunk loaches
1 rainbow sharkminnow
1 southern platyfish
1 goldfish (Carassius auratus)

And on to the 20-gallon!

My 20 gallon is PLANTED! It has 10 different rocks on the right side of the tank, and a large piece of driftwood spanning the entire length of the tank.

Here is my freshwater angelfish (Pterophyllum scalare), Seraph:

He’s a beautiful animal and is full of personality. Also, I have a bronze cory (Corydoras aeneus) and a spinecheek loach (Pangio kuhli), which you can both see in the next picture, hiding under the driftwood…

Look closely in the back of the cory, and you might see that striped head—that’s the loach!

Here are some aquascaping materials I decided to photograph:

In case you didn’t know, aquascaping is like underwater landscaping. It’s cool.

Here’s my larger Java fern (Microsorum pteropus), with the two of the three rummynose tetras (Hemigrammus bleheri) in the background:

Look by the doorknobs, and you can see the tetras. I apologize that my door is in the way and you can kind of see the reflection of my hands holding the camera…sorry about that, folks!

Here’s my “rock garden,” home to the famous ten rocks mentioned before in this article, and some schooling fish—the rummynose tetras, a lonely cardinal tetra (Paracheirodon axelrod), and my mated pair of cherry barbs (Pungti titteya):

To close is a picture of my golden creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia ‘Aurea’):

Stocking list for 20 gallon:

1 Mastacembelus circumcinctus
1 common freshwater angelfish
3 rummynose tetras
1 cardinal tetra
2 cherry barbs
1 spinecheek loach
1 bronze cory
1 orange finned loach (Yasuhikotakia modestus)
5 stalks of lucky bamboo (Dracaena sanderiana)
1 Amazon swordplant (Echinodorus amazonicus)
1 golden creeping Jenny
1 guppy grass (Najas marina), plus countless guppy grass clippings
2 Java ferns

Thanks for reading!