Tag Archives: live

Some homemade cement/oyster shell aquarium rocks curing in rock salt water. UPDATE 1/22/2010: These rocks are still not fully cured. The pH still goes alkaline in a couple days. I’m not sure this idea of homemade rocks is going to work but probably just takes more time to cure. I have changed about 20% of the water and continue to check and adjust the pH using some sulfuric battery acid (new, not used). If this does work it will be way cheaper than buying the live rocks and doesn’t damage the world’s coral reefs. If it doesn’t work maybe the rocks can be put in a flower bed or just smashed up for driveway fill. If and when the rocks are fully cured I plan to seed them with a piece or two of live rock from another tank. I have already added small amounts of ammonia to simulate fish wastes to feed the good bacteria. A good link I just found about making and curing homemade live rock is: www.reefs.org UPDATE: 2-6-2010 The pH has finally quit changing. It is not cycled yet. The nitrite is high so that should mean that the bacteria are working on changing the added ammonia into nitrite. I haven’t checked the nitrate yet. I added more brine shrimp eggs and have a lot of them in this tank now. I also added a clump of chaetomorpha macro algae to seed the tank with some more life and to help with nitrite/nitrate levels. Also, my other tank had a lot of this algae and I needed to remove a bit of it anyway. This curing tank is not arranged how I want it so I will eventually be …
Video Rating: 5 / 5

Betta fish dancing for each other. I don’t get around to respond to all/most comments, but I’ll try to answer what I can here. This is a male and female mating pair taken from a neglectful owner who purchased about 50 betta fish with the intent to breed them for profit and could not care for them. They were kept in tiny plastic containers which caused them a great deal of stress. Once they got in my tank, they did wonderfully. The male is flaring to show his interest in the female, and soon they were taken to a mating tank where he built a little bubble nest and they had their fun. I got the tank from PetsMart or PetCo, can’t remember, and it came with a divider. I no longer have fish (this was filmed years ago). If you have problems with your fish, I recommend Googling for answers. One plant is real, the others are soft and gentle plastic, and his fins were damaged before I got him. Both fish were imported from Asia via mail. The filter was gentle enough to not bother either fish and had no current, and in fact they really seemed to enjoy it. I fed them frozen bloodworms and gave dried brine shrimp as treats, and sometimes even regular tropical fish food as treats, too.