Returning From Vacation

Well, I don’t think I lost any fish this time around. Cool! Both of the automatic feeders were totally empty, though, and I have no way of knowing how long the food supply lasted. Maybe I should have had my sister in law check on the containers and refill them. I’ll make a note of that.
Another other thing I learned about automatic feeders is that they don’t work too well with flake food. The flakes seem to get jammed in the opening as the drum spins. As a result, sometimes a little tiny amount gets dumped, and sometimes a great big amount gets dumped. I tried working around this by crunching up the flakes into smaller pieces. That seemed to help.

I also tried a mix of flakes and shrimp pellets. That worked, too—kind of. This is going to require a little more experimentation.

In retrospect, I would advise setting things up a couple weeks in advance and using the feeders to do your normal feedings. That way you can see how long the food lasts, and you can make sure your fish are getting enough. If the food isn’t coming out right, you can try new things. It is nice to eliminate all the guesswork before you are rushing off to wherever.

Now that I am back I think I ought to do a water change. This is probably good advice for anyone returning from vacation. If you used an automatic feeder and you have it set up just right, you are probably okay. However, if you had a friend or a neighbor kid come over, or if you used one of those plaster weekend feeders, you should definitely do a water change. Go through your tank, clean out all the dead fish, remove all the moldy debris, and scrub off all the algae. That should restore the tank to normal.

BTW, I don’t leave the light on when I go on vacation. If you have live plants and you are worried, you might get a light timer, but as long as your aquarium is in a well-lit spot away from direct sunlight, your plants should be fine for a couple days. None of the live plants in my aquarium were affected by the lights being off, and I was away for 8 days.

Going on Vacation?

I am planning to leave on an 8-day vacation to see my parents in Oregon. In the past, long trips have always been disasterous for my fish. I have usually been able to get someone to come over, but they either over-feed the fish, or they forget then overcompensate by over-over feeding... Every vacation I have come home to find 2 or three fish were missing. One vacation I lost five. That was in the early days.

So today I thought I'd talk a little about feeding and vacations, and tell some of the things I've tried that work. I've tried a lot of things and gotten advice from lots of places, so let me go through the options one by one (presented in order of worst to best):

• Weekend feeders. These are little things made of plaster of paris and they have food mixed in. They dissolve over time and your fish swim by and pick the food off. Man, they make a mess. Use these if you want, but you should definately do a water-change when you get back.
• Sinking pellets. These work better. They will accumulate a layer of mold on them, but the fish seem to be able to pick around the mold. You'll have to clean up a little mess when you get back, but it's not bad.
• Hire a kid from your neighborhood. It's a risk, especially if they don't have an aquarium at their home. kids forget, too--remember that. Then they feel guilty and over-feed.
• Ask an adult friend. If they don't have an aquarium of their own they are about as bad as a kid. If they do have an aquarium, you are much better off, but remember, people forget.
• Just let your fish go hungry. This works for two or three days. That's what I find the most reliable--sorry to say. It's the least hassle and works the best for 2-3 day vacations.
• Automatic mechanical feeder. You can get really expensive ones and really cheap ones. All of them allow you to adjust the amount of food that gets dispensed. These work with dry food only (no frozen food)!

So I went out and bought a couple mechanical feeders. The expensive one has a programmable clock, and I can set it to dispense up to eight times a day. It works really well. I bought another one that only cost $12.00. It just dispenses every 12 hours.

My programmable automatic feeder

Both of these feeders work by a rotating drum that has a hole in one end. There is a sliding door that allows you to adjust the size of the hole. The important thing to remember is that you should experiment. Don't just pop in the batteries and program your device, and take off for a week. Make sure you do a couple of practice runs so you can be there when things go wrong. You want to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Here's one final piece of advice that has nothing to do with feedings, but is farily relevant to vacations. If the weather outside is cold, be cautious about turning your thermostat down too low. I went on a week-long Christmas vacation in 2005. I got a friend who was very experienced with aquariums to feed my fish. She came over one day and the house was very cold. All my fish were grouped in a tight little school around the heater and the water temp was in the low 60s.

Most heaters have a maximum range that they can raise the temperature. The range is always relative to room temperature, and is (I would guess) around 15 degrees. That means if you lower your thermostat to 50 degrees, then your heater will heat your tank to 65 degrees. This is not what you want. You'll have some pretty cold fish. When you buy a heater for your aquarium, try to find out it's maximum range. If it has a range of only +10 then make sure your house thermostat is set no lower than say 65 degrees.

My Favorite Habit

I decided to start this blog to record my personal experiences with keeping freshwater fish. I have been doing this now since 2001, and I've had a lot of fun. The purpose of this blog will be to record my observations. It seems like there is something new to learn with every species, and the number of interactions between all the possible tank-mates is infinite.

In addition to this blog, I maintain a secondary website that has more detailed information about my findings and observations: http://www.feralnerd.com/fishblog. If you go there, you can find more detailed information grouped by subject and broken down by category.

Keep in mind, the material I post on this blog and on feralnerd.com represents my own personal observations and my own personal experiences. Do not rely on my findings as your sole source of information. I recommend you collect opinions and observations from many people, and not rely on my stuff, alone. Also keep in mind that I bend or break the rules a lot. I like to experiment and try things, because that is how you learn, and that is where some of the more interesting things happen. You will find me doing lots of stuff that the experts warn you not to do. I have found that the experts (whom I do respect) don't always have complete information, and sometimes they have wrong information. So while I have the money to burn on my favorite habit, I'll bend the rules whenever I feel like it. If anything interesting (or bad) happens I'll definitely let you know.

That said, here's a little info about me, and what I like to call "my favorite habit":

I got my first aquarium sometime around 2001. I started by getting a book, titled "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Freshwater Aquariums," by Mike Wickham. It's pretty decent. It told me everything I needed to know, and I'm surprised to find myself going back to it so many years later. I started with a 10-gallon tank, then got a 20-gallon tank from a friend. My latest tank was set up earlier this year, and it's 55-gallon.

The first important thing I learned about keeping an aquarium is the cheapest thing you'll put in your tank will be the fish. I was shocked. Just setting up my first 10-gallon aquarium I spent close to $350! There was tons of stuff I needed:

• A cover for the tank
• A light
• An under-gravel filter
• gravel
• decorations
• Some realistic-looking fake plants
• A rock (you'd be surprised how much rocks cost)
• An attractive piece of bog-log
• A big cave-thing
• an air pump
• a bigger air pump
• a bio-wheel filter (the undergravel filter wasn't cutting it)
• an aquarium stand (I used a sturdy little TV stand that I found at Fred Meyer)

Let me just say, if you're thinking about starting up, don't be proud. Get everything second-hand that you can. Most of the stuff you can beg/burrow/buy second hand will look just fine once you clean it up. The best place to find stuff is at garage sales. Craigslist has lots of stuff, too. Scavenge everything you can.

I managed to get the 10-gallon tank for free--my parents had been keeping gerbils in it, and hadn't used it in a long time. I cleaned it out and filled it with water to make sure it didn't leak, then made sure no one was emotionally attached to it before swiping it.

My second aquarium setup was given to me. A friend found a 20-gallon tank with all the equipment (even plants and gravel) at a garage sale for $5.00. He thought of me, bought it, then just gave it to me. Kind of cool. It cleaned up really nice, and I was able to move the 10-gallon tank to my office.

Last Christmas I bought a 55-gallon tank. That's been fun. I have a little money to burn now, and I have been going to different pet stores every couple weeks or so to get something new.

Over the years I have kept all sorts of fish, from goldfish to gouramis (my favorites). Here is my current setup:

Tank 1 (55-gallon)

• 5 angel fish
• 3 clown loaches
• 1 red-tailed shark
• 4 bala sharks
• 2 corey-cats
• 3 otocinclus
• 2 yellow gouramis
• 2 pearl gouramis
• 1 opaline gourami
• 3 fiddler crabs (2 males and a female)

This is an active tank, and fairly aggressive, too. I was worried about the otocinclus at first because they are so docile, but they spend so much of their time immobile that the other fish just leave them alone. The opaline gourami is the alpha fish. He's a lot smaller than some of the others, but he's definitely the one in charge. The red-tailed shark is the longest. He spends most of his time hidden (unless a bala shark wanders too close to his lair). All of them spend their time shooting around, chasing eachother. Very nice.

Tank 2 (20-gallon)

• 6 zebra danios (still a favorite after all these years)
• 6 blue mickey-mouse platties (very cool)
• 1 mystery snail
• 1 apple snail
• 1 red-claw crab
• 2 very tiny, baby angelfish
• 1 goldfish

This tank used to be full of goldfish. I originally bought the goldfish to start the cycles for the 55-gallon. After it had stabilized, I had the goldfish start the 20-gallon tank. By then they had grown on me, so I decided to keep them. They all changed color. The biggest of the group (who I call Lenny) started out green and turned brass-colored. Another one that was orange and white turned pure white. There were some others that each had a brown blotch along their back, and they all turned pure orange.

Last saturday I got rid of them, donating them back to the pet store. I kept Lenny--he's quite a prize. I want to see how big he gets. The others were kind of boring. Goldfish are fine for kids, but I just never found them interesting.

You know, people everywhere will tell you not to put goldfish in the same tank as freshwater tropicals because the goldfish won't do well in the warmer temperatures. That may be true, but sometimes you learn the most when you bend the rules a little. Lenny grew to about 3 inches long since I got him in January. His tank stays around 73 degrees. In all fariness, two of Lenney's original tank-mates stayed their original size. Others grew, but only got a little bigger.

Speaking of goldfish growing, I was told that goldfish will only get as big as as the size of the aquarium you keep them in. I read somewhere else that was not true, but the problem is the quality of the water they are kept in. If you change the water religiously, they should get very big. One fish doesn't make a very accurate sample set for experimentation, but I'll try keeping the water clean to see how big Lenny gets.

I learned recently from Lenny that goldfish are very peaceful. On my scale of 1 to 5, I would have to put goldfish at a 1. I tried putting him in the 55-gallon tank with the other big fish. I figured, "hey, he's huge. They'll leave him alone..." Not so. One of the yellow gouramis went after him, "hey, I'm the big yellow fish in this tank, mister!!" A couple hours later when I checked on the tank, Lenny was hiding down in the weeds. He reminded me of bad, bad Leroy Brown who "looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone." Poor big, dumb, peacful Lenny--I named him after the George Steinbeck character from Of Mice and Men. Lenny's caudal fin looked like the fringe on a lace doily, and he was missing several scales all over his body. Man, not good! He does fine now, back in the 20-gallon tank. He doesn't bother anybody. Eventually he'll get big enough that he'll eat the danios, but by then maybe I'll have a koi pond he can live in.

Anyway, that's all I'm going to write for today.