Bamboo Shrimp

I have a bamboo shrimp. I went to the pet store one day looking for critters (something besides fish). All they had was a unique little brown guy, called a bamboo shrimp. I found a website that has some good info:

http://www.petshrimp.com/bambooshrimp.html

Here is a photo from the website:

I took him home and put him in the 55-gallon tank. He was kind of interesting, but didn’t do much. The next morning when I came downstairs to feed the fish, the little guy was gone. Lying suspiciously on the floor was a bamboo shrimp sized carapace. I thought at first that he had molted, but since I couldn’t find him anywhere I had to conclude that it had been eaten. I was devastated. Well, I hope whoever ate him enjoyed their little $6.00 snack. Anyway, I figured that’s what keeping an aquarium is all about: experimenting with different combinations of species.

Then about three months later I see something sailing around the tank in long, graceful arcs, finally coming to rest on the top of a log. I knew I didn’t have any fish that size in that tank—just otocinclus, which dart and wiggle. When I took a closer look, I found it was my little bamboo shrimp. I tried netting it so I could put it in the smaller tank (and maybe I’d see it more than once in a blue moon), but it got away and promptly vanished.

I think I’ll name it Hale-Bopp since he appears about as often—every 4,200 years (okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration). Comet Hale-Bopp appeared auspiciously in the sky, two months after my wife and I got married in 1997, a dazzling white smudge, which felt very gratifying after missing out on Haley’s comet (BOOOOO!), a mere, brief cosmic event, a fleeting wonder to behold. Just like my little bamboo shrimp.

Feeding Your Fish

The experts advise that you feed your fish 2 times a day. Give them just enough food for them to eat in about five minutes' time. This is a pretty good rule of thumb--but it differs depending on what you have in your tank and the size of your tank!

When I bought my first 10-gallon tank, I had all kinds of fish--mostly little ones. I overfed constantly. Gradually a layer of scum built up on the floor of the aquarium. So I tried to compensate by feeding way too little. My fish got super-duper scrawny, then started dying. It was a frustrating experience.

Helpful tip #1: I have a small spoon that I use. It's not a measuring spoon because they are too deep. It is more of a toddler's spoon (I have lots of toddlers). Don't use a baby spoon because they are too flat and shallow. I keep my spoon on top of the aquarium, and I feed using that, every day. Because the spoon is shallow, all the flakes lay flat and I have a reliable way of telling how much food I am giving them.

I have found that the five-minute rule is a really solid rule of thumb, however, twice a day in my experience has been a little much. I have lost a lot of fish because of barely overfeeding them. The fish get really, really fat, then the food rots in their gut, then they get sick and die. Very sad. My tank water was very clean, I had no accumulated waste, but I was still losing fish.

After talking to people at several pet stores, I came up with a strategy that seemed to work really well. Feed my fish like I normally do, but reduce the feeding time to once every other day. I decided to feed them on even-numbered days. The strategy worked, and my fish lived. One guy told me that fish can go for quite a few days without eating. I have let my aquarium go over a 3-day weekend.

Helpful tip #2: A fish's stomach is about the same size as its eye. When you feed your fish, you want to fill the stomach all the way. This can be hard to estimate since flakes are flat, but if your fish are about 1 to 2 inches long, they will eat about two large flakes.

The once every other day strategy worked well before I moved. Back then, my 20 gallon tank had zebra danios and silver-tip tetras. These fish don't graze along the bottom, so I had to rely on the corey cats to clean up. Things are very different in my new tank. In my 55-gallon tank, I have angelfish, gouramies, clown loaches and bala sharks. All of these fish graze. They are constantly picking at the bottom of the tank. They eat everything, and they eat constantly. In fact, they graze so much that most of my corey-cats have died. I now over-feed by just a bit, and I feed once a day.

Here's another problem. Suppose you have just a few fish in a huge tank. This can be a problem because your fish might not get to all their food in five minutes' time. Your fish can starve, even though you're over-feeding them. Fish that like to stay hidden are especially prone to this problem.

It looks like the five-minute, twice a day rule is a good starting point, but it really depends on how big your fish are, how many fish you have, and the eating habits of your fish.

Goldfish are grazers. You can overfeed them by just a small amount, and the tank will stay relatively free of decomposing food. Zebra danios and platties are not grazers. If food is on the bottom, they will swim right over it.

Here is a problem that many people have probably run into. Early on, I became a big fan of bio-wheel filters—it is a really cool technology. However, any time you have a filter that sits on the back of your tank and pours water back into your aquarium (like a waterfall), food floats around the top of the water until it goes under the waterfall. Then it gets dunked under water and starts floating around until the filter sucks it up. You will come back five minutes later and find all the fish food gone, but your fish are still really thin, so you feed and feed. Eventually the back of your filter gets super clogged with rotten food because your filter is eating all the food and your fish aren't getting any.

I thought about this problem for a while, and then came up with an idea. I could get a piece of wooden plank (like a 1x10, down at Home Depot). I could cut off a square piece and then use a jigsaw to cut a large hole in it so it looks like a square ring. The ring would float on the water, and I could dump all the food in that. The food doesn't swirl around--it stays in one place, and it stays out of the filter. Cool idea?

Helpful tip #3: Get a feeding ring. Stick it in a spot of the tank where there is an eddy in the surface current, and it will stay there. Don't get a little one unless you have a really tiny tank. Get a big one.

Well, I was browsing at PetSmart one day and found out that someone else had invented that very thing! Cool! It's called a feeding ring. Here's a pic:

It's made of foam-rubber. I thought it would float all over the place and then get sucked under the waterfall, but when I placed it next to the filter, the waterfall pushed it away. Nice! I keep it in a corner of the tank where there is an eddy in the surface currents, and it just stays there. At feeding time my fish got used to going to that corner pretty quickly. They make quite a mess, but not a big one, and it stays out of the filter; and just enough food floats around so that all the fish that like to stay at the opposite corner of the tank get something to eat. Man, I'm a believer in these things.

Helpful tip #4: You can make your own feeding ring by taking a Styrofoam tray—you know, the ones that come with the ground beef that you buy at the grocery store? Using a sharp knife, cut out the bottom, leaving only ¼ inch around each side. Be careful not to break it. This will give you a nice, large, very cheap feeding ring. If you keep the water level in your tank just right, no one will ever know you have a cheap piece of Styrofoam in your aquarium! Reduce, reuse, recycle! :)

My only other piece of advice would be to get a BIG one. They sale all kinds of little tiny ones. Don't get a tiny one unless you have a tiny tank (i.e., 1 to 5-gallon). The bigger ones give the fish room to feed without having to crowd together. If your fish are aggressive, a larger ring will give them less of an excuse to fight or compete.

Red Claw Crabs

I think critters add a lot of character to a tank, and they do some pretty interesting things, too—that is, besides just swim around. I asked around quite a bit and got a whole bunch of advice. In today’s blog, I will talk about one of my favorite critters, red claw crabs.

This isn't the best photo. They are very well camouflaged, and are hard to photograph.

I saw a tank full of these guys at Pet Smart, and bought the biggest one—a lively female. The clerk mentioned offhand that they were semi-aquatic. I figured, yeah, whatever. I’ll just take it home and if there’s a problem, I’ll think of something.

I just love crabs. I love the way they scoot and skitter around sideways on their long, spidery legs. I like the way their eyes are perched at the end of long spindly eye-stalks. I like their massive claws. There is something mechanical about crabs in the way they move and eat.

So, how do you tell if you have a male crab or a female crab? Well, you turn it over (which requires you to hold the little guy with a delicate but firm grip—not easy to do), and look at the under-side. There is a flap attached to what appears to be the crab’s butt, which curls under the body and runs back toward the mouth. This flap is called the abdomen, and yes, it does contain the intestinal tract. On males, the abdomen is very thin, like a pencil. On females, the flap is very wide, sometimes rounded and sometimes triangular, but it is distinctly wider than a male’s.

Well, I put the little gal in my 20 gallon tank, and had fun watching her explore, looking for a place to hide. In the same tank I also had an African dwarf frog. I am not sure if putting the two together was the best idea. I came downstairs a few hours later and found a neat, frog-shaped skeleton lying on the gravel. Mmmmm, someone had a tasty meal!


I know this photo looks suspicious, but in fairness, I had just recently moved the frog into the 20 gallon tank, so it might have died from the stress. Regardless, I would think twice about pairing the two in the future. A quick check on the web reveals that their habits are similar to cray-fish. They are omnivorous—i.e., they eat everything, and they’re not even slightly picky. Don’t mix them with any kind of fish that lives on the bottom.

Red claw crabs like to hide, so if you want to see them regularly, you have two options: buy a bunch (so that there is always one out doing stuff), or don’t put anything in the tank for them to hide under.

Here is a hard, fast rule for any aquarium animal: “If you give them a place to hide, they will”. If you want to actually SEE your critters, don’t give them a place to hide. Nevertheless, all animals need some place to hide from bullies and more aggressive species. There is a fine balance.

These little guys LOVE TO CLIMB. They WILL FIND ANY OPENING in your tank. They can shinny up any hose or tubing that goes from the bottom to the surface of your tank. My crab escaped after just a few days. I was afraid she had gotten out, but eventually I found her hiding under the bio-wheel filter. Be warned, crabs can climb! I sealed off every opening of the tank with half-inch galvanized mesh, and haven’t had any problems since.

Red claw crabs are semi terrestrial. They like to come up for air a lot, so you need a decoration of some sort that protrudes above the surface. I made a platform of wood, 2x3 inches (just a small piece of plank), and attached a long strip of galvanized mesh for a ladder. Now the little gal has safe, easy access to the surface, and she can’t get out. She spends lots of time up there. I attached the bottom of a can so she has something to hide under.

Here is a link I found on the web. Apparently red claw crabs do better if you add a pinch of salt. This is a website of a pet shop. They have lots of interesting info.

http://www.aqualandpetsplus.com/Bug,%20Red%20Claw%20Crab.htm

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.