The Fishy Project continues

As is probably easy to guess, I have been busy with the new fish tank. It's fun work though. =) Here's the current view from what has already become my favourite spot on the sofa.

As you can see it's still quite unfinished, but it's getting better every day. (Excuse the thermometers here and there - there's a new heater in there and I want to be able to easily check that it's doing its job properly.) I thought I'd show these work-in-progress photos as well, to see how the aquarium develops.

For the tech-curious: the blue thing in the back left corner is the biological filter I built, a so-called Hamburg Mattenfilter according to these principles. It's basically a cylinder with a bottom, made of blue foam and containing a water pump. I made one for another tank 5 years ago and it's worked well, although for this I changed the design a bit.

The first few fishies were moved today: a twig catfish (Farlowella sp.), a red-finned or rainbow shark and a bunch of upside-down catfish.

This guy or gal, called Red-Eyes Jr, is the red-finned shark. There's only one because they get very territorial as adults, but s/he's still quite young and seems rather social - s/he's quite taken to the catfish and likes to swim along with them around the aquarium.

Here's a couple of the upside-down catfish. As the name says, the swim mostly upside down which looks awesome. :D They're also lively and really fast, they can swim from one end of the 160 cm long tank to the other in just a few seconds. I was actually quite pleasantly surprised that they have been happily swimming around even with the lights on, I didn't expect that. There's 8 of them now, but another 7 should arrive this weekend, making a decent-sized group of them.

That's all the photos for now, more coming later I bet!

(Aaaaand finally an obligatory fish safety bulletin: if you're setting up a fish tank from scratch, adding fish this soon is not a good idea. Fish produce nitrogen compounds that turn into ammonia/ammonium, which is poisonous to the fish. In a mature aquarium, the ammonia/ammonium is quickly changed into nitrite (a litte less dangerous), which in turn is changed to nitrate (fairly harmless). All this is done by certain bacteria, which need to be grown in the tank before fish can be added - this process is called "cycling". In this case, I moved over not only the fish from the old aquarium, but also the mature filter, some sand and decorations - all of which contain the "nice" bacteria that are mentioned above. I'll also be checking the nitrite & nitrate levels regularly just in case, so the fishies will be safe.)