Marine Tank -- Fish ( Bicolor Blenny--Ecsenius bicolor )

Newest addition to the marine tank-- a Bicolour Blenny !! Chanced upon it when popping by the LFS... been looking for it for quite some time... $6 for an active and healthy specimen, just had to grab it... settled well into the tank on the first day and getting out to feed plus chasing the jewel damsel should be a good sign its doing well... Supposedly easy to feed and helps control/ consume some algae...


QUICK STATS
Bicolor Blenny -- Ecsenius bicolor
Minimum Tank Size: 30 gallons
Care Level: Easy
Temperament: Peaceful
Reef Compatible: Yes
Max. Size: 4"
Color Form: Blue, Orange
Diet: Herbivore

Marine Tank -- Porcupine Puffers (Diodon Holocanthus)

The ultimate mix of cuteness plus unique-ness ( at least to me...), the fish I always wanted to keep in a marine tank. Took the chance to grab whatever I could lay my hands on once my marine lfs had stock.. scooped up 5 pieces of babies no more than 2cm.. Darlin' was also bought over by their super cuteness at this size.

Cycled a new tank for a week, with water and sand plus a hammer coral from my seasoned tank and once water conditions were fine we picked them up and brought them home... They each had their own unique personality that we could identify with them together with their nipped fins/ body markings-- the one with perfect fins chasing everyone else was "BULLY" and had to be confined solitarily...sadly the rest succumbed to infections from the bites and "BULLY" was left alone... My water was not as good as I thought it was and the tank couldn't cope with the bioload of bacteria from their slime and a dead body I determined... The lack of liverocks for filtration and thin layer of live sand from my less than 1-yr old "reef-tank" was not enough.. Lessoned learned the sad way...

The one bad thing about my fishkeeping ways is impulsiveness for stuff/fish less often seen and the buy-first-consider-later bad habit I still often regret doing.... Trying to rehabilitate myself by putting their pictures on my desktop to remind me of the cruelty I have done to them helped though...

Even so, they remain a very "prized" pet for me in the future. I hope to have a special tank with enough rocks and caves for them to steer clear from each other and keep them to palm size. For now, shall just focus on one marine tank and make sure it doesn't come crashing (in the integrity and stability of the system that is).

Diodon holocanthus

Common Name: Porcupine Puffer
Other Common Names: porcupinefish; Long-spine porcupinefish
Family: Diodontidae
Distribution: Worldwide; Tropical Oceans
Water Parameters: Temp: 23-26C (74-80F); pH 7.9-8.4
Personality/Temperament: Agressive; Hunts and searches for food
Max. Size: 19 inches (50cm)
Estimated Lifespan: ~15 years
Sexual Dimorphism: Unable to discern difference between genders using external features
Diet: Live and frozen foods (not fish), freeze-dried krill, frozen shrimp, squid, clams and other molluscs and crustaceans. Feeding and Diet article
Care: Not suitable for reef tanks - will nip at corals and other invertebrates. Keep in a well-established tank, preferrably with live rock. Larger tanks are better, for territory and water quality reasons.
Breeding: Unknown
Minimum Tank Size: 120 US Gallons (450 liters)
Links to Other Resources: D. holocanthus profile on Fishbase

(healthy) Aquariums -- an ecosystem for fish

Now, keeping an aquarium is more than just putting a fish into a body/container of water. It is about understanding the needs of the fish to be kept and meeting them -- just as a human needs to keep warm, have shelter for security, food for life-sustainance and health etc. It isn't that complicated really. Just like understanding that a cat needs water, appropriate cat food, a scratch pole and a cosy corner ( or even a bed ) for it to rest.

A typical house for us is just a shelter, just as the hamster cage is for the hamster. The environment inclusive of plants, air, light etc is what makes it complete ! Straight to the point, an aquarium is ideally a small habitat created for the fish as close it is as possible to the environment they come from. How would you feel then, if placed in a glass box with no bed, no furniture, water and food being occasionally dropped for you, leaving you to eat/ sleep in the same place as u "do your business" ??!

"Appropriate" is the key word to keeping any pet happy, healthy and long-lived rather than just keeping it alive: -

Specifically for fishes :

Water == It means much MORE to the fish than fresh air and a clean environment is to us. It is essentially what they live in, eat in, sleep in (not forgetting excreting in! ). Heavily chlorinated water or even dirty water equals to us being enclosed in a smoke chamber and forcing us to drink sewage water. We have a chance of escape, and a choice of spitting out whatever tastes bad, but fishes are trapped in whatever water conditions we put them in, unable to escape. They cant talk or complain, much less cry for help ! So basic conditions would be clean water of a bearable temperature and some water movement to aid gas exchange to replace the oxygen that they use up in that fixed volume of water.

More about water quality in another post.

Space == Fish in general swim more than we walk/ run around, so wouldn't it be fair to provide them a significant amount of water space to swim around and explore. Don't we enjoy that stroll in the garden, the park or by the beach ? It isn't that different... We all are living things and don't enjoy being confined. Remember how detention class felt ? hee...

Food == Feeding worms to dogs, fish to hamsters and carrots to cats seems common sense enough : - they MIGHt eat the above-mentioned to stay alive if thats the only thing they ever get. But we all know it would not do them much good or even create health problems, much less them enjoying it. A more crude way would be humans being given dog/cat/ fish feed...not hard to imagine now ?

All these are just the very basic rules i follow to have a healthy aquarium, not one that just provides the fish some water to turn round and round in and barely staying alive.... Enough of the boring stuff...let's start peeking into some of the fish tanks i started out with ?


first up-- MINI PREDATORS (my little slice of nature...how close can you get seeing a predator fish ambush a smaller fish ? )

Trying to cramp up as many as i can in a limited space...

My 1st snakehead...baby haruan caught behind Science Centre!

Tilapia species caught behind Sengkang home @Sungei Serangoon

Hooked onto snakeheads-- chinese/oriental snakehead

....rainbow snakehead ( channa gachua )

more to come ...

Why fish ?

Why the interest in fish ? Personally, it stems out from the interests in keeping pets. Frogs/ little chicks/ hamsters/ kittens/ birds/ spiders etc were kept at one point in time or another during childhood years...although ranging from a few hours to a few weeks before mum discovered and released some , sent a few off to my primary school science garden, or beared with them due to dad voting for me. Eventually the "longer lasting" hamsters' offended mum with the slightest stench, which led to them being placed outside the house and ended up getting stolen !! -- the lure of the adorable ones had the thieves cutting the chain that linked up the hamster cage to the water pipe just outside my bedroom window just to have the hamsters for themselves!!

THE CUTe FAMILY OF 8 !

A few initial attempts when 1st trying to keep fish almost had me give up on them...what's the idea with having a few fishes swimming around in an enclosed fish tank, not being able to be taken out and petted, doesn't give out an endearing "meow" of a little kitten nor able to take a piece of carrot out of my hand, holding it in its two front paws and looking as cute as a hamster can get ? The lack of interest led to my 1st few fishes either being ignored, or overfed yet i didn't bother to change the dirty water that they were swimming in, excreting in and drinking ! Dad was definitely struggling to help me keep the fishes alive but the toll of 2 jobs usually left him too tired to keep up with my messing up of the over-populated fish tank. Needless to say, I still was attracted to the then seemingly "exotic" creatures like fighting spiders and even baby house lizards !


Then came primary 3, and science was my favourite subject. Growing bean sprouts out of green beans, learning more about animals and the food chain and how important their natural habitats keep them alive made me appreciate, respect and regret the lives lost during my "exotic pet collection" days.... Think i forgot to mention the tens to a hundred lives that i ended when i brought them home and away from the natural habitats that sustained them... I then started to view aquariums as a duplicate of a whole enclosed natural ecosystem for the fishes within rather than a container just to keep them alive in....

DEMONSORI ??

Demonsori.. the online nick/ user ID I use for almost all of my online registration and emails.

(internet adopted pic)

It's a funny thing how I got stuck with this "NICK". It all started with a little blue/black striped cichlid I bought at a Serangoon North aquarium. It was a very new species then and I couldn't help but but one at $28. With a cichlid aquarium already running in my room, there was no way i was gonna allow myself to pass on it. The one and only concern was its size : a 1-incher to live in a 2ft tank with its inhabitants all above 2 inches. DEMONSORI was what the shop had MIS-labelled it as... should've been (Pseudotropheus) Demasoni-- and it was 2 years later after I used Demonsori as an ID that i found out ! Having been stuck with using it for various user IDs and registration, was glad that it ended up as a unique mistake !

2 years passed with it growing only to less than 2 inches,living well with the others all over 3 inches. It was fast swimming enough to evade nibbles by other territorial tankmates yet confident enough to do some damage on their fins instead! The increasing number of guppies I bred led to it being put into my electric catfish tank, after which I blamed myself when it was gulped down in the middle of one fine night; despite being fast enough to evade the predatory/ electricity-producing fish for months. Given a chance to own more tanks in future, I will definitely set up a big enough tank with a group of demasonis dominating the whole tank !

(in the community tank with bigger fishes)

(striking colouration in contrast to orange tilapia)

More info on this very interesting cichlid below :
http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/p_demasoni.php