My Aquaria

Most of what I write about in the fishkeeping press has been learned through experience.

Rio 180 (180 litre freshwater)

The 180-litre tank is a community of sorts, but with two key limitations. Firstly, it’s home to a female Panaque nigrolineatus purchased as a baby in the autumn of 1994. She’s a dear old thing, but extremely hard on plants, either eating them or else uprooting them as she swims about. At the moment planting is limited to pots of Cryptocoryne wendtii and Java fern, plus a few Vallisneria dotted about. But this is merely the current iteration: she’s managed to destroy so many plants (and so many planting schemes) that it’s dangerous to tempt her by saying that so far this arrangement has worked.

As well as this big catfish, there’s also some pufferfish, specifically Colomesus asellus as Carinotetraodon irrubesco. While both are relatively tolerant, unaggressive fish they are not precisely community safe. The South American pufferfish Colomesus asellus is definitely a fin-nipper, and while the trio of specimens mostly do their own thing together as a group, if they’re hungry they will nip at slow moving fish such as Corydoras. So tankmates have had to be chosen with care, and abundant hiding places provided for those fish (such as catfish) that might be considered fair game by a peckish puffer.

Apart from the catfish and pufferfish mentioned, current stock includes a large school of platinum halfbeaks Dermogenys siamensis; a school of bleeding heart tetras; three Synodontis nigroventris; some glassfish; a female Pelvicachromis taeniatus; a Garra cambodgiensis; and dozens of Limia nigrofasciata.

The water is moderately hard and approximately neutral in pH, and produced by mixing tap water with rainwater at a ratio of 50:50. This seems to be acceptable to all the fish, and reduces the nitrate concentration as well, which can be quite high in the tap water supplied to this part of England.

Filtration is provided by an Eheim 2217 canister filter and a Fluval 104 canister filter, delivering in total a nominal 1480 litres/hour turnover, a turnover of a bit over 8 times the volume of the tank per hour. The use of canister filters provides much better mechanical filtration than the original built-in internal filter that the Juwel tank was supplied with. A Hydro ETH external filter is fitted to the return from the Eheim filter, avoiding the risk of having an exposed glass heater in a tank with a big, clumsy catfish.

The substrate is pond soil held in place with pea gravel and a plastic gravel tidy, and then overlaid with a pea gravel/silica sand mix. Green granite rocks are used to create caves and other hiding places for the fish. The plastic gravel tidy helps to keep the substrate formly packed, so that despite any burrowing done by the Panaque, these heavy rocks can’t be loosened and allowed to fall onto the glass bottom of the tank (something that happened with my previous tank!). The back of the tank is decorated with an external rock motif poster; the use of an internal resin backdrop was considered but eventually ruled out because of the likelihood that the Panaque would simply destroy it.

Mirabello 30 (30 litre freshwater)

Originally used by a friend as a marine aquarium, this is a compact unit with a built-in canister filter, an 11W light, and a heater. Apart from the tendency of the filter to suck in air, resulting in some odd gurgling sounds, it’s not a bad aquarium at all.

Read more on my Freshwater Reef Tank page.

Breeding Tank (24-litre freshwater)

This tank was bought to rear some Nomorhamphus halfbeak fry, and over the years has been used to rear Dermogenys fry, Corydoras, dwarf cichlids, and most recently Limia nigrofasciata fry and some juvenile Carassius carassius collected on a field trip. Cherry shrimps breed freely in the system, and juvenile Tylomelania snails are being placed in there for growing on.

Filtration was initially provided by an air-powered box filter but is now in the care of an Eheim ‘Aquaball’ internal filter. The tank has no hood or lighting; instead it is placed on an east-facing windowsill where it receives a few hours direct sunlight per day. While the tank can get a bit warm in the summer, the fish don’t seem to care, and in fact the dense growth of plants and algae probably makes them feel more comfortable. Hygrophila corymbosa and Hygrophila polysperma dominate the planting, and both species have grown 30-40 cm above the waterline and produced lots of flowers.

180-litre tank

Keeping a tank pretty when you’re housing Panaque nigrolineatus is an uphill struggle

The 180-litre tank is decorated mostly of large granite rocks and a few hardy plants

30-litre tank

The peacock gudgeon Tateurndina ocellicauda is a colourful addition to a 30-litre tank

Barely 3 cm long, the tiny catfish Aspidoras pauciradiatus add a great deal of charm to small aquaria

24-litre tank

This tank was initially planted with a few bulbs and cuttings and placed on a somewhat sunny windowsill

A couple of months later the tank was thick with plants, much to the pleasure of the juvenile fish, shrimps and snails being reared there