Well, if my goal was a little genetic diversity and companions for my guppies. I have achieved that goal. There are an alarming amount of guppies. I'm mostly alarmed as it seems they are eating the male guppy babies and leaving the female guppy babies. So now I have two male guppies and I have no idea how many female guppies. I may have made a miscalculation there. My napkin math indicates that I may need to get a pool or something. I probably should not have done this, but my guppies have friends now... and their friends have friends and their friends as well. I should cut back on the feeding I guess, and let them sort it out on their own. The trouble is that I like feeding the fish. They get all happy and it helps me to have little happy fish. I love seeing all the little baby guppies in there hanging out and learning how to be big fish like their parents.
I've been feeding this bacter ae stuff for the shrimp, but everyone seems to like it. I'm not sure if it's a gimmick or not, it sounds a bit like hogwash, but I like buying new fish foods and feeding the fish. Also: why are all the fish foods in such disproportional large container sizes? I don't really feel like I need 35 years worth of fish food. Honest to god, I don't know that I've finished a whole can/pouch/tub of fish food ever... well, maybe algae wafers.Also, If anyone has any fish food suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
It looks like some of the shrimp I got may have been the natural color variant as now I have a bunch of brown, black, and clear shrimps along with my red shrimps. I'm slightly miffed, due to the cost, but... I like them too lol and they're in there making baby shrimps and living busy shrimp lives doing whatever-it-is-they're-doing-so-busily. Some of the brown ones are real pretty too, like neat little patterns and designs, harder to find in the tank, but that might be a good thing if you were a shrimp I guess.
I recently took to performing a much needed, and long overdue, cleaning of the filter and it's associated pipes and tubing. In doing so, I not only made my once silent filter noisy but I also caused a little ammonia spike and some fresh diatoms and a burst of bba. NEAT! So, some furious (read: angry) pruning and fussing and excelling, and water changes things have changed up a bit. Full disclosure: I sort of love changing water. It's something that I used to do as "me time" when I was working and married and still in school and it's still one of my favorite chores.
The absolute mass of rotala indica has been removed (mostly, my collectoritis is real)
Also, my duckweed is back even though I got rid of every single piece of it (collectoritis does not apply to duckweed).
I yanked a bunch of vallisneria out. I aim to remove more. I've gotten rid of that plant entirely a few times too.
The right side is now crowded with Pogostemon Stellatus Octopus (the right side must always be crowded). I like it, it's not as baby shrimp/fish hidey as the rotala was, but I have too many guppies.
I also got some Cryptocoryne Tropica, and a banana plant, because I have a problem.
Oh and some monte carlo, because I wanted to see if I'd like that in the little tank I was just about to set up: a good reason and not indicative of my aforementioned problem.
The Hemianthus micranthemoides (I think) is all over the little stump that reaches the surface. It is a big jungle-ie mess that shades half the tank and needs to be cleaned out, so I can continue hunting duck weed, but it's filled with shrimplets and guppylets and sort of makes me happy even though it's a bit unsightly.
As always: overgrown and algae covered: