{"id":14938,"date":"2011-09-18T20:40:25","date_gmt":"2011-09-18T12:40:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2011\/09\/18\/fishy-business\/"},"modified":"2011-09-19T20:55:48","modified_gmt":"2011-09-19T12:55:48","slug":"fishy-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2011\/09\/18\/fishy-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Fishy Business"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We haven\u2019t been blogging about our aquarium for a few years now; the last such post about our tank at home was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2008\/12\/27\/five-or-six\/\">nearly three years ago now<\/a>. The three feet tank still graces our living room, and it was put up five years ago when we first moved to our home here.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding-top: 0px; border: 0px;\" title=\"blog-2011-aquarium-OLYP3639-tank\" src=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/blog-2011-aquarium-OLYP3639-tank_thumb.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"blog-2011-aquarium-OLYP3639-tank\" width=\"600\" height=\"310\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The way I\u2019ve set it up from the start is that it mostly runs on auto-mode. Basically, apart from the daily critter feeds and a fortnightly partial change of water, the only other maintenance routines is the about bimonthly cleaning of filter inlets, trimming of plants, and scrubbing of fish-tank waters.<\/p>\n<p>The two major changes since that last post has been removal of a costly CO2 injection system that I added when first setting the tank up (the system was too cumbersome and controlling the flow of the gas for optimal plant growth was too difficult), and adding a second aquarium filter to the tank. One of those dreadfully expensive but highly-regarded made-in-Germay Eheim filters.<\/p>\n<p>The tank has also, remarkably, stabilized very well for the last three years now. We rarely have critter deaths. The last non-natural critter death as I recall it was one tetra that inexplicably took a leap out of the tank two years ago.<\/p>\n<p>We haven\u2019t been replacing the critters though. I had this big idea about replacing the entire substrate layer a year ago (a major and very time-consuming operation for those of us who know about the hobby). The substrate the current tank uses is aquatic soil, and it has a finite life-span; slowly turning into slush. I picked up nearly 30 kilograms of inert replacement gravel, but haven\u2019t quite got round to actually doing it! Oh well; maybe at the end of this year.<\/p>\n<p>Ling was asking about our longest lived critter. It\u2019s this little bugger:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding-top: 0px; border: 0px;\" title=\"blog-2011-aquarium-OLYP3638-cory\" src=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/blog-2011-aquarium-OLYP3638-cory_thumb.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"blog-2011-aquarium-OLYP3638-cory\" width=\"550\" height=\"367\" \/><\/p>\n<p>He\u2019s an Albino corydoras. We\u2019ve had him for 4.5 years now. He grew from a little runt of about 2\/3rds of an inch, to a grand size of nearly 1.5 inches now.=)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We haven\u2019t been blogging about our aquarium for a few years now; the last such post about our tank at home was nearly three years ago now. The three feet tank still graces our living room, and it was put<\/p>\n<div class=\"entry-read-more\"><a class=\"read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2011\/09\/18\/fishy-business\/\">Read More<span class=\"cleanwp-sr-only\">  Fishy Business<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aquarium-pets","category-at-home","wpcat-5-id","wpcat-6-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}