designing tank for museum

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
ReeceTheBeast;3247825; said:
Maybe you shouyld take the gar?


nah man thats the gars tank, everything else is just visiting, leave jennifer be
 
Well hello all, sorry for the delay in the update, but, I really wanted to have something worth posting to update.

Firstly a piece of not so good but good news if you look for silver linings on clouds

For some reason jennifer just stopped eating. I don't know what the reason was. I bumped up the water change regime to make sure the water was pristine, but, it did not seem to make any difference at all. The week before she stopped eating I did notice that when she would snag a fish she would swallow it the wrong way tail first. I spent quite a bit of time looking to see if that was normal and studying to see about the effects of growth spurt on stunted fish, as she had put on 3 inches of growth in the short time I was taking care of her which encouraged me and I thought at 2 1/2 months in I had gotten her past the recovery period time since she had grown and the fins had healed shut for most part.

When I went and picked up the dead jennifer, I cut her open to see if there was any obstructions in the throat or digestive track. Not that I am any fish doctor but the liver really really looked rather large to me. I took a measurement of her for the thread here and cut off her head because I am going to preserve it by making a skull statue out of it.

Now the good news side of this is that I was now able to drop in the fish I was growing out and they seem to be loving it. I also finally tracked down some decent looking plants and totally removed the fake plant that they wanted me to put back in. I told them that fake plants are a really bad idea because if a fish is in the fake plant and spooks the hard plastic is not the softest of material.

Well any ideas as to what might have caused jennifer to stop eating would be welcomed.

At any rate here are the pics I have to post for the update

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It was a great thing to have been able to care for this 12 year old gar and try to get it to a better form of life

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we will be starting a saturday afternoon have your picture taken with the tank thing here is the first family to have their pic taken

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the way the tank looks now


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some tank resident pictures-there are 1 bristlenose plec, 1 cae, 1 senegal bichir, 2 ornate bicir, 1 tiger shovel nose, 2 spotted/florida ? gar, and many passing by visitors who stay for lunch then leave ahahahhahha I will also be adding one more senegal bichir

As I was leaving the museum the other day I got the idea to post pics of the native saskatchewan flower garden that is on display in front of the museum

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don't look like much till you take a close look, most people just walk by and dont even notice the intricate amount of color that is there \


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I have a few more plants to put in the next month or so and will most probably just take the initiative and redo that back drop myself
 
I think the tank looks great & sorry to hear about Jennifer. If the museum still wants more plant cover, check out TwistedPenguin's Oscar tank. He somehow attached large fake plants to the lid/canopy and they hang down into the water. They look amazing like that & really round out the tank.
 
bump for an update?
 
coeus;3415099; said:
bump for an update?

Ok, I was there last night doing the bi weekly maintenance and thought I would take some pics.

What I have begun to do is to 1/week, I drop in a good amount of doomed to dinner visitors :ROFL: and drop in some pellets that will not sink so that the visitors have something to sustain them while they wait for the inevitable to happen. I also put the pellets in so that the iri shark I added has a food source. Should any of the pellets actually make it to the bottom, the 3 bichir and bristle plec are able to have a snack.

Before anyone says anything about iri sharks, I have 3 already 18-24 inch in my 300g. The one I put in this tank came from a dudes 30g and really fit the museum tank as the sign about the gar talks about sharks as being ancient fish.

I can not find a bowfin anywhere, and from what my thoughts are a bowfin would be a bad dude in this tank so I did the next best thing in my mind. I dropped in a dwarf gaucho snakehead.

I keep forgetting to redo the backdrop with black in the hope that the museum artists will have gotten to it, but, I will this weekend replace that planted thing with a black one. I have also been speaking with a geologist here at the university about getting me some resin copies of fossils for the tank.

Here are a string of shots that I took last night.

I call this THE GOLDFISH THINKS HE IS MR BILL:ROFL:
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I am finding the ornates are not so fast yet so will be making sure that minnows are on the menu, though it is interesting to watch them hunt

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now since pond season is almost over here I will be able to get some surface plants for the tank. I plan to rig up a egg crate fishing line deal and suspend it from the center brace and attach the plants to it so they will sway on the surface but not be able to get sucked into the filter. will show this as I do it.
 
ok time for an update

All the fish are doing well, except for that very stupid iri shark that I rehomed from another persons tank. It would not identify any of the foods, it was fed flakes in its old tank and there is no way I was going to toss flake food in this tank and cause a water quality issue in the future.

So I took some pics a week or so ago here they are

gaucho was posing for me
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I have also been growing these bad boys and will be adding them today

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I will have to take a few pics of the feeder room tanks

have been able to establish a nice tank of minnows and I just can not bring myself to destroy the calico goldfish colony that has established in the other tank. And for some reason no matter what I am doing my 15g guppy tank will not set to popping out babies I HAVE FAILED AT BREEDING GUPPIES AHAHHAHAHAHHAH
 
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