The fish move in (with video!)

As I'm sure you remember, our ocellated barbs were in the vanguard of fishy occupancy in the new tank having moved in last month. Apologies in advance for the photo quality. They only sit still for about one shot in twenty. On a good day.

It took about three weeks for the biological filter to establish, so the weekend before last I mastered my trepidations (a process not too dissimilar from mustering up my equipage) and reached once again for the net to capture the cherry barbs.

We thought there were ten of these. You might imagine in a tank as small as a BiUbe it would be easy to count fish, but the cherries move around very quickly. They're also past masters at finding hiding spots. They rarely all shoal together and even then they're gone again before you can start on the fingers of your second hand.

So as not to distress them TOO much, I transferred them in two groups of five with a short rest between, having previously removed all the vegetation and the central volcano from the BiUbe's bubble tube so I had a better chance of snaffling the little buggers. All in all it went pretty well. "No fish were harmed in the making of this transition." They were soon exploring their new home, getting very excited at the vastly increased space and the downward bubbles from the filter inlet. A new experience, since in their world bubbles had previously only travelled up.

I'd already decided to leave the BiUbe running for a week or two. Recently the cherries have been breeding actively. I was concerned that eggs on the verge of hatching would be left behind and it seemed a shame to lose them. This proved to be a lucky decision, because our count was off by one. On the Sunday morning, while eating breakfast, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. A lone cherry had spent the night in the rather apocalyptic-looking tank, now totally without decoration, and also without any company for the poor chap. Or chapette, actually, since it was a female.

Reaching once more for my trusty net I soon had the straggler in hand (well, jug) and poured her in to join the rest of her family. And then, for once, I *didn't* ignore my little voice. Check that old tank again, it said. So I did. I stared for several minutes into the supposedly empty tank. My patience was rewarded with a swim-past by the smallest cherry barb fry I've ever seen. Barely half the size of the first one we saw in the tank almost three years ago this little guy/gal, immediately christened Tiny Kev, was no longer than 3-4mm. Dilemma! I was not at all sure I could retrieve such a small fish undamaged with the net, but it would be weeks before he/she (let's say she) grew large enough to net. Weeks alone in a tank that resembled an aquatic prison cell. Only one thing for it: I had to drain the tank to the point where I could dip Tiny Kev out with a small plastic beaker. And that meant removing all the ceramic substrate so there was no danger of squashing her.

It took more than an hour to remove the noodles (no really, that's what they're called) one at a time with a set of kitchen tongs. Going very slowly to avoid squishing TK in the event she couldn't swim away fast enough, or panicked and swam the wrong way. Once most of the noodles were out I started sucking out the water gradually, with a turkey baster (I'm very well equipped, aquatically speaking. Can't say the same for the kitchen. Any more), into my all-purpose fish-transfer device (3 litre plastic measuring jug) and carrying it through to the kitchen where I let the muck settle to give me chance to check for Tiny Kev before pouring it down the sink and returning for another few litres.

On the third such trip, TK emerged from the muck like Voyager traversing the intergalactic dust cloud. She had inadvertently been sucked into the turkey baster and survived not only that, but also being squirted out again into the jug. Not apparently any the worse for the experience I'd soon poured her into the main tank where we lost sight of her for a worrying couple of days. But it's OK! We spotted her again eventually, eagerly chasing a small flake of food and managing to avoid being eaten herself.

So here they all are, twelve cherries and five ocellated barbs, happily enjoying their new home. It takes a minute or so to get going, but if I stand very still they think I've gone and come out of hiding...

Ocellations

Took the plunge last Friday and transferred our five ocellated barbs to the new tank. I wanted them to have 48 hours in there, producing their ammonia, so that when I borrowed some of the BiUbe's bacterial culture it would have something to eat.

Look away now if you're squeamish, cos things are about to get messy. When I did the BiUbe's filter change on Sunday I scooped out a few handfuls of the ceramic substrate and scattered it among the new ceramic "noodles" that the AquaStyle uses, figuring there'd be some cross-pollination in the filtration pods. I also added the water from the water change (yes, there'd be some nitrate in it, but not enough to be harmful, and there'd be a small amount of bacteria floating around in it too, I thought) and then - the messy part - squeezed out the filter sponge into the new tank. Finally I had a couple of spare sachets of StressZyme bacteria culture left over from previous filter changes, so I squirted this into the new tank for good measure.

Well it's been another 48 hours since I did that, so today was time for some testing. Sure enough there was a small amount of ammonia detected in the AquaStyle (normally bad, but at this stage good) AND a small amount of nitrite too. This proves the bacteria are working. I'll leave it another couple of days and test again, and include a nitrate test this time to see how far it's built up. I'm not expecting to have to do a water change in the new tank for at least another week, but I'll keep monitoring to make sure the ammonia & nitrite levels don't get too high.

The barbs seem quite happy, although they're definitely the shyest fish we have, and spend most of their time behind the plants if they can detect any movement in the room. Once we've all sat down they will eventually venture out, only to disappear again at the next sign of movement. Once the cherries have moved in, we'll be after some new species. Preferably something not so easily spooked!

Fun with ammonia

You may have heard the comedic feminist epigram: "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

Well... fish may not need a bicycle, but they do need a cycle. The period, in the life of a new aquarium, during which the biological filter is established, growing enough nitrifying bacteria to convert the waste products from the fish (ammonia) into still-toxic nitrite, and then much safer nitrate. While this is happening, the tank is said to be cycling, a process that is complete when ammonia and nitrite levels fall to zero (or as close as makes no difference) because you have enough bacteria to eat it all, and nitrate levels gradually rise until the next partial water change.

You can cycle a tank with a small number of fish, which is how we started off the biological filter in the BiUbe, but this is stressful for those fish as they're subjected to higher levels of ammonia and nitrite than is best for them, so this time round I was hoping to do a "fishless cycle."

A fairly easy concept to grasp but more complicated in its execution, the fishless cycle basically involves introducing chemical ammonia into a tank for the bacteria to feed on (and starting the colony off with some bacteria from an existing tank if possible) and waiting until you've grown a colony large enough to handle the waste from your fish, at which point the fish can be introduced. In practice this is a bit of a juggling act because (a) you don't know how much ammonia your colony of fish is generating and (b) you have to guess that amount and then add it daily to keep the bacteria fed until the fish arrive. It's also important to do regular testing to monitor the colony's progress. Too much ammonia can kill off the bacteria and put you back to square one.

The first challenge was finding a source of pure ammonia. Or ammonium hydroxide I should more properly say. Most of the bleach available from supermarkets is contaminated with perfumes and surfactants to make it more acceptable as a cleaning agent. Any of that is not good for the inside of an aquarium. After a short search we eventually found a local shop (of the kind we usually refer to as "plastic man" because they sell a huge array of plastic tubs, buckets and bowls) with a stock of Kleen Off - pure ammonium hydroxide. Result!

It's never as easy as that though is it? The bottle had no indication of concentration, so to arrive at the required ammonia levels (4 or 5 ppm) in our 130-litre tank I had to do some experimenting. I'd found a handy guide to fishless cycling that talked about adding "a few drops at a time", testing, and repeating until the numbers came up, so armed with a jug containing 2 litres of treated water, my bottle of ammonia and my testing kit, I made a start. First with 3 drops, then 7, then another 10, 20, 50. Pretty soon I was up to 200 drops in my 2 litres and the test phial had barely shifted from the weakest colour (0.05 ppm) to the next blob (0.1ppm). Pretty soon the water was looking pretty syrupy with ammonia and I was approaching the point where I'd be adding the equivalent of half a bottle to the tank every day. That can't be right! (I thought). Slowly the reality dawned on me - the ammonia was bleaching the dye in the test kit.

I think we'll be cycling this new tank with some fish from the BiUbe!

FuruTankee

Hot on the heels of yesterday's post, where I claimed "KaraTankee" might mean empty tank, we have FuruTankee. Because Google translate is my friend, and tells me that the Japanese for full is "furu".

The only thing it's not full of, is fish. We have plants, we have rocks (the black pebbles that have recently seen service in the BiUbe, the spare piece of ocean rock that I bought to address the acidity problem, but didn't have room for, and a nifty little moulded pile of rubble from those nice people at Fluval), we have a heater, and we have an assembled filter with its input strainer in place.

It all hums along very nicely. Armed with her 'A' Level physics - far more recent than mine - Nat calculates it will take about 15 hours to heat the water up to 24°C. That'll be tomorrow then.

That's when the process of "cycling" the tank will start in earnest, with the addition of a tasty mix of ammonia, old filter squeezings and a bit of rock from the old tank. Yum!

KaraTankee

Well, you know, KaraTe is "empty hand". KaraOke is "empty orchestra". So KaraTankee is "empty tank."

Yep, the new aquarium! Collected from the supplier Tuesday evening, cabinet assembled yesterday and the tank washed out and put in position, and you might just be able to make out a layer of "black glass" gravel at the bottom (so strictly speaking I guess it doesn't qualify as KaraTankee any more).

We bought a bunch of new (artificial) plants too, so they'll be going in tomorrow along with 130 litres of Manchester's finest tap water. We're lucky we still have some actualleh, after yesterday's burst water main. So far I've not done much else apart from wash all the bits of the filter. And my hands, obviously. Very important that, as the set up instructions make clear. Item 2: "Wash your hands and arms. It is very important to remove dirt, moisturiser and other impurities."

Not much chance of there being any moisturiser on my arms. I think the last time I used that was when we went to Greece in 2005 (God, that's seven years ago. SEVEN YEARS!).

The subject of washed hands comes up again later in the instruction booklet, under Fortnightly Tank Maintenance:
"What you will need: A bucket, gravel cleaner, towel, water conditioner, filter supplement and clean hands. All items are available from your local Aqua One retailer."

That's good to know.
"Hello, is that Urmston Aquatics? I'd like a pair of clean hands please. Mine are just too mucky."

Our new aquarium... prototype

During the long project dubbed the "new new lounge" last year, we debated what to do with our fish. We've now had them three years, and I think I can claim that the spectres of my past fishy disasters have been exorcised. We recently discovered another THREE fry in the tank, happily swimming around what has become the "nursery" area (in and around the ocean rock I introduced to solve the acidity problem) which brings to a total of ten the number of cherry barbs we've bred in those three years. Must be doing something right.

But the impending move into the new room gave us the opportunity to introduce a new aquarium. The BiUbe has served us very well and is a doddle to maintain, but it has limitations. At only 35 litres it was pretty much at capacity with the cherries and the ocellated barbs we added about eighteen months ago. Probably over stocked now, if anything, after all the breeding. So the fish we have don't have a lot of room, there's not much scope for adding more plants or rocks or anything to make the tank more interesting for them, and there's no room for extra species. Hence the debate. Were we happy with what we've got, or did we want something new and if so, what?

Armed with my newly built confidence after three years of successful fishy husbandry I was keen to expand. Nikki was too, but had a concern that anything new wasn't TOO big, and wouldn't dominate the new room which she wanted to keep fairly sparsely furnished (despite the - albeit temporary - fact that it is currently home to one more sofa than we actually want. We're hoping eBay or Gumtree will shortly come to our rescue on that score).

After much debate and more than a few visits to local aquarium suppliers and not-so-local websites, we settled on a model. But Nikki retained a slight niggle that it was too big. Too tall. Too dominating. So with the cabinet and tank dimensions off the web and a ready supply of eBay storage and packaging materials, I built the above mock-up. OK, OK, it's not perfect. The top half isn't the right width and the whole thing is too deep, BUT... it's the right height and the right width at the base, so it gave us an idea. Enough of an idea for Nikki to give the green light. I'll be ordering it today :0)

(For a photo of the real thing, here's one on a supplier's website in the Black Ash cabinet we'll be going for to match the TV stand. Ironically the manufacturer's site doesn't have such a good pic)

Incidentally the small green fish visible in the picture above isn't part of our new stock. It's one of the toys Hobo brought with him from his Mum's house, and remains one of his favourites even though it's lost a fin and is looking very tatty these days.

The Acid Test

Hard to believe that it will soon be three years since we first installed our BiUbe aquarium. During those intervening years, we've added to the shoal of cherry barbs to replace some that died, and they've been pretty successful in adding to their shoal themselves, too. In fact since that first spate of fry, we've had two more separate birthing occasions, so it's now entirely possible that we're on our third generation of fish bred solely in our tank.

We branched out into ocellated barbs about 18 months ago too, just for a bit of variety, but as yet there's no sign of them breeding. We're not even sure if there's a gender mix among those five fish to be honest.

Anyway for the whole of those three years I've kept up with my regular water tests - ammonium, nitrite, nitrate and pH - and on those rare occasions when anything has appeared to be going awry in the water quality department, I've been able to address the issue fairly quickly. But among all those tests one - the pH test - has never varied more than 0.5pH from neutral. Until about a month ago when, for the first time ever, the test came out something other than green. It was yellow - the water had become very slightly acidic.

I have no idea why; we haven't changed our routine at all. Not the food, or the water treatment, or the frequency of filter changes. If anything the gravel bed was cleaner than it has sometimes been, and stock levels hadn't changed since those ocellated barbs were introduced, so I was at a loss to explain it. However, since barbs like their water somewhere in the range pH6.0 - 8.0, I wasn't worried. Until, that is, I did another test last Sunday. For one reason or another I hadn't tested the water for four weeks (I used to do the tests every week but when the results don't change from one week to the next for over two years, it's easy to relax the schedule a bit) and on Sunday the pH test came up orange.

That's pH 5.5. Yikes.

Fish didn't seem too bothered. A little more active, if anything, which apparently is normal at lower pH, but not distressed. And another tiny Kevin appeared a week or so back, so it can't be THAT bad. Can it?

Anyway after some rapid Internet research I decided ocean rock was the way forward. Our water is so soft that it doesn't register on a KH test at all, so attempting to correct the pH with chemicals would have been tricky (and I don't like that approach anyway). So off I went in search of a chunk of ocean rock, boiled it and baked it for the prescribed times, let it cool and with some trepidation, dropped it in.

A day later the pH test colour had relaxed from orange to yellow, and 24 hours after that it was lime green, so we're at something like pH 6.5-7.0 now, and it's taken two days to make that change. Which is good, because while fish can adapt well to different pH levels, what they don't like is RAPID changes in pH. I'll be doing another test tomorrow to check the tank hasn't pivoted over to alkalinity, but with luck I'll be able to leave the rock in there permanently. The extra minerals will act as an acidity buffer and help to keep things on an even keel from now on.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Yeah. Early exposure to Christmas has spilled out of the malls and department stores and infected commercial radio. Friday night we're listening to Smooth FM and here comes Bing bending our ears with his 1951 Christmas number, and it's still only November 26th.

It' s felt like a quiet couple of weeks but although at the time nothing seemed worthy of blogging, or I couldn't muster up the enthusiasm, looking back there's been quite a bit going on.

The big news is that Nikki decided she wanted livestock again this Christmas, after having plumped for tropical fish last year, so a week ago last Friday I took off for Yorkshire and left a deposit (in the nicest possible way) on this little guy.

He's about six weeks old here, and won't be ready to come "home" until a couple of days before Christmas, but we've been promised more photos between now and then, and the hunt is now on for a name. It's been a while since we last owned a cat, so his impending arrival prompted a trip to Pets At Home to stock up on supplies (a bed, scratching post, bowls, etc).

On the kitchen front, the news is that there's no news. No recurrence of the leak problem, granite guys haven't said when they'll be coming to fit that last short bit of upstand, electricians haven't said when they'll be coming to fix the intermittent fault on the lighting transformer. Only the flooring guy has come up smelling of roses, having said he'd pop round to add beading to those few places where we thought we were going to replace the skirting board but later decided it wouldn't look right, he DID pop round, exactly when he said he would, beaded as necessary and refused all payment. Top bloke.

An addition to the family

We suffered another small bereavement a little while ago. Not on the same scale as my Mum, of course, but closer to home, at least in a geographical sense.

One of the cherry barbs developed dropsy and had to be humanely euthanised (i.e. transferred to a small bowl of water and left in the freezer for half an hour). This, coupled with the mysterious loss of another fish somewhere along the line (eaten, presumably, although there was never any evidence), reduced the number of cherries to 7 and started me thinking about adding another shoal of something different to the tank.

So on a recent visit to the aquatic centre to gather more food supplies for our fishy friends, we dropped into the basement to see what was on offer, and found these:

They're red ocellated barbs, and they look even more attractive IRL than in this photo.

They also have the added advantage that - being barbs - they should mix in with our existing cherries just fine.

Which is exactly how it went. After a short period of argy-bargy, the new shoal of five all settled down and got along swimmingly (*cough*) with the other seven. For the first few days the ocellated crowd were *extremely* excited at feeding time, rushing up to the surface and gobbling the food while it was still floating. I guess they don't feed very often at the shop. Within a few days they'd realised that food was going to be a regular feature of life in the new place, and calmed down a bit.

Something fishy going on

Why is it that it takes a "celebrity" to tell us something is bad before there's even the ghost of a chance that anything will be done about it?

The European Union regulations about catching and landing fish have been broken for years. In an effort to "protect" species whose populations are either on the verge of crashing, or have already, they limit fishermen to a given number of thousands of tons in a year, after which it is illegal to land any more fish of that kind.

Unfortunately, none of the massed intellect of the EU agricultural and fisheries policy units was capable of realising that there are no nets in existence that can differentiate what they are catching. The nets go down, the fish come up, spill out onto the deck, die, and then - if they are "over quota" - they're thrown back into the sea. Dead.

How is that protecting populations? It isn't. How long has it been going on? Years. What's been done about it? Nothing. Until along comes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, kicking off a campaign very much in the vein of Jamie Oliver and his Turkey Twizzlers, designed to wake everyone up to the problem and do something about it.

Laudable, and I can hardly complain about him or his campaign since he has already - allegedly - secured Tesco's agreement to moving to 100% rod-and-line caught tuna (as opposed to trawled tuna) by the end of 2012. Now, if you were a cynic, you might think "well, yes, that's two years away. Who's going to be monitoring their progress? Who's going to be shouting the odds if they don't quite manage it?" But at least something is happening. Something more than could be achieved by consumers alone.

And that's my beef, really. How is it that something so patently ludicrous, that doesn't achieve the protection it was intended to and at the same time affects the livelihoods of every European fisherman for no benefit whatever, has been allowed to carry on for so long? And why does no-one pay any attention until a bloody TV chef steps in?

In among all the posturing and self-congratulation there are some interesting statistics. 50% of the fish we all eat comes from three species - salmon, tuna & cod. Add haddock and prawns and you're up to 80%. Is it any wonder the populations can't sustain themselves, faced with automated, computerised trawlers pulling hundreds of thousands of tons of them out of the sea every year, and then throwing half of them back dead?

Over a million tons of fish a year are thrown back. Caught, dead, and unable to be landed, sold or eaten. Meanwhile stocks of sardines, herring, and white fish like whiting, hake, coley - that you really would be hard pushed to tell from cod, especially in fish fingers - are plentiful and ignored.

Well, I guess any progress is better than no progress. If you want to sign up to help his campaign (I have), it's at Fish-Fight.net, and the TV programme begins for those in the UK (or those who can watch online) tomorrow night at 9pm on Channel 4.

Three Kevins!

This is getting beyond a joke. Kevin and Marina have now been joined by little Neptune, bringing the total complement of fish in the tank to 9. Our original calculations suggested it could hold a maximum of 12, so any more of this spawning business and we'll have to start thinking of ways to reduce the population. That's one problem we didn't expect to have!

They don't half grow quickly too. I reckon Kevin - who from "his" colouring is almost certainly female - is now almost the same size as the first fish we brought home back in November, and he and Marina have become braver over the last day or so and started feeding with the adults. I still find it quite strange to think that our little tank is the only home they've ever known.

Kevin Watch

Since discovering the presence of young Kevin in our aquarium the other day, things have been a bit fraught. I'm the first to admit I know nothing about the habits of very small cherry barbs, but he does seem to spend an awful lot of his time... missing. Or hiding.

Maybe it's because he's such a small nipper he instinctively knows he needs to keep out of the way of the Big Fish in case they take a fancy to a passing morsel. These fish are known for eating their young, although I think he's past the stage where any of them would be able to take a chunk out of him. Anyway, it's not been unusual for a day or two to pass without a sighting, which leads to elevated levels of anxiety from "mum & dad" as we peer into the tank hoping for a glimpse.

This level of concern for little Kev was raised to unprecedented heights during our week away in the Lakes, since we'd left the fish to more-or-less fend for themselves with nothing more than a dissolving "vacation" food block for company. Would the block dissolve? Would they recognise it as food? Would their increased hunger lead them to focus even more keenly on their defenceless offspring? Returning from our hols yesterday morning we examined the tank closely for any sign of young life. There was none. Unable to concentrate properly on the evening's telly our attentions were continually drawn back to the glowing tube, but he never showed.

Until this morning, when the weekly partial water change must have flushed him out from his usual hiding place and suddenly there he was, racing around the tank in pursuit of small bits of detritus thrown up by the pouring water. And... what's this? Looks like he's got a little brother or sister too!! Almost half the size Kevin is now, and as far as we can remember smaller than he was the first time we spotted him. We've called "her" Marina. If this keeps up we'll be needing a second tank!

Small fry

I haven't blogged much about our fish recently (let's be honest, I haven't blogged much about anything recently), but they've been doing fine. I'm being so diligent about doing their water tests once a week, and water changes at the same time, that I hardly recognise myself. If those poor creatures who lived in my cold water aquarium during the mid-eighties could see me, they'd stare in awe at the reformed character who does more than clean the tank once every six months.

Anyway that was then, and this is now, and I'm pleased to say our six cherry barbs have settled in very well and aren't exhibiting any of the shyness that barbs are renowned for. They all huddle at the front of the tank every time anyone walks into the room, expecting to be fed, and beyond that they pretty much look after themselves and don't do anything more remarkable than chase each other about a bit from time to time.

Until last night, when I happened to glance over while we were watching TV, and spotted a small piece of floating debris near the top of the tank. The filter usually does a pretty good job of removing anything like this, so I was surprised to see it, and even more surprised when I noticed it was moving. Against the current. Swimming, even. Scarcely able to believe my eyes I rushed over to the tank for a closer look. A tiny fish! Our barbs have spawned!

The little guy is barely half a centimetre long, but appears to be a strong swimmer. He (or she - we won't be able to tell for a few months) keeps his distance from the adults. A sensible strategy, because they tend to eat their fry when nobody's looking. He's done pretty well to survive this long under his own steam, because we've done nothing special to promote breeding in the tank, and not provided any of the recommended feeding material (like "infusoria" - whatever that is) for fry, but the fact that he's grown big enough to be seen free swimming without a black background means he must already be a few weeks old.

Which also means he's somehow managed to survive a filter change. I'll have to be even more careful from now on. We've called him Kevin. Well, you know, "Stephen" was a bit too obvious.

Happy New Year

I suppose I should write something on here to herald the new year, even though it looked for a while as if things were conspiring to allow the shit to ooze through into 2010 from 2009. I almost got dragged into a pointless debate about whether it's a new decade or not after some crabby old bat left a rather short-tempered reply to my New Year's facebook status, but in the end I managed not to rise to her ill-flavoured bait. Breaking with tradition by working at home for the first day back at work after a lengthy period of absence (17 wonderful days) on account of (a) the snow and (b) Nikki taking a day off sick with a nasty cold, saw me locked out of the corporate network owing to my anti-virus definitions being too far out of date.

Trouble was, several thousand other staff members were in the same boat, and had also elected to work at home. I don't know whether their wives/girlfriends/partners had nasty colds, but most of them probably had snow. So the VPN was totally swamped and my repeated attempts to update my AV definitions resulted in nothing but server timeouts throughout the whole day. By far the quietest first-day-back on record, the downside being that I had to struggle into the office through even more snow (around 7 inches fell overnight) today to get access.

Lest this first post of 2010 leave as nasty a taste in the mouth as the aforementioned crabby bait, I should say that it's not all been bad. I did get to see Avatar for a second time (on New Year's Eve actually, but who's counting?) after we cried off from the planned NYE party with various medical complaints; the Christmas deccies came down in short order (two hours) on Saturday, and now sit boxed awaiting their annual departure for the upper floor; and our aquarium completed its nitrogen cycle on Sunday, so we popped out and bought another three cherry barbs to make the shoal up to six. Apart from one very large female who arrived in the new group, the other five are now virtually indistinguishable, so we no longer know which is Bee, Bop, or Lulu. It's looking like we may need a rechristening. Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich is a possibility, although as there's six of the blighters we'll have to split Dave and Dee, and of course the enormous female just has to be Tich.

Fishy situation

I just *know* you've been dying to hear how our fish are faring.

Well, they seem happy enough, despite having to cope with the chemical toilet that masquerades as an early-life aquarium undergoing its first cycle. I just completed my third week of tests, and - as far as this novice can tell at any rate - things are progressing as expected.

A healthy aquarium contains several kinds of bacteria that convert the ammonia produced by the fish and the decomposition of left over food into nitrites and those nitrites into safer nitrates. In a stable tank, ammonia and nitrite levels should be almost undetectable, and nitrates gradually accumulating in the water through the bacterial activity are removed by doing partial water changes each week.

In a young aquarium, the bacteria haven't established colonies of sufficient size to deal with the chemicals, so levels gradually rise in the first couple of weeks. I've seen exactly this with my testing. Levels of ammonia peaked last week, but have now dropped off to the lowest number so far recorded (about 0.4ppm), whereas nitrite levels, which were relatively low last week, are now extremely high. This indicates we're almost exactly at the mid-point of the cycle, but because nitrite is especially dangerous to fish (it binds to haemoglobin and can leave them gasping for oxygen) I've done a 20% water change this week instead of the usual 10%.

By this time next week nitrite levels should be dropping and hopefully in a couple of weeks the aquarium will have fully cycled and we'll be able to add three more friends for Bee, Bop and Lulu to bring the cherry barb shoal up to full strength.

All's well... so far!

The good news is that, while the aquarium suppliers were at a loss to explain the death of our first three fish, they agreed to replace them right away. Figuring I'd best collect them when the traffic was light I went over there at lunchtime the next day, made sure they were triple-bagged against the cold and not fetched out of their home tank until I was ready to leave, and drove home gently but swiftly.

Hard to describe my relief when I floated the plastic bag in our biUbe and I could see the little fellas were still wrigglin'. I followed the Instructions For Introduction of New Fish to the letter and pretty soon they were investigating the nooks and crannies of their new home.

A worrying 48 hours passed with us checking the tank at every available opportunity and, more often than not, searching the water surface for floating bodies before glancing around the rest of the cylinder. We needn't have worried. These three have settled in really well, seem happy enough and, on the flimsy gender evidence available to us at this early stage, have been christened Bee, Bop and Lou-Lou.

Something happened on the way home from the fish shop...

They died! :o(

Which was a pretty traumatic start to our fish-keeping activities I can tell you.

Having done our research, we knew a new tank is a pretty hostile place for fish. The chemistry hasn't settled down and all sorts of nasties wait in store - like ammonia spikes and whatnot - so your first fish have to be fairly robust to ride through that while the tank is "cycling." Once it has stabilised and the bacteria have started working, further additions are less traumatic, although they still have to be carefully managed. We added the bacterial culture yesterday once the water was conditioned and had a further 24-hour wait until today before excitedly setting off to purchase our first fish.

We'd opted for Cherry Barbs. Hardy little specimens, allegedly, and more than capable of coping with the harsh few weeks of a new aquarium's life. Three is both the minimum size shoal for these fish, and the maximum number we can introduce in one go, so we bought... three.

But we didn't even have chance to introduce them to the water, or take the blame for being total noobs and doing something wrong ourselves that killed them off. They were already dead when we lifted their clear plastic bag from its brown paper wrapping.

We figured they'd died of cold. The shop had, rather stupidly, bagged them up while we were still umming and ahhing about test kits, so they'd sat on the counter for ten minutes. With a single paper bag to protect them, they weren't very well insulated from the cold and, being rush hour, it took us 45 minutes to get home from the aquatic suppliers, which proved just too long.

Tanked

After our visit to the spa, we stopped off at the new house of two of our mates to partake of their excellent hospitality & general housewarming. The party went really well, but that's not the point of this post. Nikki spied their new aquarium - a "BiUbe Pure" from Reef One - and was sufficiently intrigued to investigate further.

To cut a long story short, I ordered her one for Christmas earlier this week and it was delivered yesterday. With extreme self-control, we waited until today to start setting it up. The kit contains everything you need for coldwater fish, but we'd decided on tropicals (I've had a coldwater aquarium before and it wasn't a happy experience) so the order included a heater and a thermometer, as well as a few plants and a "volcano" structure to hide the central tube.

The first job - washing ceramic media in which the biological filter (i.e. bacteria) will eventually grow - gave me a painful reminder of my previous aquarium existence as the brown water swirled around the sharp little rocks. This time round, that should be a one-off task as the BiUbe pretty much looks after itself. We positioned the volcano, thermometer, and heater and carried the whole thing through to the living room before filling it with water.

As fishy enthusiasts will know, tap water is deadly for fish - all that chlorine and chloramines - so it has to be treated. The BiUbe kit is complete in this respect too, with a sachet of "Stress Coat" water conditioner to remove all the harmful chemicals. Once we'd positioned the plants and turned on the air pump, I squirted the contents of the sachet into the water and sat back for the 24-hour wait before we can add the bacterial culture that will grow on the bottom of the tank and process all that fishy waste.

To be honest, it looks the business even without fish. Maybe we could just leave it bubbling away in the corner and convince any visitors that the fish are hiding?