Fishkeeping: Day 8, part 2

(continued from part 1) After my wife and I put my kids to sleep, and had a second to breath, I got back to the project at hand.

Now that the water was all setup, I wanted to clean the gravel. I took a metal pasta colander, filled it with a couple handfuls of gravel, and washed them with hot water in the tub. Most of the dirt, waste, and small gravel fell through the colander. After about 35 minutes of repeating this process, I finally got almost all of the gravel back in the tank and called it a day with that whole mess.

Next I called my neighbor and asked him to bring over 3 Danio's to put in the tank. He has several varieties of Danio's, so I let him choose which ones. He brought over a bucket that I had dropped off earlier. I took a couple scoops of water from my freshly setup tank, and put them into the bucket to get them used to the water. My neighbor had left when I realized that I had given back the stress coat that I needed for when I put the Danio's in the tank so I walked over to his apartment to grab them.

About 15 minutes later when I came back to the bucket, I noticed something was wrong. I counted one, two, oh crap! where is the third fish? I immediately dropped to the ground looking for a beige colored fish on my beige carpet. I spotted number 3 on the floor flopping around and picked him up and put him back in the bucket. I wish I remembered which fish jumped out because I would have come up with a very ironic nickname for him.

10 minutes later I pulled the trigger and put the new fish in the tank along with the stress coat. Two of them started going around the edges of the tank. I can only assume they were attempting to find their boundaries. They have been used to a 55 gallon tank and were not used to such a small space. The last one went and hid behind the filter and stayed there for 15 minutes and would not come out.

30 minutes after being put in the tank they started acclimating themselves and became more comfortable. The scared one rejoind the other two and they stayed close together. Every once in a while, one would go hide in the fake plants, then come back out again.

After this point, I hung up my fishkeeping hat, and put on my gamer hat. I grabbed the last of the supplies I borrowed, along with my xbox hard drive and game and trucked it over to Tony's for some late night gaming.

Hmm...I still haven't decided on a name for the fish...

(PHOTO'S)

Fish in a bucket

Tank after water and gravel
was replaced

Very scared Danio after being
put in the tank

New Danio's

New Danio's

New Danio's

New Danio's

New Danio's