Museum Display Tank

well with the backdrop, the museum artists are going to be painting a recreation of some of the surrounding displays to give it a killer look.

I added some marimo moss balls and some dwarf lily banana plants to the tank to give a bit of real plant to the tank and I might actually place the driftwood a bit differently. I spent a month studying this resident gar just to establish a symbiotic relationship with her to let her know that I am there to make her world a much better one. And she makes sure to stay near me when I am doing maintenance.

Well when I added the other fish, I sat back and just watched the tank for a good half hour or so just to get a read on how jennifer would deal with the new fish. She acted like she could care less about the needlenose gar, the knife fish or the ripsaw cats. Yet, with the arowana she seemed very curious of it and followed it around and then she did the strangest thing she caught a gold fish gave it a good chomp to disable it and then spit it out in the general direction of the arowana. I took this to be one of two things offering the arowana an easy kill or worse saying to the arow hey look bubb I can do this to you.

Well last week when I went to do a waterchange the arow showed a split fin on the bottom, I was expecting to find it gone, but thought hey ok it's been a few days all good. On saturday when I went to do the partial water change and check out the fish room tanks the arow showed much more of a split fin which means one of two things to me bad water or bad environment and since its not the water I wondered if it was just that my arow was stressed due to being in this new tank with a much bigger tank mate than it. So I again watched the tank for a good 45 minutes and what I saw kind of gave me a chill, surely jennifer the gar seemed to be stalking the arowana but not doing any acts of agression kind of like sheep herding and since there was a goodly amount of feeders in the tank I felt confident that the arow would be ok till tonight when I went to do the waterchange.

When I got there I went first to check the fish room to see if the feeders I put in the holding tanks about a week ago were still alive, yup. So I netted them all out and replaced the one tank with some minnows to see if they would do well for a few days. I have the feeder colony in my living room 70g and some at the restaurant.

So off I go to the main tank to do the water change and sure enough the arowana has a strike mark on its back and its finnage is much troubled, so I immediately netted it out and took it to the fish room to wait for the ride back home to the 140g at the restaurant. None of the other fish in the tank showed any issue.

Here are a few shots of the arow, the pic aint the best but you can see on the left top the strike mark

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when I put it back in the 140 it swam to the front an watched me for a bit here it is back in the tank

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here are the plants I put in

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For feeders I have a colony of convicts, rosie red minnows, some platties and mollies and goldfish that I am going to be holding and pumping up with vitamins and high quality flake and frozen foods the main tank residents will eat the best that money can buy
 
Awww, poor aro. Glad you got it out before anything else could happen. Hopefully it will make a full recovery.
 
I really believe my aro will be fine, my wife constantly calls me dr. doomuch( not dolittle because im so busy) because of this strange relationship I have with animals.

I used to think I was just a little off by what I was seeing with the many animals I have kept in my life, but, my wife says she sees it.

When I put this aro back in its old home of the 140g here it spent a good 3 minutes just undulating right in front of my face with its face pressed against the glass sort of saying thank you so much for bringing me back here I missed you.

Do any of you find this relationship with your animals. Even my chameleon lady beauty, I take her out and she literally refuses to go back in. She will crawl into my palm and then just set herself down and go to sleep and when I get her out of her enclosure she does this crasy color scintilation which is kinda like a cuttlefish. She love to be touched around her head.

I just think that since animals are living creatures they totally respond to love in a like fashion. Though the more dangerous animals I would be totally respectfully wary of.
 
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the aro after being back in the 140g for a few weeks

the fish room tanks are now being populated with sailfin mollies, white cloud minnnows and convicts to grow out feeders, and 1 60g tank will be specifically used to grow out the 2 spotted gars. I dropped in all the feeder comets I have been using to cycle the fish room tanks and it was a bad day to be a feeder goldfish.

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in this last picture it really looks like to me that the resident old gar has begun to regrow a split that looked like it was permanent in its back fin, and it really looks like it has grow about 1/2 inch since I took over the tank. I do know the water quality was anemic and the dude basically starved the gar in his 5 years of looking after her. So, I am really hopefull that jennifer will grow some.

My next mission is to get the museum to redo the backdrop and find me the fossils I had spoken with them about. I am also going to be looking for some good top cover plants, the surface moss I tried did not work as the rena filter intake just sucked it all up. Also looking for a good plant to attach to the drift wood.
 
hey This thread is sweet, im glad that you have high goals for the museum. A good plant for the drift wood would be Java fern. Looks nice and clings very well. also it does good in the not so great water conditions like low light/co2/nutrients.


It would be cool to see an update :).
 
tiops only have a very short life cycle like 3 weeks or something but they do lay eggs in the substrate and they need to be dried out to simulate the dry season and then a month later reintroduced into water where it all starts again (my missus bought me some for christmas lol)
 
Good job man, really impressed.

Keep up the good work and keep us posted.

- Dj -
 
Awesome job! Anubias, java fern, and cryptocorynes would do fine in that tank. The live food remnants will be more than enough fertiliser as will the fish waste.

Look forward to seeing the finished product.
 

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