YAY!

Got myself a brand shiny new 55 gal tank for my goldfish! I have had Phillippe the goldfish for five years now, along with Adele, and they started out as babies, like an inch and a half long. Now Phillippe is like 6 inches long or something, and he is stuck in a sad 29-gal with 3 goldfish buddies and 3 Siamese algae eater friends!



I started by adding some lovely aged tap water, and putting in new gravel along with some laterite. I then cleverly used a plate to transfer my forest of whatever-
kind-of-plants-
those-are. They are quite large forests, and I wanted to keep them together. I do think I separated a small three-some off of one of the main groups though. These guys grow like crazy.

I put more water in there, tap, and transferred water from my established tank into the new tank. This sat overnight. I put even MORE water in there in the morning, the fish are getting sad looking at this point, they thought they were getting a bigger tank! I started the filter up, which wouldn't run yesterday because the level was too low - there's this midlevel water intake that is sort of strange and I needed to get the water up that high before it would run. The bitch did creek and moan for a good while before it finally started though.

THEN, I was reading up on cycling tanks - which I never put much thought into before, but since my dad mentioned, I thought I should look into it - and I found something about how planted tanks are easier to cycle, transfer plants over, use stemmed plants, which like to eat nitrogen a lot, apparently. I ran out to the store and got me some Pennywort and Ludwigia. Popped my heater in there to try to get the temperature even with my old tank. Did some ammonia tests - both tanks are around .1 ppm, which is fine. Ran off for the day.

NOW, nearly 24 hours after setting it, I have entered my Siamese algae eaters into their new home. THey are swimming round and munching on algae on the established plants. I will check the ammonia later tonight at some point. Anyway, the algae eaters are supposed to be hardy fish, so it should be ok. And I'm not as emotionally attached to them as I am to my goldfish. The goldfish would probably like a little more water in their tank though...