In the post below, I talk about my second tank. Its focus is primarily live plants, but I plan on populating it with a minimal selection of unusual and beautiful animals. Of all the animals I could choose from, the freshwater Caridina japonica, or Amano Shrimp, is definitely a candidate. Along with the Amano, here are other shrimp candidates for the new tank.

Neocaridina denticulata, Red Cherry Shrimp	Caridina japonica, Amano Shrimp
Palaemon scarletti, Rudolph Red-Nosed Shrimp	Palaemon hendersoni, Malaysian Rainbow Shrimp

As I mentioned in my post with photos, I'm planning on a new tank now that I've cut my chops on my very first 10g, which, so far, is quite successful.

I've decided on a few changes to the original plan:

I'm going to go with a 3-gallon tank and reserve the 2g tank I bought for hospital purposes. Unlike the 2g, the 3g has a bulb, which will be important for the Riccia if I can get my hands on it

I've decided to go with 1 or 2 Amano shrimp. The main focus of this tank is the plant life, so I'll focus on actual livestock later.

I do not plan on putting a Betta, as originally planned, in this tank.

Following are a couple of sketches of planting ideas:

Christmas Moss is planted vertically by tying it to plastic mesh that suction cups hold to the back of the tank. Riccia also fixed to plastic mesh on a bed of flourite.	Japanese Dwarf Rush grows tall and thick in background. Middleground driftwood covered in Mini Moss, surrounded by a bed of Micro Sword.

I have great news. Four days ago, after 21 days of quarantine, I returned Honegger to the main tank. It was dodgy at first. He developed a mouth fungus, which Maracyn Plus wiped out in 24 hours. He refused to eat in the first 24 hours. He breathed heavily. It just looked like he had made one of those little comebacks before you drop dead from the burden of being ill.

After 4 days, his breathing has returned to normal. He eats with great vigor. He swims with his tank mates, clearly pleased to enjoy the shoal once more.

Poor little guy has a slightly bent spine, and doesn't get in the larger Cardinal Tetras' way when they go bananas for frozen bloodworms, but he holds his own in the tank. I'm so pleased to have been able to nurse him back to health.

Lesson learned: Don't bother buying Neon Tetras, even from a respectable LFS. After weeks conversing with fellow aquarists on FishProfiles.com, I've learned that for the last year there have been widely reported problems with Neon livestock coming from Singapore. Inbreeding, artificial coloring that apparently compromises the immune system, and other problems.

I now have 6 Neons and can only hope that they live fairly fruitful lives. Four of them are from the original, questionable batch, which includes Honegger and Durey and Taileferre. The latter two died in the first day. Luckily, Honegger survived.

The Cardinals are as hefty and robust as I could have hoped for. So, with 12 fishies in my first tank, I'm a happy camper. In a few days, I can get to work on my ambitious second tank...the little Plakat habitat. More soon.

All my research when starting with aquarianism pointed to a variety of fish food to strengthen fish and maintain their appetites. Could you live on salad every day? Well, some of you could, but let's not go there. A mix of meat, dairy, vegetables, and fruit gives us humans the widest range of nutrients possible. The same is true for fish (or my Beagles, for that matter).

I've been toying with a few different kinds of food. Pellets (great success). Crushed flakes (great success). Freeze-dried bloodworms (great success). And frozen bloodworms (thawed, of course; great success -- their favorite, in fact). I'm about to try frozen daphnia and frozen brine shrimp.

What has been an abject failure is Marineland's Bio-Blend. If anybody reads this blog, please note that Bio-Blend Tropical pellets (more like nuggets) are far too large for Tetras. They wig out when they get them, but the pellets expand to 4 or 5 times their size when wet, which will occur only after ingested at the rate my fishies eat. This means distended bellies and massive amounts of fish poo. The pellets sink fast, so even my ravenous Tetras can't get to everything before it falls into the substrate, increasing the amount of bioload and more of a mess I have to vacuum out of the tank.

Big thumbs down to this highly touted fashion food for fish. It might be great for larger fish, but it's just not very practical for Tetras. Be warned.

For some aquarists, the addition of driftwood to a tank is a real pleasure, an added element of authenticity that raises the gravel and plastic-plant habitat to a level that strats to emulate real-world conditions.

Be warned. Driftwood comes in different forms, some of them easy to condition, some of them a real pain in the ass. First, you must choose driftwood that, when soaked for an appropriate period of time, sinks. I conditioned a piece of wood found in wilderness waters. It's beautiful, marbled, and almost perfectly round, a real rare find. But after 10 hours of boiling, it refuses to sink. Its bouyancy cannot be overcome. I guess I'll put it on a windowsill.

Second, Malaysian driftwood (you buy it at an LFS), as gorgeous as it is, is very difficult to rid of tannins, the water-staining brown-ness that aquarists dread. I've soaked it in buckets of regularly changed water for nearly a month, and boiled it for about 16 hours. It still leaks. Not worth the effort, in my opinion, although I'll keep trying for a few more weeks.

The best kind of driftwood I've found at my LFS is African-lake driftwood. Without any boiling, I leached its tannins in two-weeks worth of bucket soakings. It's gorgeous, with the sorts of curves and grain you'd expect to find in a haunted forest. I recommend it highly. It will form cloudy white algae in its first month of use in the tank, but don't panic. The algae clears up, and many of the algae clots will come off with the suction of a water change.