Elassoma okefenokee

Posted 21 January 2014 - 10:46 AM

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Posted 21 January 2014 - 04:53 PM

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Posted 22 January 2014 - 08:20 PM

Here are some photos from setting up the 75 gallon tank. It was previously housing some other fish and a few hundred leeches, so I removed all the fish and plants and cleaned the substrate. The substrate, or ground, is pure clay kitty litter. I took it out and ran it under hot water in a bucket in the tub. The clay left in the tank got four pounds of salt poured on it. The leeches are visibly dead; I reached in and pulled a few out and they did not revive. So I poured the clay back in the tank. I also bought another bag and poured that in too, because I like the aesthetics of a sloped up ground. It's pretty.

Here's the brand of clay I bought. It's just clay, no clumping chemicals or fragrances added. I've tested it and it doesn't increase my water's hardness. (My tap water is 0 DH with and without this clay).


Here's a picture of the clay in the tank.


That tube is a Python no spill clean 'n fill, a sink-faucet connection. It can suck water from the tank into the sink or use the faucet water to fill the tank depending on its setting.


It kicks up a little bit of dust to pour the water directly onto the clay


but fill and drain a few times and it clears up quickly. This whole process, including the plants, took less than two hours.


Speaking of the plants, I noticed some leeches were coming off them so I salt shocked them. I poured this container of salt into this bucket of plants, waited 20 minutes, then refreshed the water with freshwater.


More pictures will follow. I'm going to put the plants in the tank and take a photo.

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Posted 22 January 2014 - 09:06 PM

More pictures. Here's the tank with the plants back in. The pellia's a little bit bubbly. It'll sink soon enough.



closeup of the kitty litter clay so you can see the texture:


The blue tint to the light comes from the blue T8 bulb covers I put over a few of the 32 watt four foot Daylight Deluxe lights. It's just for aesthetical reasons. I like the aquarium slightly blue.

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Posted 23 January 2014 - 09:42 AM

I am checking the tracking number and it looks like they might be delivered today! I'm so excited I will post pictures when they arrive.

Oh, um, just so nobody's confused, they're not going in this 75 gallon tank when they get here. They, or at least two or so pairs of them, are going into a 10 gallon tank. My goal is to let them spawn in the 10 gallon, remove the parents, and let the fry grow up alone. I'll wait until they're too big for their parents to eat, then I'll catch all the juveniles and transfer them from the 10 gallon to the 75 gallon, emptying the 10 gallon tank. Then I'll put a few pairs of the adult fish from the main tank in the 10 gallon and let them spawn there. Repeat. That way, hopefully I'll have continual fry production. I figure 1-2 months in the 10 gallon, 2 ish months to grow up. Each cycle will take about four months but might theoretically produce 10-80 fry. When I accidentally used this method once in 2010 (by removing the elassoma from a 10 gallon and then ignoring it), I counted 84 fish after half a year.

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Posted 23 January 2014 - 10:38 PM

They arrived! And they're all alive! I would like to officially recommend Sachs System Aquaculture. The packaging was very professional and the fish survived transit very well, despite it being a particularly bad cold snap right now. And best of all they actually do appear to be elassoma okefenokee (sometimes an advertisement for gilberti or okefenokee actually gets you evergladei). I'm so glad they arrived safely.



I will post more pictures once they settle in. I don't want to startle them right now. They are going to be my version of drip acclimated, water gradually added to the bag every 15 to 30 minutes ish. Then when the bag is full, exchanging out water between the bag and the tank.



You can also use this method, not my video but I like it:

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Posted 23 January 2014 - 11:08 PM

Congrats on the new additions Erica! Glad they all made it ok... looking forward to more pics as they settle in

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Posted 23 January 2014 - 11:45 PM

Thank you I'm feeding them grindal worms right now and they're super cute. At first they don't care what that thing floating past their head is. Then they snatch at it more in annoyance than anything else. Once they taste what it is they've eaten, their expression totally changes. They look around, looking for more of that delicious thing they just ate. And then the grindal worm hunt begins. So cute! aaaaahhhh I MISSED them so much

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Posted 24 January 2014 - 11:49 AM

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Posted 24 January 2014 - 12:05 PM

Did you ask Paul Sachs if he's coming back to NC for our conference this year? He came up in 2007 when we had it in Greensboro, rode with Doug I think. We'd love to see him again (and Doug too!).

Ah, no, I didn't.
His fish are very nice, though. I checked on them this morning and it looks like every single one survived acclimation to their new 10 gallon home. There are a lot of fish in this 10 gallon, I count 17 or 18? (thank you, more than I paid for ). I am considering waiting for a male or two to color up, then moving all but two pairs of the fish to a bucket tank I will set up temporarily just for them. Then I'd wait for two more pairs to color up (or just wait a month, bucket tanks are hard to see into). Then move every fish from the 10 gallon, the bucket tank, everywhere, to the 75.

I have discovered that these bucket tanks are ridiculously good at generating fry. It is starting to offend me how little guppy fry I get in my 55 gallon tank compared to in my bucket tank.
This is an old video of my bucket tank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uIvjlV6Z38

I've got an extra bucket available since I used it to salt the plants. I could throw hornwort (but not duckweed or ricciocarpus natans! surface plant suffocation) into it and collect a second spawn of eggs. Hmm, yes. That sounds like a good idea. I will see how they are doing when I get home late tonight and see if I can separate the population between the 10 gallon and a bucket tank. With 17 fish and all of them surviving so far, that seems like the best plan to maximize fry production.

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Posted 25 January 2014 - 03:43 PM

Here's how the 75 gallon tank looks today. No fish in it yet. I'll put the elassoma there in a month ish, after I see spawning. The goal is to have a place to remove the parents to so that fry can grow up without being eaten by the adult fish.


http://gallery.nanfa...enokee.jpg.html

Here's the 10 gallon tank:

http://gallery.nanfa...eeding.jpg.html

I set up the bucket tank for the Elassoma okefenokee.



http://gallery.nanfa...eeding.jpg.html
http://gallery.nanfa...enokee.jpg.html
http://gallery.nanfa... angle.jpg.html

These are the fish that I put in the bucket tank. I think that is two males and two females and a little juvenile fish that I think will be a female. I left more than ten fish in the 10 gallon tank.

youtu.be/DlR8lDU3JuI

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Posted 26 January 2014 - 12:56 PM

When I turned on the light this morning, I startled one of the smaller males from out where he was in the plants. He's solid black. Let's see if I can get a picture. *gets camera* Yes, I did! He paled a bit when he saw me, though.


http://gallery.nanfa...e room.jpg.html

Excellent, there is spawning activity already. This is how it's supposed to work, perfect

Edit: Oh ho ho, since just stepping away to post this, I see he's already gone back to solid black again. I'm not going to bother him for pictures. I'll watch and see, and I bet he spawns with a female soon.

I almost forgot to say, I'm feeding these fish twice a day. I feed them either live grindal worms that I breed in the drawer under the 10 gallon or a cube of frozen food from Petsmart. The frozen food is mixed bloodworm cubes, brine shrimp cubes, and I think there's a gammarus cube maybe? It's a variety box.
I describe how I breed the grindal worms in post #55: http://forum.nanfa.o...ks/page__st__40
Here's a closeup of my cultures.

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Posted 27 January 2014 - 12:32 AM

http://gallery.nanfa...nokee1.jpg.html


http://gallery.nanfa...nokee7.jpg.html


http://gallery.nanfa...nokee8.jpg.html

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Posted 27 January 2014 - 04:28 PM

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Posted 27 January 2014 - 04:39 PM

(Edit: Before I forget, I keep meaning to say that this camera is a Canon Elph 330 HS. Mkay.)

Are the okefenokees simply faded-looking ... because they are startled?

Yeah, this little dude is not face trained yet. He sees my face and he's pretty sure I'm gonna eat him, but he's a brave little fellow, so he's not losing all his color. How it worked with the elassoma gilberti I bred was that it was my second generation that truly did not care if I stared at them. If you go back and look at my old thread you'll see in all the first generation photos, the males wouldn't fully color up when I was close to their tank. Definitely not in the first few days, at least. The second generation and on was when I started getting much better photos. This little guy's very brave. Or, I have become less terrifying. I am curious to know how Sachs breeds their fish. The wild caught and pond bred fish I've received seem to be slightly more skittish than these guys. I wonder if these fish were in display tanks at any point. Or it could be because of the density of the fish in the 10 gallon and how I was hiding underneath the tank taking the picture with the camera pointed up, so they couldn't really see me. It probably looks ridiculous, but I didn't walk up to the tank to take those photos. I sort of crawled below the level of the fish tank so they couldn't see me and then slowly raised the zoom lens above the edge of the 10 gallon tank's dresser stand. ha haha, yeah, that probably looked ridiculous, but it worked.

I would like to make sure to say that I am very impressed at how these fish arrived in prime breeding condition. They did not have caved in stomachs, not at all. They arrived already plump and ready to go. Sachs is a very good vendor

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Posted 27 January 2014 - 05:05 PM

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Posted 03 February 2014 - 09:20 PM

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Posted 03 February 2014 - 11:35 PM

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Posted 04 February 2014 - 11:12 AM

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Posted 06 February 2014 - 03:05 AM

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