Pickabar Blog

I went on a tattoo hiatus for a few years, but I’ve been back on the ink bandwagon in the last two years. On Sunday I got my newest piece by Eddia Senzala at Powerhouse Tattoo. Sparrows are a common tattoo idea, but I decided to get a similar tattoo commemorating my new hobby. Without further ado, here are my new Discus fish tattoos:

Eddie worked quickly and the only parts that really hurt were on the collarbone. I barely bled and both pieces are healing nicely. Of course, nothing can assuage the pure itchy agony of chest hair growing back in.

Only when I got home did I realize that we had both forgotten about the pectoral fins! Oh well, what can you do. I’m otherwise delighted with my new pieces and this gives me an excuse to visit Eddie when he’s next in town!

2010 has been a pretty slow year for me in terms of writing songs. It seemed like I popped out a new one every two or three weeks last year. One of the big things is that I just haven’t been practicing guitar as often as I used to.

At one point, I decided to try writing on keyboard instead to give myself a different perspective. It hasn’t really worked, but I did write one tune on keys in August called “Don’t Grow Out Of It”. It’s got a little modulation in the bridge, which I thought was kind of cool.

Enjoy!

[Download MP3]

I am a know-it-all in the fine tradition of Cliff Clavin. The fact that Sarah doesn’t kill me in my sleep is really a testament to fine parenting and her Quaker heritage. My latest bout of blowharditis was in relation to the substrate in our tank.

As I previously mentioned, we started out with a substrate made of a little bit of natural sand (light tan) and a whole lot of fluorite (black). We later learned that this was a bad idea for discus fish. Sarah suggested that we remove all of the existing substrate and replace it with a 100% sand base. I was very hesitant to upset the tank and disturb the helpful bacteria which live in the gravel. I thought it best to merely sprinkle a layer of the sand above the existing fluorite. We’d get all of the benefits of the lighter color without having to disturb the tank. Sarah was skeptical, but I was adamant and she went along with the sprinkling plan.

Well, it became clear in a day or two that my plan wasn’t going to work. As I really should have expected and I’m sure Sarah did expect, the black fluorite found it’s way back on top of the sand within minutes. It was only a matter of time before we wound up with a peppered color instead of the light tan we were hoping for. But I remained confident and/or defensively unwilling to admit my mistake.

A day or so after we sprinkled the new sand on our substrate, we purchased a worm feeder cone. The fish love freeze dried Australian black worms, but the discus are messy eaters and the worms are easily carried away by the current.  We often wound up with worms all over the tank after a feeding. The cone allows the fish to eat without all of the worms in the meal having a chance to float away.

The cone came with a suction cup for attaching to the aquarium glass, but it was difficult to move it. I decided to just leave the cup sitting upside down in the sand. Sarah was concerned that it might tip over, but I was sure it wasn’t. Sarah stepped out to run and errand and left me to finish the feeding. Almost as soon as she walked out of the door, the cone was knocked over just as she had expected. Rather than re-consider my plan, I doubled down and dug the cone into the sand. Problem solved! I felt pretty good about my clever handiwork and allowed myself a smug grin.

Then I removed the cone and realized that I’d created a huge black area. “No big deal”, I thought to myself. “I’ll just move some sand over to cover it.” Let’s call this the cover-up. Unfortunately, my moving sand only served to create more and more black or peppered areas. At this point, I should have stopped and waited for Sarah to return. We could have calmly discussed our next steps and set an appropriate time to redo the entire substrate if necessary. That’s what I should have done.

Instead, I decided to completely remove the substrate in the affected area and quickly add new sand. This was the cover-up of the cover-up. If I worked efficiently, I figured that I could have everything fixed before Sarah got back and I’d never have to hear an “I told you so”. I’m sure you can get where this is headed. The affected area kept expanding the more I tried to fix it and eventually I heard Sarah opening the door.

She walked in to see me with both arms in the tank, the water completely clouded with sand and dust and our poor fish were huddling at the bottom of the tank. I was forced to admit my mistake and Sarah was forced by the fear of criminal punishment not to kill me.

In the end, everything worked out. We replaced the entire front area of the tank with 100% sand substrate. We’ll continue to change additional areas where our plants haven’t already rooted in the future. Two days of water changes got the water clear again and made all of our inhabitants happy.

If you’re going to get discus, definitely go with sand as your substrate. It makes it so much easier to locate uneaten food or waste.

If you’ve made a mistake in your setup, don’t be so married to it that you’re unwilling to go back and fix things. Sometimes small tweaks and hacks work, but often times you wind up having to do the full fix in the long term anyway.

Most of all, once you’re doing a cover-up of a cover-up, it’s probably time to fess up.

Last Friday, Sarah and I received 2 Brilliant Turquoise discus and 16 cardinal tetras from Discus Hans. The fish arrived in the morning via fedex and were shipped in a styrofoam boxed. They are really beautiful, confident eaters as soon as we let them out of the bag and best of all they have calmed down the overall aggression level in the tank.

Obviously, part of the aggression problem was just the fact that we only had four discus in the tank. It’s recommended that they be kept in groups of atleast six, which makes sense when you realize that discus live in groups of up to 1,000 members in the wild.

As you can see, we also decided to add some lighter colored sand above our flourite subtrate. Discus will actually darken if living above a dark substrate. Pigeon based strains of discus also develop more peppering over a dark surface. We didn’t know that when we setup our tank, unfortunately. We didn’t want to remove our existing substrate, so we just sprinkled a thin layer of sand over the black flourite.

The best way to raise juvenile discus is in what’s called a bare bottom or BB tank. That is, a tank with no substrate and only potted plants or artificial plants. Discus are messy eaters, they need to eat often and they are also very sensitive to water conditions. Gravel or other substrate makes it hard to remove uneaten food and waste. People who are focused on growing their fish as large as possible stick to BB tanks.

We didn’t like the look of the BB tanks and decided to go for a lightly planted tank. We did that despite the fact that we knew that keeping the plants healthy and the gravel clean would mean a lot more work and a lot more risk. We just liked the more natural look and to be honest we looked forward to watching the plants grow along with the fish in our own little low budget version of a biotope.

Discus are actually found in the Amazon River. There natural environment is black water around submerged decaying trees. To that end, some of the people who have the most beautiful tanks feature large sections of driftwood as the centerpiece of their layouts. We weren’t as knowledgeable when we designed our original layout and we wound up buying random pieces of driftwood at Pacific Aquarium. We’ll probably purchase some manzanita at some point.

We also wanted to have a very lightly planted tank, so we started out with only a few microswords (which look like grass), two amazon swords (the plants with larger leaves towards the foreground) and two watersprites (the taller plants towards the left and right edges of the tank). We’ later added an anubias plants attached to our largest piece of driftwood.

Unfortunately, we wound up having the quickly growing watersprite in front of the less aggressive anubias. It was clear that our layout was going to lead to the anubias being completely blocked from sight. We also wanted to open the tank up a bit in the front.

Last Saturday the 25th, Sarah went ahead and re-configured the layout so that the driftwood with our largest anubias is now in the center back of the tank. We also added two small anubias plants to the driftwood on the right of the tank and a few more bunches of the microsword grass. I think the new layout looks much better.

This is Lloyd, one of our first four discus:

He’s a juvenile red maze pigeon blood discus. His hobbies are eating, pooping and bullying. One of his eyes is deformed, but we love him anyway.

Unfortunately, he started to have long stringy poop last week. You can see it if you look closely at the picture. He was still active and eating, but we were concerned because we had read that stringy poop is one of the big signs of poor health in discus. We immediately posted a thread on the Simply Discus message boards.

We didn’t get an immediate response and being slightly panicked we decided that the problem was intestinal flagellates and we had to treat the problem now now now! The SD common treatments guide suggested the antibiotic Metronidazole as the appropriate treatment so we headed out to buy it. Most proficient fish keepers will have a hospital tank setup which allows them to isolate and treat sick fish. Unfortunately, we don’t really have the space for another tank in our small apartment. At any rate, the Metro treatment was supposed to be safe for the whole tank. The main problem would be the additional expense of treating our large tank rather than a smaller setup. We weren’t concerned.

The metro that we purchased came in a 5 gram package. The SD common treatments guide recommended dosing at at least 400 milligrams for each ten gallons of water for three to five days. Our tank is 72 gallons. By my calculations we would need two of the packages.

72 gallons / 10 gallons ~= 7

7 * 400 milligrams = 2800 milligrams

3 days * 2800 milligrams = 8400 milligrams.

8400 milligrams = 8.4 grams.

Something must have been wrong in my thinking, though, because our first package was completely used up on the first day. Even worse, the store that had sold us the medicine had only had the two packages that I bought. All of the other local stores either didn’t carry the medicine or were our of stock for a few days. In the end, we decided to just do 1/2 of the remaining package each of the last two days of the treatment.

At that point, we actually got a reply to our thread. In the experienced poster’s opinion, our problem wasn’t intestinal flagellates at all, but worms. It seems like worms are a common problem with discus fish and many keepers recommend regularly scheduled de-worming to prevent outbreaks. He recommended Angel Plus Medicated Flake Food which we have now ordered.

In hindsight, it makes more sense that our problem would be worms. Another of our fish, Jack had been a bit under the weather before LLoyd showed any symptoms. I had coincidentally soaked some of the pellets I was trying to introduce to the fish in garlic because I had read that it strengthened their appetite and encouraged them to eat new food. Jack suddenly sprung back to life! Further reading suggests that garlic is a natural de-wormer, which is probably why it helped Jack to feel better.

In the meantime, LLoyd seems to be doing well and he’s still his tyrannical self. Hopefully, he’ll be ok until the medicated flake food arrives. Our lesson from all of this is that medicine should mostly be avoided and that knee jerk reactions aren’t very helpful. It can be nerve wracking to see that your beloved fish is showing signs of illness and medicines offer a quick fix. Slow thoughtful treatment is the right way to go. It’s also much cheaper!