Hey everyone,
Well, I can't believe it's been about ten months since I've updated here, but it's time. I admit I go through phases with my hobbies and there are times it's on the back burner and other times I get re-energized and feel like sharing. [Edit: well, technically, I ended my part of the 2018 Grow Out Challenge with a shot of this group in their new tank with two holdovers from the contest back in late December (http://forum.simplydiscus.com/showth...=1#post1313322), so maybe it's nine months, but you get the point.]
Things went normally from what I remember for the first part of last year, and then we had a big challenge: plans to be away from home for about 7 solid weeks over the summer! I really wasn't sure what I was going to do, and didn't want to get too attached to my fish, as plan A was to get the LFS to help me re-home them. (I ended up taking a bunch of other fish and shrimp over there to keep my other tanks minimally stocked, but I didn't get word from them of anyone ready for these guys and naturally I didn't want them to end up in bad living conditions somewhere, so... plan B: they rode it out!)
I posted (another) vacation-oriented thread seeking advice on this, and in the end I hired a college student who had done some babysitting for us to come over once a week to do a feeding and a water change. I typed up step-by-step instructions and walked her through it as she did the process once, and decided that was as good as we could do for them. So, fasting most of the time, lights out most of the time, a little sustenance and one big WC per week was the plan. Most of the fish were a year old or so, and I didn't see other good options I liked. Complicating matters was that one of my original group had been thinning for a while and if I had been home I probably would have medicated him.
Long story short, these guys as a group were really resilient! We got pretty much zero communication from our housesitter, and were 24+ hours away by car anyway even if things went awry, so I didn't know what I'd find upon return. Well, the fish were all alive, except one of the two small runts from the contest had vanished. Don't know if he jumped or if he passed somehow and she removed him--we never did hear from her again after about week one(!)--but everyone else was hanging in. Thing was, the power strip with the canisters and the heater was off (!), so the only thing running in the tank were the airstones! Yikes. Had no idea how long that had been the case--might have been from a WC that day, might have been off for weeks! Only option was to break down the canisters, do a big WC, get the heater going again and hope for the best.
Unfortunately, the one weak fish I mentioned above didn't make it more than another couple of days after these big interventions; he hadn't been well-conditioned beforehand and didn't have the stamina. But everybody else bounced back really well. Slowly got them eating again and took a couple of tank shots and some video with my phone a couple of days ago, now a little more than a month and a half after we got back. Here they are:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKij...ature=youtu.be
Started to see some new dynamics emerging a bit with the group, and given it's down to six total I thought it might be time to bring in some new adult fish, do a long QT, and enlarge the group. So that's happening this week. Will update on those soon... should be unboxing on Friday!