My fish tank, a social experiment

2 years of neglect to my clown loaches, leaving them in a big, empty fish tank and with no proper food. No wonder they are losing their distinctive black strips. With their welfare in mind and also to replace a boring big tank of water with an attractive aquarium of biodiversity, I spend S$80 to revamp my house aquarium.




This is my very novice attempt at recreating a natural environment for the fish and more importantly the 8 Clown Loaches that have survived for almost 4 years. Just sand, rock and some cheap water plants to add some greenery to it. Water changed weekly and treated with GEO-LIQUID popularly advertised as a natural water treatment solution that even monkey will be able to maintain an aquarium.

Current resident in the aquarium are 8 Clown Loaches, a horde of Neon Tetra, some Guppies, 1 very big Albino Suckerfish, 1 fighting fish and numerous prawns thats in charge of cleaning up dead fish that sink to the bottom. More than just an aquarium, it was a water-life social experiment of some sort.

First experiment involve food. Turn out that all the fishes in the Aquarium are so well fed that they are already mentally conditioned to relate food to my hands moving around the fish tank. Its really interesting to be able to control where they swim with my finger. Fish don't have a sophisticated brain like human. They probably know only 4 things, eat, sleep, run away from danger and finally mating which is a rare sight. I think human being too are sometime like fish, our brains are conditioned to work everyday for the sake of a stable income. The money is the finger that leads us in circles.



Second experiment involve adding in a fighting fish a week ago. I was told that Fighting Fish only fight among their own species and is absolutely safe to be added into an existing aquarium as long as only 1 of their kind exist in a tank. It proof to be partially wrong for the Fighting Fish seems to have a invisible sphere of territory around it. Whenever a fish enter that invisible zone, the Fighting Fish will not hesitate to chase it away. A few unfortunate Neon Tetra however were killed in the occasional confrontation. Thus a Fighting fish is still a Fighting fish no matter if its alone or not.

Third experiment was a test to find out if my Clown Loaches love to eat prawns. I am always interested to keep some Red colored shrimp in the aquarium but fear that it will be eaten up by the Clown Loaches which are known to eat snails and prawn. So I brought some cheap prawn (A dozen for a dollar) and use them as guinea pigs. Its been 3 weeks now and the population of the prawn did not dwindle. Instead the prawns have grown slightly in size since they are always consuming the poor fish corpse, casualties from natural cause or killed by fighting fish.

Finally, I learn not to buy adult size Neon Tetra. Not only are they expensive (1 for $1), they are mostly at the end of their life span so they die pretty soon. I brought 50 smaller size Neon Tetra for $6 and all survived.