Lisa’s Aquarium(‘s), Aquatic Plants, Fish, Shrimp, etc…

[Ron in Regina]

Not sure where to post this, or where I’m even going with this, but if anyone else has a similar interest/hobby/etc…maybe there can be an exchange of information and ideas. If you have Aquarium questions, I can pose them to her…

Being a member of the Regina Aquarium Society, if she doesn’t know the answer, she could sure find out from somebody firsthand with real world experience.

Lisa is my significant other. If she develops a hobby, she dives into the deep end without a life jacket & figures it out. Right now one of her hobbies are Aquatic everything. She’s not new to this but it’s really taken off the last couple of years, & she’s currently at (I think) nineteen tanks at home at this point.

There’s only four in our living-room where I generally see them, & about 15-ish now in our basement where I don’t, which might be a good thing.

 

[Ron in Regina]

Once a week (minimum), somewhere along the line and I’m not sure how it happened, it’s become my job to do the aquarium maintenance on her upstairs tanks. The benefit to me is if we actually get a chance to have some downtime, and watch a movie, and I’ve done the maintenance on these tanks, I can actually hear the movie over the top of them.

I have no idea if she’s making a profit or not (not my department), but I think she’s breaking even, rescuing fish from people that get over their head or are moving long distance and it doesn’t make sense for them to try and transport live fish well in the process of doing so, and many many other scenarios along the above lines.

She breeds Aquatic plants, several different species of fish, and domestic shrimp in Reds, Blues, Yellows, Greens, Blacks, I’m sure I’m missing a few colours in here, and then Wilds (which can turn into anything from stripes to whatever).

Not only is she breading or rehoming these for sale to the public in order to perpetuate her hobby, but she’s also supplying different species of fish, plants, and shrimp to the local pet stores in exchange for credit and food to further perpetuate this same hobby. It’s….busy.

Earlier today, I started on a few of the upstairs tanks, pulling off and cleaning filters…then pulling off all the floating plants, skimming off some pest weed (we call it frog snot) that grows prolifically for her, but not for everybody for some reason, rinsing all of the desirable floating plants of this “Frog Snot” (apparently goldfish loved to eat it, and that’s not something we have in our home), and getting everything back in to these tanks, with the correct orientation, & topping everything up (just from the four up stairs tanks there’s about 15-20 gallons/week water loss through evaporation this time of year, and about half of that weekly through the winter).

I don’t even pretend to understand what I’m looking at, know the names of any of the plants, or most of the fish, and definitely not the individual species of shrimp, etc… but again that’s not my department.

Here’s my first tank from the early afternoon today:

The above come out, so that the invasive prolific “Frog Snot” (I guess it’s also called “Duck Weed) can get skimmed off and packaged up for either sale or the garbage bin…

& the desirable Stuff goes back in:

 

[Ron in Regina]

The above tank I think was just a 50 gallon, and this one below, same process and same maintenance at least once a week, is a 60 gallon:





…& two more to go today, & 15 others that aren’t in my area of responsibility.

 

[Ron in Regina]

Anyway, lots of strange and interesting things happening, with an entire room set up for her mad scientist Color specific sorting/breeding (mostly shrimp) in the middle of the Canadian Prairies.


(It’s almost impossible to get pictures of shrimp with an iPhone)





To the naked eye, they are highly visible, with lots of movement, etc…

 

[Ron in Regina]

These are some she’s excited about:





Some need clean water to breed, & others brackish, & others borderline disgusting…

 

[Ron in Regina]

The pet stores sell 2”-3” tall plants for $12-$20 each for the desirable stuff, & 6” tall plants for $8-$15 or so for the others…

Lisa recently helped set up an aquarium for the school in Kamsack SK (again, this is a breakeven prospect for her, but it perpetuates her hobby), & This is one of the plants the Teacher left with that day, with a root ball bigger than the entire plants available from the local pet stores…

She’s got a bit of a green thumb. She set this Teacher up with about half a dozen different species of plants to get a very good start on filling a 150 gallon tank for the schools library if I recall correctly.

 

[petros]

Cool beans. Anything edible?

 

[Ron in Regina]

Cool beans. Anything edible?

I’ve no idea but I can ask. She does start non-aquatic plants in these aquariums and they root like greased lightning thought.


I’ve asked, & she doesn’t think so, but she can (hydroponically) start many things for transplant elsewhere on the tanks and those could be eatable.

 

[Ron in Regina]

This nasty look’n mess with what looks like soap scum on top of it is completely intentional. That (not soap scum) is a bubble nest for breeding Betas (Siamese Fighting Fish):

Currently she’s breeding these above Beta’s, Mollies, Platties, Sword-Tails, Guppies, German Blue Rams, Electric Blue Ankaras, Polar Blue Cichlids, Crebenzas (they’re another type of cichlids), and Shrimp in six colours plus wilds. I can Identify about four of the above.




…and these Glo-Tetra’s are cool all on their own:

 

[Ron in Regina]

 

[Ron in Regina]