A brief fishy update

Well I know a lot of my blog has been about zombies of late, but that's purely because a lot of my life has been about zombies of late!  In fact I'll have another post to follow very shortly with regards to my filming session on Thursday and Friday.  But right now, this is a quick post about my lovely fishy friends.

It's been about a year now since I bought my maroon clownfish, Fulgrim, and since day 1 I've really wanted to get her an anemone to host.  I did get an anemone last summer, but sadly the clowns (as I did have a pair back then) didn't take to it, and it died later on.  When the second clown died I put the anemone on the back-burner, as one of the main reasons I wanted one was that they were a mated pair and it would encourage them to breed.

But now that my tank's fully stocked I decided it was time to bite the bullet and get that anemone, so I picked up a beautifully vibrant red bubble tip anemone, which I have named Cthulhu.

He was pretty expensive, setting me back £50, but I'm hoping he'll last a good while.  The most important thing is getting the clown to host him, as she'll make sure he gets fed and look after him in general.  Once I'd got Cthulhu into the tank he spent a couple of hours moving around, trying to find a nice spot, and by luck he settled into just the spot I was hoping he'd choose, as it's right in the middle of Fulgrim's territory.  After he'd been there for a little while Fulgrim started to swim up close and take an interest in the new addition, and a short while later I looked into the tank to see this...

 

So it looks like they're going to get along just fine.  This photo was taken around 4 hours ago, and Fulgrim hasn't spent more than a few seconds away from Cthulhu at a time since then, so hopefully this'll be the start of a long and happy friendship!





Fingers crossed for more fishy friends!

Well the Clownfish are settling in nicely, and the next planned addition to the tank was to be their anemone, but a quick visit to the pet shop has changed everything today.

Originally today's visit was just to reserve myself an anemone to pick up next weekend, but they had a lot of stock in which I hadn't seen before, and some which they only get in very rarely.  The rarity was a Mandarin, which I've been wanting to get as the final fish for my community.  They only have the one in, so tomorrow I plan to speak to my regular guy there and see if I can reserve it for next weekend and place the anemone on hold for a fortnight.

The exciting new additions were rather large sand-sifting snails, and also pretty big white-legged hermit crabs.  A snail I'd definitely love to have - I already have a turbo snail, but the sand-sifter would help to eliminate the algae problem I'm having in the substrate.  The hermit on the other hand is a bit more iffy.  Very beautiful creatures to be sure, but I know that some hermits can have a bit of a rough temperament, so I don't want anything that will upset my small red hermits, or either of the snails, so tomorrow I'll be asking about how compatible one of those would be with the other tank members.

At the very least I plan to add the snail to my aquarium tomorrow, and if all goes well I'll be adding the snail and a nice big fat hermit crab as well :) And then it'll be a week until the Mandarin, a fortnight after that until the anemone, and then my little tank community will finally be complete.  Altogether I'm feeling quite excited at the moment.