Because I am expecting some new fish soon, I decided to re-use and re-do the 45g tank I mentioned in the previous post.
Out of an abundance of caution, I cleared that tank of everything but the heater, the airstone, and the thermometer. I then nuked it, meaning I dosed it with bleach. I let the filter run with the bleach solution for three days. After several water changes and treatment, I replaced the nuked media with fresh, seeded media from another tank.
I also added some new sand, some holey and river rock, and some new plants. I also did a bit of a scape. For the plants, I used CaribSea Eco-Complete soil, which your local pet store or fish store should have. You can also get it online here and here. There are plenty of other aquarium soils available. I chose this one because it contains active bacteria, very useful since I started this tank mostly from scratch (even though I used some seeded bio-media).
Since the photo above is not very good (taken with an iPhone 16), I will try to get a better one using my SLR camera.
To keep the bio media in the filter active, I added five juvenile Julidochromis dickfeldi from a couple of other tanks.
The incoming, new fish are Telmatochromis dhonti, which might go fine with the J. dickfeldi, at least for a while. Dhonti are pretty aggressive, at least as adults and toward conspecifics. However, I believe I am getting juveniles, so I’ll have to wait and see.
I hope to have the dhonti next month (June). I’ll post about them once I have them.