For those of you who prefer artificial/plastic plants over live plants, this is a maintenance post for you.
Clean those plants
cleaning
Reconciling lots of cover with cleaning
Unlike most tropical, freshwater fish, many species of cichlids prefer adequate cover for hiding and spawning. This is especially true for mbuna, pikes, and many lamprologines. Such cover can consist of rocks, caves, wood, etc. In fact, it’s often beneficial to have a substantial amount of cover if your tank contains multiple species, especially breeding pairs.
Clean those impeller shafts!
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Three years ago, I posted about keeping your power filters clean, especially the impeller and impeller housing. The point of that post was to help you avoid filter restart problems in the event of a power outage (or when you unplug the filter when you feed your fish or some other reason). Most of the time, a restart failure is due to a dirty impeller housing, dirty impeller, dirty impeller shaft, or all of the above.
Clean that glass
When you do routine maintenance on your show tanks, what components of the tank do you clean? Most cichlidophiles clean the substrate or at least vacuum the bottom if they have a bare bottom tank. Most also clean their filters regularly. How often do you clean the inside glass of your tank?
Regular glass cleaning is as important as maintenance on other components of your set up. Why? I’ll give you three reasons.
Restore that holey rock
Algae covered holey rock (l) and clean holey rock (r). Photo courtesy of the author.
If you’ve kept African cichlids, especially mbuna, you’ve probably used holey rock at one time or another. I’d be willing to bet that you’ve also had rock in which its exposed surface within the tank has accumulated diatomaceous algae (the brown stuff) or regular green algae. Either way, you’ve probably also discovered that such algae is not the easiest stuff to remove. The surface of holey rock, unlike river rock, is usually quite course, which makes it difficult to clean.
So what do you do? Most people will get out a brush of some kind and scrub it while holding it under running water. That will do a partial job. So how do you get it back to the crisp white color that it was when you bought it? A tip I picked up from a fellow cichlidophile is that you sun bleach it. No need to take a brush to it. Just set it out in direct sunlight for a couple of days. The longer it’s exposed to bright sunlight, the whiter it will get (to a limit). A week ago, the rock on the right in the photo looked almost as bad as the one on the left. Notice the difference after a few days in the sun.