AJ's Fishkeeping Diary

Intro

March 23 2023

Hi! I'm AJ (they/them) and I'm a college student in the UP of Michigan. I'm originally from downstate and my girlfriend is from Oregon - we met here at our college. I have an undeclared major while my girlfriend is a mechanical engineer.

Today I've decided to create a log of my fishkeeping experiences. I've had fish for several years now but I've not kept any written entries of my work in the hobby until now! Currently I have one 10 gallon with a betta sorority, a mystery snail, and pest snails. This is my first time attempting a betta sorority and so far it's gone very very smoothly with few mishaps. My 3 girls get along wonderfully and have grown a lot since I got them in December(?). Although they gorged themselves on bloodworms last night and are pretty lethargic today - I'm not letting them do that again.

Yesterday, I received a 20 gallon tank from someone in town who was donating their supplies to our aquarium society (for $40, so honestly steal). It came with all the substrate, sponge filter, heater, breeding box, and some stock. There's a lot of ramshorns and bladder snails, but also some shrimp (I've found red, blue, black, and black/white so far, mostly babies but some adults too, the biggest is a red cherry). I've never kept shrimp before so this is new to me. There's also 2 huge apple/mystery snails in the tank, one that I believe is an ivory and the other potentially jade. It's hard to tell their original colors because their shells are so pitted and thick. The seller had a purple snail in the tank that had gotten claimed by someone else, so I'll be attempting to hatch any viable egg sacs that are in the tank right now, in hopes that there are some purple or magenta babies in it for future breeding projects. Breeding mysteries is something I've been wanting to try, and hatching these eggs will be my first attempt. I've got 2 floating on a lid (one of them may have been drowned in the moving process, we'll keep an eye on it) and one under the tank lid I think is fine where it is. There's 2 more on the filter that I don't think will be viable. There's some baby mysteries in the tank, and I've only seen ivory and gold so far. There are also 2 panda cory fry that I caught and put in the breeder's box. The seller said he didn't know they were there until he was getting the tank ready for transport, and the parents have been gone for about a week, but were pretty high quality. I've again, never raised any fry, nor had corydoras, so I'm doing research and will try to get them growing, and fill out the rest of the school out of pocket.

If there's anything anyone would be interested in reading my experiences with, just let me know in the comments! If it's to talk about my betta sorority, keeping my mystery snails, past fish tanks and mishaps, my previous bettas, or anything else! Even if you wanna know more about me. Thanks for joining us on this journey <3