Below are some pictures of my fishy~

This is a dottyback, we call it capsule because of it's colour pattern. (I have no idea whether it is a he or she, so I'll just call Capsule a it.) It is my very first marine fish! It recently got sick but luckily is recovering now~ Every night when it's bed time, Capsule goes to the back of the fake coral and sleeps in one of the gaps. When I say sleep, I mean no movement at all!

This is obviously a clownfish~ It came with the nemo package I bought together with another smaller clownfish. We had no idea what to call it, and now its name seems to have become Big clown somehow. When it comes to meal time Big clown and capsule would stay around the top left hand corner where I feed them every day, but Big clown wouldn't allow Small clown to go near there... It'll scare off Small clown whenever it comes just a bit closer! Tyrannic eh! But it gets along with Capsule quite well.

Here is a not-so-clear picture for you to compare the size of Big clown and Small clown.

Now let's have a look at the tank~ I think Small clown was near the heater (don't worry, the heater wasn't on at that time).

Cow Cow

(became a member on 27/02/2004)

(Left on 11/05/2004)

This gorgeous (weird), fascinating (scary) fish is a cowfish. It belongs to Vincent. I therefore have a bit pressure from keeping it (alive) because my tank has had some problem before, and Capsule seems not to have completely recovered yet, also the tank could be a little too small for the cowfish (and this cowfish is relatively expensive).

Anyways, let me introduce it to you, we've decided to call it Cow Cow. When the salesman got Cow into the plastic bag so that we could carry it home, it got scared and struggled and its horns actually popped a few holes on the plastic bag... so we needed a total of  3 plastic bags to carry it.

And when it got home it got scared and actually did some very quick colour change! When it changed colour it had a few big dark brown patches on the body and didn't look nice. (Didn't capture that...) Also it loves to curl its tail to the front, don't know if this helps with changing directions, cause its body is a hard shell and it can't sway like other fish~

We were told that when the cowfish gets stressed, it produces a slightly poisonous slime, but it won't kill other fish in the tank. So I swear I won't put my hand into the tank for any reason! What if its horns accidentally poke my hand??? What if my hand gets into contact with its slime???

Always on our minds

Cow Cow has left us forever. I think it was due to improper feeding. We just treated it as a normal marine fish, and the shopkeeper that sold us Cow Cow didn't tell us anything that we need to pay attention to it. In fact, when feeding Cowfish, the food must be pre-soaked before putting it into the tank, because if the food flows on the surface and the Cowfish tries to eat it, it will "suck in" the air and eventually develops intestinal blockage, and swim bladder problem which is an irreversible problem. I just realised this after discovering Cow Cow's illness and researched on the internet... Also Cowfish should be fed proteins such as brine shrimp as well as vegetables to prevent intestinal blockage. Sorry Cow Cow...

Cow Cow was sitting on the bottom of the tank and "nose-diving" into the sand when I first noticed his illness. He couldn't eat anything because of this, so we put him into a plastic box and fed him some brine shrimp, in the hope that it would gain some strength and recover. When we went to observe Cow Cow's condition again, he suddenly turned into a very light, pale colour, then he passed away.

Therefore, whatever pets you would like to keep, do extended research on the species before buying it, do not rely on other people such as the shopkeeper to give you special advice. Treat all as unique species, because some could be very vulnerable to a typical disease or have special requirements, while others are more tough and can adapt to changing environments more easily.

Big Clown sold

(07/07/2004)

This decision didn't come easy, but she has really bad behaviour and it gets worse... just around 2 days before we sold her away, she tried to hurt Capsule really badly. Capsule was bleeding under the skin, most fins were broken, some of the scales came off, and some parts of the colour has lost, probably due to the injury. It got extremely nervous, and tried to hide from Big Clown's attacks. It even hid inside the fake coral (as the coral is hollow), probably by finding a little gap between the sand and the fake coral and forced itself to "slip" inside the coral. I discovered this when I returned home and couldn't find Capsule in the tank. I lifted the coral carefully and saw Capsule swam out of it! It was such a shock to me because it must be really painful to get inside between the tiny gap between the hard coral and the rough sand.

So we went to an aquarium and asked what we could do about this bullying. We were told to get rid of 1 of the fish, and can actually sell it to the shop for 1/3 of the retail price, as long as the fish appears healthy. So we decided to sell Big Clown since she has been bullying other fish around ever since she joined the tankhood.

I might add a few more little fish when I'm confident that the tank is healthy again, both the environment and the fish already in there.

Tripped Over  (仆親)

(Joined the tankhood on 19/07/2004)

(Left on 24/07/2004)

This is embarrassing, for not being able to keep a fish alive for more than 5 days... I did thought of taking off Tripped Over's pictures, but then decided not to hide this embarrassment, to take the courage to leave them here, to face the problem and hopefully learn from the mistakes, also for Tripped Over to be memorised as such a short-lived but charming member of the tank, like fireworks.

The tank has been getting tiny white worms (around 1 mm long) ever since Capsule got sick. This has been one of the biggest problems of the tank because after each medication, they just keep coming back, and so last month we did a 50% water change, prior to the water change, I applied the medication again just a day before it, so to kill off the worms. While we were quite happy with the result (hadn't seen a worm for about 3 weeks),  we decided to address the reddish bacteria problem, as you can see from the pictures, and so we bought a medication and buffer to raise the pH in the hope that the bacteria would go away. We did a 25% water change before adding the medication and buffer, and while sucking out the filthy stuff from the sand, we realised there were in fact heaps of those tiny white worms hiding in the sand!!! They have in fact been building a colony in the sand with me innocently believing in their extinction... Vincent suggested it could due to the reddish bacteria finding hosts and thus the growth of the worms, so we just hope that buffering the water can not only destroy the bacteria but also the worms. By the way the staff from the aquarium told us it's normal to get little organism in a marine tank, but it really irritates me...

One day before Tripped Over's death, I realised it was breathing very fast, but we didn't do anything about it, and then the next day I woke up, it's gone. Vincent did a search on the net and found that fast breathing could be due to many reasons, one that makes some sense to us is that there could be parasites or worms, so we're suspecting that the ugly worms have taken away my Tripped Over.

Anyways, I'm not going to buy any more fish that are hard to keep, no matter what the salespeople in the aquarium say about the ease of keeping a particular type of fish, thus only hardy fish in my tank until I have reasonable knowledge and time and money to keep different kinds of marine fish. Also I'll try not to put in any new fish until the tank is parasite-free/ bacteria-free/ problem-free.

Capsule left on 31/07/2004

The tank has been running for almost a year now, and now maybe this is the time to give it a rest. Capsule is my first marine fish, now that it's gone, I lost hope for a while. 2 fish died within 1 week, there has to be something really wrong with the tank, just that I don't know what exactly is the problem. I realised similar symptoms in Capsule just a day or two before it left, and I had a feeling that Capsule would not stay for long. Then the next day it passed away. Capsule had been very brave in fighting a parasite it got last year, and had recovered from that, it also survived Big Clown's attack, but what is it this time that took away Capsule's life?