We had a nasty outbreak of algae in our tank last week, and this is despite the fact that we’ve got five Ottocinclus critters living in the tank. These five Ottos are quite a temperamental bunch: of the five, two of them are so fat from chewing up algae they look like they’re about to burst. They’ve effectively stopped eating. Two others seem to enjoy grazing on the gravel instead of the leaves. The fifth one seems to be doing his job at least and valiantly trying his best to eat up all the green mess.
I suspect the algae outbreak has been because of the new replacement florescent tubes we’ve installed in the aquarium lighting system. In any case, we decided to go for a two prong approach: we went by Nature Aquarium at Balestier on Saturday to pick up three more Ottos. and also a whole bunch of plants from there and also Sea View at Seletar (the following day we topped them all up with more plants from Aquarama). Right now, the tank looks, visually, a mess – but it’s heavily saturated with plants, hopefully sufficient enough to eat up all the nutrients I’ve got in the gravel and leave nothing to the algae.
The picture here is as it was on Saturday evening, without the new plants we picked up at Aquarama the following morning on Sunday. The tank setups we saw at the exhibition at Suntec City were amazing. Our next home we’ll have to invest in a four footer tank.:)
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