Shy fish and lousy memory = complicated move

[Mark in Vancouver]

I moved recently, a fair distance (I really should be Mark in Delta now) - a 45 minute drive, anyway, with the air outside hovering around freezing. Complicated at the best of times when you have tanks. I had dismantled the 65 and 75 gallon tanks over the last several weeks and I managed to pass the fish off to respectable hobbyists, so it was bittersweet.

But the twenty and the thirty gallon tanks still presented problems. The worst part about it - or the most stressful, I guess - is the overall urgency of getting the fish into their new tanks fast. A wise lfs employee really helped with the advice of keeping the gravel/plants intact and not washing the filter equipment. Get the tanks set up at the other end of the move, add water, dechlorinator, minerals, run a pH test, and pop the fish in. The tank is cycled almost instantly. I kept all the filter material in bags full of old tank water. I did not lose a single fish this way. They were bagged and in a sealed polystyrene crate for the move.

However, loaches do not like to be caught at the best of times. Try catching sids in a planted tank! And it turns out I have 6 P. myersi, and not the 4 I had assumed. 4 P. anguillaris, and not 2... When you don't see much of your fish in a densely planted tank, you forget, I suppose. One of the anguillaris turns out to be gravid, and one of the horseface loaches is gravid once again.

One of the best improvements has been moving the batik loaches into the more sparsely planted 20g tank - I can see them for the first time in a couple of years as they're out and about and having small battles over the bogwood.

I am soooo glad this move is over!

[Emma Turner]

Glad most of the upheaval is over. We'll look forward to more pics (loaches as well as birds, remember! ) in due course.

Maybe you should think about keeping the Horsies in a species-only tank as last time we saw pics of those, it looked like you probably had a pair.

Emma

[Graeme Robson]

Good to hear all is well.

[Tery]

Congrats on the successful move. I'm glad to hear i'm not the only one to "find" fish in a move. I was down to <1" of water in my 50 when i found that the horsefaced i thought was long gone, was not only still growing but was still hard to catch.