Our cold water tank.
Glorine, living in the old tank, which is now used for tropical fish. Glorine caught whitespot from Bubbles (who had whitespot when we got him), but survived it.
Glorine got a swim bladder problem, and we had to spoon feed her peas, but it was too bad, and she died.
Lightning was a crazy fish. If anything got close and moved, he would go crazy and swim very fast around and around and around. And around.
He had little tentacles called barbels on the front of his face.
Wiggletail is an algae eating fish. When he moved, his tail would wiggle. He spent most of the time hiding on the filter.
Sushi was my oldest fish. She had a funny tumour (lump) on her tail.
She was a strong fish, and had already survived white spot. Unfortunately she got a swim bladder problem, but she coped with it for a long time.
We tried to treat her for it, and had to hold her so she could eat peas from the bottom of the hospital tank. Unfortunately, she got dropsy as well, and died after a few days.
Rosie is the biggest fish. He is a fantail, but he has a longer body than the other fantails, so he is less likely to get swim bladder problems.
Rosie's tail is smaller on one side than the other, but he has no trouble swimming. Rosie is very friendly with the other fish, and people.
Neville's name came from Neville Chamberlain. His eyes were on the outside of his head instead of the inside like the other fish. He was not afraid of you, but he wiggled very fast when he moved, if he saw you near him.
He always swallowed bubbles because he couldn't see very well and thought they were food, and he had problems finding food on the bottom. That hurt his swim bladder so badly that he eventualy died.
Lemonade and Neville were the first new fish after the new tank was set up. Lemonade looks like Bubbles, but Bubbles didn't have the lipstick.
This shows Lemonade looking very pretty. She seems to like Rosie, and normally follows him and strokes against him.
Stripy zebras and spotted leopards are very strong little fish. They can live in warm and cold water. Like the fantails, they come from Asia, but they are their natural colours.
We wanted more zebras, but the fish shop accidentally gave us too many leopards, so after a while, we got more zebras.
This is Rosie, compared with zebras and leopards. If Rosie was any bigger, he would think the leopards and zebras were food, so we had to get him used to them before he got any bigger.
This is a leopard with mouth fungus. We put him in a breeding box so we could check on him more easily while we were medicating them all, just in case.
Pen y Fan, our first gold White Cloud Mountain minnow. It is named after a mountain in the Brecon Beacons. To make it happy, because it is supposed to live in a group, we bought some more. One disappeared the day after we got them.
Corn Du, the White Cloud Mountain minnow, was named after another mountain in the Brecon Beacons. The minnows are smaller than the danios, but they were happy to swim together.
The minnows looked different, but they liked each other, and acted like they were the same.
Corn Du had pretty colours on its scales and fins. One day he disappeared into thin water. Probably he died and got eaten afterwards.
The boy Pen y Fans display their fins for the girls, and to show off to each other.
Our cold water tank before we had the garra.
We got the garra so that they could eat the algae off the sides of the tank. It took a week for them to clean the whole tank.
The first garra is a Sri Lanka garra (ceylonensis). It can change colour from black (like the last picture) to striped yellow, depending on how it is feeling.
Here it is with a black stripe on it.
The stripe and the body can be very different colours when the fish wants them to be.
The garras suck themselves onto the glass, and bite off the algae. They can get aggressive with each other when they both want the same food, so we might put one of them in another tank.
The other garra doesn't change its colour a lot, and is normally black. We think it might be a Phillip's Garra (phillipsi), but they both come from Sri Lanka. The garra like to rest on leaves.
The garra swim like normal fish, not like catfish. In the wild, they even swim up waterfalls by sucking on the rocks.
This garra sometimes changes colour to get lighter, but doesn't have a strong stripe. It hardly ever does it though.
All of the fish like eating out of your hand, especially Rosie. Sometimes Neville ate out of your hands, but not very often because he couldn't see very well to work out where the food was.
Our garra are related to doctor fish, and like to eat dead skin, so they try to clean your hands when you put them in the tank.
The striped garra cleaning the algae off the tank.