Happy Fish

It has been quite some time since I have seen eggs on my ricefish (the dominant species in my main fish tank), but today I spotted several females with partially laid clutches. This species is called Daisy’s Blue Ricefish (Oryzias woworae). Daisy Worwor discovered them in a single stream on Sulawesi and brought back specimens to the United States, which then bred and were eventually distributed across the nation. Their eyes are characteristically blue, and, somewhat unusually, the females carry their eggs in a bunch for several hours. They will occasionally make trips to swim through a dense patch of plants - usually süsswassertang in my tank - and swipe one or a few eggs off at a time, sticking them to the plants.

The shrimp are doing well as far as I can tell, as are the otocinclus catfish, but they seem to prefer not to be photographed (unlike the ricefish who are always begging for attention). As always the bladder snails are present, doing their snail things. The dwarf saggitarius has been pretty much completely overtaken by the cryptocoryne (cryptocoryne is the most visible plant in all the photos below except for the one of the partially obscured oto’, which has an Amazon sword leaf behind it).

The taking of the photos was somewhat of a challenge. The tank has a healthy covering of duckweed right now and the lights are only at about 20% brightness most of the time in order to discourage algae. The low light conditions mean that my sensor struggles to get the entire subject in focus or to get a shot without motion blur, and I have to use high ISO so there is more color noise than I would like. For next time, clearing the duckweed and raising the lights would help a lot. Maybe there will be baby fish!