The Aquarium is getting low on water

This is… intentional, believe it or not.

I keep livebearers. Guppies and Mollies. Anyone who’s ever made the mistake of getting guppies because “they’re easy” or because “It seems like a good first fish” knows that they earned their nickname “the Millionsoffish” by doing what they do best. Creating hundreds of babies over the lifetime of a single fish.

I keep my tank on the warmer side, and these are cold blooded fish. This means that they “live fast and die younger”, since they have a faster metabolic processes. This is to accommodate the other residents of the tank. I also keep a gang of African Dwarf Frogs. They’re excellent population control, but I’m short a few and I don’t wanna work on socializing a new frog to the tank. The solution in my mind, breeding.

So I’ve been looking into the natural habitat and breeding conditions for ADFs. My tank is pretty close. It’s super rich in plant life so the nitrates and whatnot don’t really ever climb. I keep my TDS a bit on the harder side, and my salt on the higher side (I even get occasional nerite breeding in my ‘semi-brackish’ tank). Right now, I’m working on slowly raising the tank temp from 78 to 81 to simulate the “End of Summer” conditions for the froggos. They are also no longer getting evap replenishments, only replacements until I’ve lost about 5 gallons (that’s 25% of the tank volume).

The idea is, when I hit my 5 gallons missing, I should refill the tank with the same temperature (or slightly lower) of RODI water. The sudden dramatic environment size increase partnered with the water suddenly being significantly cleaner, should prompt the frogs to mate. As it stands, they occasionally enter amplexus and Frag (my female’s name) occasionally lays exactly one egg. One egg will not survive in a livebearer tank, I’m gonna need at least a hundred for a chance at a new generation of frogs.

I also had a little murder monster show up in the tank recently. I’m not sure where it came from, probably when I had the windows open for a couple days (it was unseasonably comfortable here in ABQ the other day). I was looking for Madam Scrimply (a Saddled Cherry shrimp who hitched a ride in some frogbit), since she just molted a week ago and I was worried she might get snapped up by a frog (or worse, picked to death by my second generation boys, who’re extremely aggressive for some reason). While I was looking for her, I found a damselfly nymph. Initially I thought it was a ghost shrimp. I had some in the tank at one point and had assumed they’d all been eaten, they were meant as frog fodder after all. I picked it out of the tank noticing it had been stuck on top of my frogbit, I’d assumed it dead. When that thing grabbed my tweezers with it’s little legs I let out an audible “what the fuuuuuck is that?!?”, crushed it’s head, and laid it out on the patio for a dove to find, that was probably irresponsible but it’s fine. From what I read online, I may have saved my entire generation of fry by destroying that thing, probably saved Madam Scrimply too.

This is a second call, anyone who has African Dwarf Frog breeding advice, I’d love to hear it.

I’m getting back into the aquarium thing after a nearly 10 year hiatus since “Lord Octavius Redfin, Champion of the Southern Gulf, Alpha Above All Betta” was abandoned by necessity with a former roommate (who was an excellent fish handler, I knew Octo was in good hands). I’ve never raised active predators like ADFs before. Actually, everything online says they’re terrible hunters but after a few months in my tank they’re super healthy and have gotten better at hunting. I think their eyes seem clearer too. Folks say they have terrible eyesight, but like, so would you if you ate the same nutrition-less pellets every day, a varied diet is important to the health of the entire body. I give them pellets sometimes, only when I haven’t supplemented their calcium in a while (since they primarily hunt fry and eat decaying plants).

Love y’all,
Thanks for reading my dumps,
Nora