It’s been over 6 weeks since the costia outbreak in my 20-gallon extra-tall aquarium that wiped out my pair of angelfish. I ran the tank empty during those 6 weeks after upping the salinity to brackish range. I’ve done a couple of water changes in the past two weeks to bring down the salinity and finally restocked the tank today.
A nice couple I met at Top of the Reef in Phoenix runs a small angelfish breeding operation called JC’s AngelFish and More. (No web site but if anybody local wants some nice angelfish email me and I’ll give you contact information.)
I’m pretty much done buying fish at big box pet stores like……and…. They are great for hardware and food but I’ve been burned too many times with sick animals to buy livestock there again.
JC’s is run out of the guy’s house. I saw the entire breeding operation and brought home two feisty angelfish with body somewhere between dime and nickel size.
At the same time, I also bought a pair of albino bushynose plecos. Bushynose are appropriate plecostomus for a home fish tank for most people. These aren’t the common plecos you find at those big box stores. Common plecos are enormous as adults, and the casual aquarium owner has no idea what to do with the fish when it outgrows the tank, so they get dumped into canals and rivers. Bushynose plecos only get to about 4-5 inches long and are great animals to own. Why they aren’t sold more often is a mystery to me.
It’s sort of funny that I met this couple at Top of the Reef. It’s mainly a marine aquarium store and none of us do marine fish. I come the closest with brackish tanks, but those parallel freshwater more than marine tanks.
The angelfish I bought were looking for food as soon as I put them into the tank. Usually when I import fish I leave the lights off until the next morning. These guys were so active that I turned the lights back on after about 10 minutes. They don’t seem a bit stressed.