digging for photos and a diversion

My ad didn't so especially well. One helpful guy named Ron Chapman sent me a few good pictures...one in particular is excellent but he was the only fish person to respond.

I decided to get in touch with Dave at Somethingfishy Inc. in Ohio and ask him for help. He's the guy who sold me my fish back in April. This is a story in itself, so I think I'll write it down. It will make good copy for the site.

I found Dave's brick and mortar and online stores via http://www.cichlid-forum.com/reviews/
The reviews were good, and Dave happened to have hundreds of Ps. Saulosi fry for sale at a good price (I think it was 3/$10). As he is outside Cleveland, Ohio I figured the shipping wouldn't be too expensive or rough on the fish. So I ordered 13 Ps. Saulosi and two Synodontis Petricola which were $10 each, I think. I asked for overnight shipping with Saturday delivery and I waited. I'd never done mail-order fish before...back in the old days, I only knew of stores that got fish this way...and maybe some clubs also. Overall I paid less than $100 for the stock and the overnight shipping, which was a great deal. I should know...I shopped around like mad.

The fish came early in the day, in a box carefully packed with two bags of Saulosi and one bag of Petricola. Dave double-bagged each bag and put them into a very thick cardboard box filled with packing material. He also put a heating pack on the bottom to compensate for any temperature drops in transit. He may also have used "Bag Buddies," which is the trade name for a tranquilizer that is often used when shipping fish, but I'm not sure.

I immediately put the bags into the tank so they temperature in the bags could warm up to that in the tank. The catfish, which are nocturnal, looked active and groovy. The Ps. Saulosi looked only so-so. They were really little, vulnerable fish -- the biggest two or three were barely an inch long -- and a few looked like they weren't going to make it. These fish were sitting on the bottom in the cracks formed by the cinched bag. I left them floating in the tank for a good forty minutes and by the end, the sad-looking fish were perking up. All the Saulosi had arrived pale but were now getting their common deep yellow-orange. Later I realized that the fish probably weren't dying but just very zonked out from being in the dark for that long.

These days if I surprise the fish by turning on their light or the room light in the middle of the night they are all very inactive and pale. It takes at least five minutes for their color to return when you awaken them.

Toward the end of the floating period I opened the bags and began to introduce tank water in small amounts into the bag so as to avoid shocking the fish from differences in pH or hardness. Eventually I tipped the bags into a net and let the old bag-water run into a bucket and dropped the fish into the tank. I was definitely doing things by the book because I didn't want this to go wrong, primarily because I didn't want the little guys to die, and secondarily because my budget for project fishtank was nearly exhausted.

The fish ran and hid in the little caves I'd carefully made for them with dead coral, tuffa rock, and lace rock on the bottom.

That's enough of that. Back to Dave. He proved to be a nice guy, and since he breeds the hell of of the Ps. Saulosi and sells them online I'm hoping he'll be able to float me some nice photos. We'll see.