JayJay has been acting really off recently, and he's been sitting on the gravel at the bottom only coming to the surface to breathe and eat, which isn't very often. He also had a very mild case of fin rot, which I seem to have horrible luck with. Today when I got home from school, he was laying on his side, not moving at all, so I thought he was dead. I nudged him with a net and he shot up towards the surface to get a breath, then sunk back down to the bottom. So I left him there, and about four hours later I came back to check on him. He died. So I took him out and flushed him. Since I don't have very good luck with bettas, I don't think I'll be getting any more of them. I'll just stick with Gary and Liberty.
And the good news? I took the kissing gourami out of isolation today. Since he lost his eye, he's been a lot calmer than before. He doesn't struggle when I catch him in a net, and he doesn't flip around in it or anything like he used to. So I let him out into the tank and he swam off into the back corner; he positioned himself so that his blind side was by the wall and he could look over the entire tank. I watched him for a few minutes to make sure he was doing alright, then checked up on him about once every hour. I turned off the light already, so I'll probably check on him again in the morning.
Since I have an empty 2.5 gallon tank, Gary gets to move in to it! Yayy for him, but I need to clean it first. I think I'm just going to dump the gravel that's in it, and put some regular stuff in. I'll probably tear Liberty's tank down too and replace the gravel. I hate that blue-green algae that invades all my tanks. I read somewhere that it's toxic to fish, and that's why nothing will eat it; you have to scrub it off, then it just comes back within a few days. Once it has been on something, it's going to come back no matter what. And it's not fun. It's all over the big piece of wood in my 20 long, and even took over my red temple plant that came uprooted. It's basically a big mass of green at the surface of the tank now.
Since most of my plants in the 20 long aren't doing very well, I've decided I'm going to get a few more fish for the tank. After all, it only has the two Bolivians and a snail. Since I don't have any CO2 going into the tank, I think that's why the plants are starting to die; so maybe if I get more fish, which will in turn produce more CO2, they might come back? So I've been thinking about neon tetras, and maybe a wood shrimp. The neons would love the yellowy water and live plants, and the shrimp would probably help me keep the water a little cleaner.
