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So yeah, I bought a new fish! Right now I'm calling him Sucky. He's an oticinclus catfish and I bought him so he can eat the algae I've been getting in my tank. Thus his name. Here's what the little widget looks like:
He's only about 1.5 inches long, and he's a quick little sucker. It's going to be a challenge to catch him and put him in Otis' tank, once the two-week quarantine period is over.
Here's the same photo of Sucky in extreme close up. I'll bet Blurry will feel like those eyes are commanding him to commit unspeakable acts.
I also bought Otis a new home - a six-gallon Eclipse tank - because his old five-gallon tank had a crack in the base. So Otis is swimming around his new, bigger digs and he seems to be quite happy. He's even happier because I figured out a way to block the water flow that comes off the filter. Normally it's much too disruptive to the water for Otis, and it creates too heavy a current for him to swim through. So he would avoid the entire side of the tank where the outflow is (or if he ventured that way, he'd get tossed and swirled around in the current).
Soooooo, I took a shrimp net that I had - it's a very finely-woven, soft net - and used black electrical tape to afix the opening of the net over the outflow. So the water comes out into the net, which slows it down enough that it creates almost no current (and doesn't cause the water to backflow because it's being blocked).
This is a perfect resolution because the net is so soft that it won't hurt Otis if he swims up against it. I'm really quite pleased. Here are some photos:
Click the thumbnail to view a larger image
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