FISHIOLOGY

 Finally the black n white Toman During the time when I was searching for the Sp. Borneo at Kalimantan, I ran across a variant of Micros with a unique pattern and colorations. The bars are rounder instead of squarish or big square to the point of just lines instead of bars. The bars are sometimes so roundish that you get polka dots instead of bars. Some like this pc hv a round bars that form a donut. The base color is pale that they appear just white with black bars hence I gave the name black and white toman. I tried searching for the origin of this variant and found non at Kalimantan, mostly are bought from shops or friends.  Until recently I finally found them from fishing groups and bingo....they're not originally from Kalimantan but Jambi Sumatra, yes from the great Riau maru home place. They are truly magnificent, beautiful monster. I'm not sure mine will survive from the long journey, the eyes were sunken and a bit of fungus infection due to the poor keeping conditions,...

 

  Marulioides in neutral contrast Marulioides in high contrast You can see actual results of newly captured Marulioides from the wild retaining its flowers and on top of it new flowers are growing. Above is 1.5 months progress, when kept properly a newly transferred Channa Marulioides will maintain its flowers and on top of it you can immediately start grooming and have flower progress. Grooming marulioides summarized:- 1. Choose a potential pc, not all marulioides can produce plentiful flowers. Choosing one with a good potential genetically will save you lotsa time. 2. I've demonstrated too many times, high Oxygen will cause maru to loose flowers. 3. High CO2 will encourage flowers growth. Keep your surface as still as possible. If you are willing to go a step further pump CO2 with DIY or commercial unit. Natural swamp water is high in CO2 and low in oxygen.  4. Maintain constant PH, PH fluctuation will cause maru to loose flowers and difficult to grow flowers in this conditi...

 

  Neutral contrast tanning is more effective, the pigment seem more penetrable. In my case here, it was difficult to set the fish into neutral contrast. I discovered the fish would switched to neutral contrast when hunting live shrimp. So naturally I started feeding live shrimp and the fish would stay in neutral contrast. PH5.0 Temp: 28.5C CO2 1 bubble per second Before Before

 Lately I've been asked many times about using pasir malang or Lava rock as substrate. I've heard of this 20 years ago and I've tried that too as you can see from my old picture. been there done that Firstly lemme explain what is Pasir malang, they are Lava Rock or Volcanic rock. Very porous in nature, an excellent filter media. Couple with an ion negative charged acts like a magnet to contaminations such as heavy metal and so on.  Now lets get back to the question, is lava rock a good choice as a substrate? Is it also advisable to use sera siporax as substrate? this will saved us plenty on canister filtration set up. Right? wrong! why do canister, trickle or any sort of filtration designed in such a way that plenty of oxygen supply are pumped onto the media? Because beneficial bacteria needs a lot of oxygen to operate or they will die if inadequate O2 is available.  What happen to places with low oxygen supply? these are the black site or black area that spawn bad bacter...

  When first caught on Oct 2020 One month grooming result CO2 injections 1 bubble per second PH5.5 conditioner RIO Light tannins and Humic DOC Low oxygen environment

When the fish is finally settle I started flower treatment with the same procedure : CO2 injection of one bubble per second, Lighting T5 10k High output + 24W LED white.  PH5.5 Temp 28.5c Conditioner: RIO Humic Dissolved Organic Carbon and RIO Light tannin As you can see new white spec flowers are starting to form all over.

   

  Testing this new filtration that can instantly lower tap water from  PH7 to PH3.6. This will be very useful when keeping maru at PH4, I can now do daily water change without affecting my PH.  Water change has always been the contradicting factor, we cant keep NO3, NH4 and PH down at the same time.

  This is a recent acquired Terengganu Variant, tragically my 2 ganu died, entirely my fault when transferring tank, ok not in the mood to talked about them, 2 years wasted for a real flower. Anyway as a complimentary mood enhancer, I got myself an 11 inch substitute , very potential pc but doesnt look like a real flower but rather snakeskin type I think. Not entirely sure, but we'll see how it progress.

PH reading of the Black waters of the Marulioides Trengganu Variant swamp I came across a post discussing this topic today, or rather a group of hobbyist bragging that PH is not important when keeping Marulioides. So lets discuss on this matter shall we. Keeping your fish alive and keeping your fish to its optimum level is 2 different thing entirely. A true fish lover will research the species they intend to keep and respect the fundamental rules that nature had designed and its intention. The responsibility of an aquarist is to inherent the rules that was set on. A task he takes seriously before even deciding to placed the fish under his care.  Marulioides thrived on tropical swamp wetland. And tropical swamp waters are known as Blackwaters. Blackwaters are low in PH, low in dissolved oxygen, high in carbon dioxide. These are the characters of Blackwater.  Although there isn't any international fish police that had created any laws that says marulioides cannot be kept in PH7 ...

Puteri 2 is my most anticipated Marulioides, I've been waiting to get my hands on a true plum flower trait Terengganu. Puteri 2 was caught in the month of Nov 2018 and my collector managed to get the parent fish as well for sampling but unfortunately the adult fish did not survive. The parent fish is of the plum flower trait. The parent fish displaying plum flower trait I've put a great deal of effort on this fish for the first 12 months, grooming it to be a true beauty. But unfortunately after that I was too caught up with my work. I really couldn't spare more time, grooming marulioides takes a lot of time and attention. In the end I was forced to comm the fish in the big tank.  To make matter worse, theres a Giant Borneo Gourami in the tank that wreak havoc causing the fish to loss almost all the flowers, all my hard work down the drain. It will be ashamed to lose the true plum flower this way, it is now around 14" and I can still see the potential in this p...

To answer the common question: Do we need to put salt into our tank after water change? Salt is present in 97.5% of all water found on earth, and only 2.5% are freshwater. And of the 2.5% of freshwater only 0.3% are found on the surface on Earth that made up of lakes and rivers. Millions of years throughout evolution, there evolved fishes that are adapted to freshwater. Natural freshwater tropical swamp or stream water in the jungle are so pure condition with Nitrate reading's at 0ppm. TDS reading can be as low as 14ppm. For your information Malaysia's tap water TDS reading is around 50-70ppm. Meanwhile African lakes TDS reading can go from 400 - 2500ppm with a PH9 reading. Brackish water TDS reading around 10,000ppm and finally Seawater TDS reads at around 35,000ppm. TDS taken at Trengganu peat swamp TDS = Total Dissolved Solid, PPM = Parts Per Million When we set up an aquarium, the best thing we can offer our fishes is to replicate as close as we possibly can o...

Predator fish is defined as a fish that kills and eats another organism,  common  prey would be fish, crustaceans, insects, worms, and so on.  Apart from hunting,  occasionally they scavage for dead organism as  food sources. Predatory fish are  mostly carnivorous.  They have a big stomach and short intestine designed to process protein as their  main source of energy. Feeding true carnivorous fish with pellets is wrong as you  will notice they poo most of the pellets before they even had the chance to digest  any of the nutrients. It is like feeding pellets to tigers, actually, cats do poorly with pellets too unlike dogs that are omnivorous by design. The typical way we keep predatory fish is feeding them with gold fish and prawns,  any type of prawns. Now the problem with this is that most available feeders  Lampan, Gold fish, Carp, Seluang in fact all the family of fish under the Cyprinind  Species has very high enzyme ...