FISHIOLOGY

  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 ...

This video demonstrate how the Giant Borneo gouramy changes its pattern according to its mood. It can formed the common Giant Gouramy concave pattern and switched to the Giant borneo gouramy tappered pattern at a snapped of a finger. I've never encountered a fish that can change its pattern to disguise as another species. Why do they display this behavior? Concave Bar Tappered Bar Changing bar pattern

Osphronemus Septemfasciatus can also show the bar pattern of Osphronemus Goramy, I only notice this phenomena when the fish is around 14". Are these pattern emerged only when they are sub adult? When I was searching for the O.Sep I came across a variant of Osphronemus Goramy Kapuas hulu, they show correlative pattern of the O.Sep. The hulu kapuas var O.Goramy is rather confusing as they are so similar to the O.Sep except for the concave bar. After encountering my O.Sep forming the same bar pattern, I can't help but wonder if the O.Goramy var hulu kapuas that I came across earlier are they the same fish? I do not have a clear photo but the only way to identify them apart now is the cheek line pattern. It will be tricky to ID the O.Sep from the O.Goramy hulu kapuas. O.Sep forming the concave bar, they show this bar pattern according to their mood and will revert back to their original tappered bar. A variant of O.Goramy from hulu kapuas

Puteri 2 Puteri 4 The tail biting has stopped in community tank This couple of months I was really busy and had over stocked myself with so many fishes that unfortunately I had terribly neglected them. Puteri 4 developed tail biting and I had to put her into the community tank to stopped the tail biting. Well it worked but with a terrible price. My fish room licence was revoked I've to shrink down my tank so I dumped in Puteri 2 into the community tank as well. In this experiment you can see how when Marulioides is kept in the wrong environment they lose their flowers. With over a year of work with this 2 fishes that I've saved for myself but due to work and the lack of tank I was force to kept them in the community tank and the price is they both lose all their flowers, well almost all. Puteri 2 maintained the orangy tint from the kelakai experiment but puteri 4 lost the orangy tint. I'll try to hang on to this 2 fish as I know genetically the...

Giant Borneo Gourami formation of the cheek line, its interesting to see and record the formation of the cheek line and hopefully I can manage to do so for the entire headshape changes.