Looking for large beds for my loach

[Jan Cavalieri]

My Loach sleep half the day and are maniacs the other half. they usually plop themsellves on some flat slate rock to rest - rather on the sand for some reason. They are DoJo which are pretty much scaleless fish that grow up to two feet long. My longest is 15" at age 1 1/2. The slate, sand or whatever seem to rub parts of their skin raw. I've been searching for a platform bed big enough to meet their needs at least for now - since it will be a long time before they reach 2 feet (and about a quarter size around). i'm putting together a 90 gallon tank to give them more space and lesson the pollution and I'm planning on using a canister filter If i can figure out the one I've got. I see plenty of platforms for turtle but most float and since these guys are jumpers I don't want anything that gets them to the top of the aquarium,

I found this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0096R1B60/?tag=ff0d01-20 on Amazon - it uses 4 suction devices to hold it in place, which means I could keep it underwater, the BIG complain is that their turtles are eating the fake turf - one even died, I don't doubt my DoJo wouldn't try and eat it because they eat everything in sight. But I know they'd love the shape of this platform because that is the way they prefer to sleep. Any clues where I can get a platform like this that is SOFT - unlike turtles they don't need to climb they just swim to it and lay down. My tank is very tall so as long as the platform doesn't float I have a lot of room to work with. If nobody has seen something like this online - have they any idea how to build one? And is there any soft water safe material I can put on top of the beds? One of the reviewers is successfully using it for their Axoloti (an endangered salamander like fish- which aren't that dis-similar from my DoJo . Do I buy a couple of these and strip off the fake grass - what wou;d I put on instead of the grass that would be nice and soft and less temping to eat (ie., not green) I think the grass would scratch them up anyway. Perhaps polyfill (which is used as a filter anyway) in a bag?

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Thanks for your help.

 

[Waterbabe]

Weatherloach will not really need this at all. Best not to waste your money and save the room in your tank I would say, but yeah Weatherloach/Dojo do love to rest and loll about towards the top of the tank, it's not always easy dressing the top of the water unlike the bottom, but maybe a few ideas for you. I have floating cork tubes which I got online easily and masses of fake plants which they all come up to rest on and have a tickle haha . It wont hurt them if you dont have anything soon, take your time and look for more interesting and cosmetically pleasing objects like maybe a large fake banana leaf or cork tube lots of floating weed is always a good one.

 

[Jan Cavalieri]

Thank you so much for your response. It got me thinking.

I've tried the floating plants and they just ate pieces of it - as dense as it was it was not dense enough to hold their huge weight. These guys are 15" long and about the size of a quarter around. The other issue with floating plants is that they continuously get sucked into the filter, clogging and stopping filtration several times a DAY. I got tired of cleaning their intake tubes every few hours and got rid of the floating plants. I felt bad, I know they ate some of it but I needed to keep that tank as clean as possible due to the heavy pollution their poop causes and with the filter constantly clogging it wasn't keeping the tank clean.

Now with them moving into the 90 gallon tank as soon as I add water and cycle (it - due to the problem with white mold bloom or whatever it is due to their huge poops) I will NOT take any of their existing filtration media to the new tank. I don't want to risk contaminating the new tank with the white water issue I have been fighting for the last year. Maybe it wouldn't but I'm not taking any chances. Both the fish and I are miserable when that white water takes over the entire tank. They have to stop swimming for the most part and lay depressed on the floor of the tank.

I also am trying to make a Fluval cannister filter work on the 90 gallon acrylic tank hoping it will also handle their poop without causing white water. The hoses are designed to fit over the edges of the tank wall - but on an acrylic tank (for structural reasons) the there is an overhang of 3-5 inches of acrylic on all sides of the tank - no way to attach the hoses on the side of the tank. There are cut outs, but they are so far apart from each other and on the back of the tank - that the hose that comes with the Fluval is about 2 feet too short of reaching unless I put the in and out tubes next to each other through the cutout. I haven't figured out what to do yet except squeeze both hoses into one cut-out, and everything else (heater, air pumps etc) through the other cutout. I have to have better filtration for these guys due to their massive amount of waste. I don't seem to be overfeeding because every scrap of food disappears - they are BIG fish with BIG appetites and huge volumes of poop (it is almost entirely liquid and mucous like but comes out of them in a ball that is about 5" in diameter). If I see it I try to remove it but it just falls apart.

Anyway - I found some turtle basking platforms on Amazon that also work for underwater life such as DoJo's and rare underwater only Salamanders. They arrived and look stunning and comfortable for my basking friends. (most of the turtle basking platforms floated, but not these) I wish the DoJo could float in vegetation but I've tried that twice now and just ended up with a mess on my hands, and only the smallest DoJo (the 8" runt) to be able to float in it. If I get the cannister filter running I wonder how badly it sucks in floating plants? Will I be cleaning the intake to that filter multiple times a day also? What floating plants don't get sucked into filters. I just ordered some new plants that don't appear to produce those awful seed-like things like frogbit and other popular plants. I'm hoping to be able to use that in both my freshwater aquariums. without clogging the filters.

The floating corks are interesting - how do they work? Do they just keep the plant together in one piece or can they be used by themselves somehow (I just can't picture it).

 

[Waterbabe]

The cork floats just under the water level so they swim right in and use it as a resting place to hang out. The weed they sit in is plastic it's a fake hanging basket plant which hangs lovely at the top (no metal parts just plastic). I've also used fake ferns which they lie in, I also gave up with real weed as it clogged up my power head.
I have 3 very large dojo but never experience mucky water due the poop, I know they can poop for England but I never see it floating in the tank? I run a 1200 lph powerhead through a heavily filtered over head box which also contains a bag of bio balls. Not sure what you mean about white water? Is that your water quality over there? Or filtration prob? Seems a shame you are all depressed with the situation can see you clearly care for them and are struggling. I'm sorry if I haven't been much help.

 

[Jan Cavalieri]

But you have been some help - I never thought of using fake floating plants - what a good solution, Same with the cork. I would love to use real plants in their tank but they uprooted them daily and eat them if they are the least bit edible. Obviously needing some greens, I do feed skinned peas (those are the only vegetables they will eat) and it takes true love to SKIN individual little peas. I'm pretty good at it now. I feed them a few algae pellets which they seem to eat as a last resort LOL but that then starts turning my white tank into a greenish white tank. I can't win. And this is with a weekly 70% water change. I'm religious about it, if my assistant can't make it then I do it myself (it just takes me a really long time - I'm on oxygen and I tire easily.)

I truly do not know what causes the constant white water. Due to additives that must be in the tank to lower the PH (my tap water ph is 9.4 way too high for fish) so I add a neutralizer as well as conditioner to each trash can of water (these are BRUTE food save 20 gallon trash cans on rollers - I am disabled and unable to haul buckets of water and my assistant has back problems - so we fill the trash can up with fresh treated water from the kitchen sink (it has an piece of outdoor hose attached with a special adaptor) then roll it to the other end of the house next to the aquarium we're doing a water change on and fill the tank with small light buckets. I have another trash can for the dirty water to be drained into - which then goes down the toilet since the windows don't open - old house, I have two more trash cans I'll use for storing salt water in one and purified water in the other for my saltwater tank as soon as I get it set up. You can buy the trashcans in different colors. I have a very colorful fish room with many comical fish prints or fish and cat prints (since the cat's stuff is in that room too,

Anyway about a year ago, we would change the water and because of the additives it would be cloudy for about 2 hours then emerge sparkling clear. Then after about 24 hours suddenly the water in the tank would turn completely white. Sometimes it is so bad I cannot see the fish. I was told on this forum that this happens to nearly everybody sometime and you just have to do waterchanges and wait it out. So it cleared up on it's own, then a week or two later was back again, I've been fighting it for a year at least and I can only remember one week where it didn't happen at all. Sometimes the water stays clear for several days then suddenly turns white - other times it turns white right after the water change and stays white no matter how many water changes we do. I pay my assistant by the number of tanks cleaned and can't afford to pay him to clean one tank 4-6 times in one day to get rid of white water. It never works any way . It just goes away on it's own. That's why I refuse to bring anything from this tank to the new tank other than the fish. It nearly killed my Rainbow fish I had in that tank so as soon as they started to die I grabbed my biggest net and scooped up the remainder and put them in my other tank. Unfortunately they antagonized my Gourami who died of old age and stress from the Rainbow fish - so no more Rainbow fish. But anyway - a week later the tank I put the Rainbow fish in suddenly got the white water disease. It cleared up with one water change and has never returned but I can't help but think it was caused by the white water that was on the Rainbow fish. Luckily just a mild case.

My only conclusion about why it doesn't go away is either overfeeding (which I don't see happening since all food is always eaten) or too much poop for a 50 gallon tank is "feeding" the white cloud disease, That why I bought a 90 gallon tank and stand - $1,000 for 4 fish. The things we do. But I love my DoJo dearly. They are such comedians when the water is clear - and so graceful and amazing, I'm hoping the 90 gallon tank plus a cannister filter will prevent the white water from returning. I also plan to put the DoJo in a bucket of clean treated water briefly so they don't bring in any of the white water particles on their bodies. This stuff is really composed of tiny white particles like snow but at times it is a blizzard. There are chemicals you can add that supposedly make the particles clump together but after reading the reviews I found that a large number of people reported death of their fish so I won't use it. Just crossing my fingers that I won't get it in the big tank.

 

[Waterbabe]

Hi Jan here's spotify on his plastic hammock and just missed the other in the tube!

 

[Jan Cavalieri]

I can't really distinguish what he's doing from the pictures (I have cataract surgery later this month) but he he actually going into a tube placed in the middle of plant?

 

[Jan Cavalieri]

Well today I filled my new 90 gallon tank and primed the canister filter and plugged it in. After priming about 200 more times it finally took off and is running perfectly (I really struggled with the assembly of that canister filter - their pictures and descriptions made no sense so I watched several youtube.com videos over and over until it all sunk in my cobwebbed brain. You know it really is true, that it's far harder to learn new things the older you get. I just turned 60 in January but look about 40 and act about 15. They did a scan of my brain after I had a nasty fall about a year ago and noticed that my brain is missing a lot of white matter - there is just empty space - they said that usually means it's an early sign of dementia. So now I not only have to worry about COVID mutations, I have to worry about lung cancer (they've seen some stuff on xrays but it's likely inflammation rather than tumors I hope),, about accidentally overdosing on all the drugs they give me as well as dementia. I don't think I'm going to have the easiest final years - that does depress me. When I was in grade school my nickname was "the Professor" because I had all these science magazines and after reading articles that's all I could talk about the next day to anybody that would listen Instead of stuffed animals I slept with my microscope and telescope in bed. No wonder i didn't get any dates until college LOL. In high school I wore nothing but black along with huge Camo jackets from a military surplus store (It had a ton of pockets so I loved it. ) I had big black heavy duty boots - which my daughter has since stolen from me when she went into her "goth" phase.. Today I wear nothing but black but just wear a black windbreaker during the winter since I'm usually dropped off near a door and I have these shoes that are painted all psychidelic colors . Can you see my generation in a nursing home? The background music would be Led Zeppelin and Guns and Roses instead of "easy listening" crap. Actually, since I live in Kansas it will probably be nothing but country music playing. LOL. My daughter had a wonderful baby sitter from birth to 3 yrs old. The lady had 3 young daughters and only babysat my daughter and on little boy. How lucky she was to basically be part of a big family rather than an only child. Only one problem, she came home from the sitter's house one day singing and dancing to "achy-breaky Heart" - a very popular country song. I told her that was probably the only way she could rebel against her dad and I was to listen to country music. Nothing else would shock us.
My late 2nd husband used to say "If it ever turn into a vegetable, just stick me in a Pinto with a full-tank of gas. (For those of you that don't know what a Pinto is, it was cheaply built car from the 70's?? I think. Anyway there was accident after accident where the car would blow up if anybody hit it anywhere near the gas tank. I really wish I could have done that for him - have him go out in a blaze of glory instead of 2 long weeks on life support looking worse by the day and having to decide when to pull the plug. I don't ever want to have to do that again, not even to my cat, or one of my fish - much less a human. I've hopefully made my wishes known clearly enough to my daughter that she won't have to worry about whether or not she's doing the right thig. I'd advise all of you to make your wishes clearly known as well. And have a durable power of attorney and a living will no matter how young you are - it just makes it so much easier for those that love you. And with this pandemic even young people are becomming vegetables.

Well that was some happy thoughts I should have stopped with how proud I was of myself for figering out the canister filter and getting that aquarium started cycling. Tomorow I'll start measuring Ammonia and nitrites and later on start measuring nitrates. I really hope this goes fast I have no patience any longer, I also just need to get the media and protein skimmer connected for my salt water tank and I can use my RO/DI filter to mix up some pure water and hopeully add the correct amount of salt to it. Then I want just two clown fish for a little while and one or two small coral - because the tank has to cycle and grow bacteria just like the freshwater tank does and you nerver want to add more livestock than it can handle. Then I'll move my remaining fish (except the Betta, into a very clean 50 gallon tank. I want to get rid of all traces of whatever cause that white water disease - but I'll use their current media for the time being as well as their current gravel and toys so I shouldn't have to cycle that tank - they will love the extra room (they are currently in a 28 gallon tank) THEN if all goes well I'll get them a canister filter as well - still using some of their old media or running both for a month or so. By then my salt water tank should be cycled and I can start getting some coral. (I'm more interested in the coral than the fish - it's only 32 gallons so with the reef in there I maybe can have 5 fish and/or invertebrates like shrimp (which kind of creep me out). Maybe a cool crab. Getting this $1,000 90 gallon tank and stand going was step one in my overhall of my entire fish set up. Then I can sit back and relax and keep buying corals and salt-water fish - and anemonies for the clown fish. And have my assistant do the water changes on the other two big tanks .while I manage the small saltwater tank, Life has become so exciting again!!! s e
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