Day of the Triops

Fish deserve as much love and care as any other animal.

Fish deserve as much love and care as any other animal.

a fucking marimo better be the only thing on that list

I hope your response is to the person asking about the betta in a five gallon tank.

And if not then I guess you didn’t read the tags because this was about a specific YouTuber who thinks it’s okay to put schooling fish in a five gallon tank. And if you think that’s okay... well then we clearly have different views of humane fish care.

Nearly a year ago, my dad got a prawn that had been meant as food for a gar at a fish store. The far hadn’t eaten it so it had grown to about two inches long.

Now Big Momma looks like a small lobster and is my family’s favorite aquatic pet. She lives alone in a 90 gallon, as prawn shrimp are territorial and aggressive. But she gets lots of food and attention.

We do have several new prawns now that may grow into a new Big Momma, though!

Hi there! The larval form of zebra mussels are smaller than can be seen with the naked eye and I’m not sure how long they take to mature into a size that we could see. I suspect they’d be a visible size by now, but in a tank, they’d likely still be hard to find. Even fully mature zebra mussels are pretty small. You’ll just have to be careful and vigilant for a while. It might be best to dump water from cleaning/water changes somewhere other than a drain. Use it to water your garden, instead, maybe.

I’m sure there are people here who are more well versed than I am on this subject! Please feel free to pitch in with advise or what to look for or a proper way to handle waste water, etc. 

EDIT;

Thanks, @punktea!

WA Fish & Wildlife article

I see a lot of people suggest tank sizes for fish on here that are just too small. So I thought, rather than trying to correct people every time I see a minimum tank size I feel is undersized, that I might explain why exactly those sizes are too small.

When I determine tank size, I calculate a tank footprint based on the length of the fish. As a bare minimum, I would personally try to give a fish a tank that is at least 5 x their length by 2 x their length. (There are exceptions to this rule - usually cases where fish have reasons to need more space.)

Less conservative measures might do 3 x their length by 2 x their length.

So lets think about this in terms of more familiar animals.

Say you’re going to keep a cat in a cage all of its life (gross). Now take your cat and measure them from their head to the base of their tail. My cat really didn’t like being measured, but she was about 16.5″. So lets do some math.

By my preferred calculations, my cat would have an almost 3ft by almost 7ft space to live in. Nothing compared to what she could live in, but she has room to turn around and move a little. (Almost 300g when I add a fairly standard 2ft height.)

By the less conservative measure, she would have about 3ft x 4ft. (About 170g.) Doesn’t sound completely terrible, right? Thinking in abstract mental numbers, those measurements almost sound reasonably roomy. But lets picture that.

Here is my cat is the amount of space we have allotted for her to spend her entire life in. This is the only space she can eat, sleep, and defecate in. Pretty disgusting, right?

A lot of the tank size recommendations I see don’t even meet that less conservative measure. So proportionately, she would have even less space by their measurements.

This isn’t even taking into account the activity level or amount of waste production of the fish, which would add to the length and volume requirements respectively.

One of the most common pieces of advice new bearded dragon owners hear from reptiblr people is “don’t keep your beardies on sand!” This is immediately followed with warnings about impaction and infection and the potential for all sorts of nastiness and death- and those are absolutely true.

But then you maybe see pictures like this and go “uh… that’s… that’s sand.”

And yes, yes it is sand. But it’s not the kind of sand that comes out of a bag from the pet store! But what makes it different? Why can bearded dragons thrive on this sand and not that sand? 

I’ll give you a little summary now in case you don’t want to read the whole thing. Basically, Australian sand is more compact and has a heavy clay component and there’s damp soil for burrows available under the outer layers. This means that the soil is less dusty and less likely to cause impaction, especially because the humidity in the burrows means that the beardie is less likely to be dehydrated.

If you’d like to know why the sand is this way, there’s a little geology involved. So let’s talk a little bit about how Australian sand dunes work! The sand dunes in places like the Simpson Desert- in the central/arid zone- formed about 20,000 years ago. Once a sand dune has formed, any rain soaks in and the dune has a damp inner core. Below the sand there’s a clay swale- a layer of clay that holds water. These dunes are stable and actually hold burrows really well! On top of the dunes, plants like saltbush and other scrubby, small things colonize the more unstable areas, holding the dunes in place and keeping the soil/sand from getting too dusty.

What that means is that the sand’s actually quite damp and compact past the top layer and you can get beardies living quite happily in dugout burrows like this!

Loose, blowing sand sometimes ends up on the road, but it’s not the dominant soil type in the dunes where they live. This is a picture from the Rainbow Valley Reserve in Alice Springs, where that first pic was taken- see how the natural soil’s tamped down? This is a clay pan, which is one of the most common soil types in the Australian outback.

Furthermore, Australian soil is different from the soil anywhere else in the world. There’s a couple of reasons for this. Australia has no large native herbivores. This plays a huge part in soil development elsewhere- native hoofstock overturns the soil with grazing. In the grand scheme of things, this has meant that Australia’s soil formation has been very different from other continents’ soil formation. Also important is that Australia had no glacial period. On other continents, glaciers moved a lot of the soil around, stripping regions down to their deeper layers or bedrock, and forcing new soil formation processes. This created loamy, loose topsoils. That didn’t happen in Australia- the soil formation process was much slower and as a result, the soil there is a lot higher in clay. Sand particles in the desert are relatively large and solid and compact, and that compaction is a huge part of what makes it possible to hold burrows. Also, the inner dampness of the clay means that the humidity in those burrows is relatively high. 

Now, compare that to the sand you get at the pet store. The grains are fine and the sand is super dusty- and there’s no clay in it! Also, when sand is usually put down in a bearded dragon cage, it’s in a fairly thin layer. It’s not deep enough to allow burrowing or to hold any humidity. Check it out- here’s a bearded dragon cage with sand in it.

Let’s look at that picture of the burrow again.

See how deep that is and how different it is from the sort of sand provided in the cage? The sand dunes in Australia are part of the natural ecosystem and are more than just pure sand. They’re quite complicated compared to the stuff you can buy at the pet store! 

Image sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Works cited: 

“Sand Dunes.” Australian National Botanic Gardens/Australian National Herbarium, 2012. Available online:  http://www.anbg.gov.au/photo/vegetation/sand-dunes.html

Sand (real sand, not Calci-Sand, which has no place in any pet keeping situation) from the pet store, play sand, and construction sand, unless specified otherwise (such as aragonite), is silica based. 

Natural silica sand is crystalline quartz or volcanic glass that has been worked by weather and other processes into tiny granules. The granules are generally rounded, whether rough or smooth. This means they roll and slide on each other a great deal. 

Geologically, clay, such as that in the montmorillonite containing soils in parts of Australia and around the world, is a very fine-grained material composed of clay minerals – hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates. The particle size is particularly important to the identification of clay (<  0.002mm). It is also produced by weathering – in this case from granite. 

The shape of these minerals is extremely fine flat planes rather than round granules. When moisture is introduced they are “plastic” (able to take and retain form). 

As a safety note, if decomposed granite or clay gets dry it can still be dusty, and as it contains silica, take care not to breathe the dust (silicosis is caused by breathing dust, and the effects are cumulative over a lifetime; once you’ve breathed silica you can’t unbreathe it). 

In Australia many animals seek the slightly moister earth beneath the surface. Even kangaroos dig pits to lie in. It is important to note that clay soils retain moisture for a long time (which is why if you have clay soil in a garden it can be compacted and have poor drainage!). Even in an arid environment like the deserts of Australia, there is moisture in the ground. 

When pure silica sand is wet enough to hold its shape (such as making sand castles, or in hermit crab enclosures) the humidity would be high in the enclosure. Sand holds together in these conditions basically due to the water on the outside of the grains creation surface tension, called interstitial liquid bridges. This is why it must be saturated to hold its shape. Due to the particle size and material, the surface area will promote higher evaporation as well. So this is not appropriate for desert animals either, but works well for creatures like gill-breathing crabs that live on water-drenched beaches.

Found some old pictures of Big Momma. First is a picture taken not too long after getting her. For an idea of size, she’s on one of the smallest sponge filters you can buy. And beside her is another prawn.

What species of shrimp/prawn is this? My dad bought four that were marked “Feeder Prawn Shrimp.”