A New Addition!!!

This is our new addition! Isn't he cute?? I came home yesterday and looked at my tank- it was nearly covered in brown algae! ICK! Brown Algae also called diatoms, is really common in tanks that have recently finished cycling. They say if you wait it out and keep doing frequent water changes that it will eventually go away after a few weeks to two months....well....I have started using part tap water with my changes, but after yesterday's change I checked my water parameters and there was ammonia again from the stupid tap water- I need to recheck this morning to make sure the tank is handling it ok. So I'm nervous about doing it too often and hurting my fishes. I also don't want to have to keep buying bottled water. SO- I had been researching algae eating fish and which kind I wanted to get. I had ruled out the plecostomus family basically because they're ugly and they get SO BIG- like 18 inches. I had originally wanted oto catfish, but then read a LOT of them die pretty quickly after getting them- uh, NOT for me. I asked some questions on my aquarium board and the bristlenose plecostomus was recommended. The original version of this fish is blackish with white spots and still fairly ugly. Well, there is an albino version! The cutest of the ugly.

We have basically 2 fish stores around here that can sortof be trusted to have healthy fish. I called my favorite and though they carry bristlenoses, she didn't have any and couldn't guarantee me that she would have some later this week. I called the other (which I'm actually not a huge fan of) and she says, "The ones I have are really super tiny, and oh, they're albino." YAY!!! I could NOT believe it. The stores around here are so dumb I can almost never find what I truly want. Oto catfish would have been impossible I'm sure. So here's our little guy. He has been SUPER active and eating constantly. He's a little over an inch long right now and will be 4-5 inches total when he's full grown. The girls are treating him OK but they get curious at times and I've seen them nip. Stupid girls. He's very small but he's already cleaned up the alligator head which was covered with brown algae yesterday. He's going to be perfect. I hope I can keep him happy. After the brown algae is gone I'll need to give him some algae wafers occasionally.

On another happy fish note here are my two babies! Big baby got his Mickey on his tail while I was gone this weekend. You could only barely see 2 black spots on it when I left but you can very much see his mickey mouse pattern now and he's very bright orange all of a sudden! The little guy is about 1/2 his size and still really see-through, but eating well and will be just fine I'm sure.
Here's another pic of them. The big one is still about 1/4 of the size of the big girls. It appears mommy fish might be getting ready to bear again. GAH! For those of you wondering- I do believe all the platies are girls- they can hold sperm for quite a long time and continue to bear litters- which explains why we keep having more and more. Hopefully this is going to slow down and stop soon- unless some of my babies are boys!