My Progress

As I've been going to my internship consistently for about 2 years now, I thought that it would be best provide an update of how far we've come and what our future plans are. When I first started cleaning and reorganizing this tank, it was a mess. The tank had become so infested with green algae and red flatworms that you could even see the rocks that laid underneath.

Photo of Tank from Fall 2013

Now, however, the tank looks much better! Nearly all of the algae is gone, and the tank is a clear difference from what it began as. One can actually see each individual rock, and the fish certainly look happier and less stressed to be in this cleaner environment.

Photo of Tank from Fall 2015

To get the tank to this state, we had to do an extensive cleaning, which involved individually scrubbing each rock (to get rid of algae and other harmful organisms found on the rocks), creating a quarantine tank (to ensure that the parasites had been killed off), and many water changes (to maintain a stable chemical balance in the water). Although this sounds as if it could have been accomplished in a couple days of solely focusing on this project, it actually takes much longer, as making drastic adjustments to any tank will dramatically shift the presence of key chemicals found in the water, which would result in fish and mollusk stress and likely death. For this reason, we had to slowly, and carefully, work to make small changes each week, so that if there were any changes in the chemical balance, the fish and mollusks would have time to acclimate themselves to these changes. By making small changes each week, we also helped reduce the likelihood of chemical changes because we were only affecting small parts of the tank, not the tank as a whole, which is what a massive cleaning would have done.

By Matthew Watowich