Bah

Sometime's life's a constant climb uphill. Recurrent injury, frequent illness, broken sleep, beaurocratic bullshit and financial stresses. Pull yourself up and the next blow rains down. Life's a game of whack-a-mole: some days you're the hammer, others you're the mole.

Not having the greatests of days today. I've been at work for over an hour but am yet to get going. Brain's distracted. I slept badly last night; strange, wild dreams like a sequence of flash cards (image:response, image:response) and dying fish.

My beautiful, only just re-established display aquarium: columnaris infection. We've lost 5 already.

Reboot. Remember how to bootstrap. Up we go (there's no alternative).

Columnaris infection update

Lost:
5 x Melanotaenia praecox (my poor little blues)
1 x Borneo sucker (hillstream loach)
1 x Siamese Algae Eater

10 days ago

Remaining:
1 x Melanotaenia praecox
4 x Melanotaenia boesemani
6 x Pseudomugil signifer
3 x Ambassis agassizii
2 x Hypseleotris compressa
4 x Borneo sucker
2 x Siamese Algae Eater

10 days ago

The tank has now been treated with hard-core antibiotics, and all bar the sole remaining praecox have also taken medicated food. We will lose the last little blue (they're the fish the damn disease came in with: we've only had them for10 days), and we might yet lose more of the Borneo suckers and SAEs. I'm hoping valiantly that we don't lose the boesemani (also new, and expensive), the blue-eyes (we bred them ourselves) and the two gudgeons (I'm very attached to the big fella - I've had him since 2000). The fact they're feeding is a good sign, and they seem to have perked up a little since the anti-biotic went in. It's hard to say though: columnaris is a nasty little bacterium, and some strains have developed anti-biotic resistance. At least we caught it early and worked out what the hell it was.

15 years of nearly disease free fish-keeping, then 2 of the worst aquarium diseases, less than 6 months apart.

3 days ago