May 24

  
Nitrate and Ammonia line graph!
 (Catie and I had the same fish tank)

May 23

The changes, slowly but surely, were definitely for the better.  We didn't start our very well with pretty high ammonia and nitrate.  Our plants that we added really grew a lot over time and grew new stems or leaves just by over night sometimes!  So we went from 0 plants to 3!  I remember when we started out, our water was never clear.  That tank, I figured, was not used as much as the others so the rocks were very dirty and when we sifted through the rocks in the beginning over and over the tank still turned out dirty when we put the water in.  On this date however you would see our tank as clean a crystal because we did a full water change and siphoned it every week!  Even with the hard work overall ten fish did die.  Technically though, it wasn't really our fault.  We took pretty good care of them, but most died from the filter being to strong (killing two of our fish), Mrs. Wood giving me the bacteria instead of the dechlorinator (four fish died), and the rest died from stress from when we got them, to putting them in the tank.  

May 22

I have learned a lot from our aquarium project!  I would say that I've never even knew how hard it was to keep a fish maintained and totally underestimated how much it takes to keep the ecosystem of your tank under control. 1.) You have to do ammonia, nitrate, dissolved oxygen, pH, and Alkalinity tests to make sure the environment is stable enough for your fish to survive in.   2.) I learned that tap water can kill your fish and that you must use declorinator and bacteria when adding fish or your fish could die! (don't get those two mixed around though, that could be bad!:P) 
3.)  Fish must have oxygen.  I had no idea that we needed a bubbler to keep our fish alive but now I do. 4.) Different fish do not get along with each other whereas I thought every fish would be fine and playful. (one of our fish lost an eye in the beginning because others didn't like him- even though those we picked were supposed to "get along"). 5.)  Different fish act differently and like other places of the tank and tend to stay or swim in that area.

I would change this project for next year by letting everyone know that a filter can be bad for small fish.  We put a filter in our tank and it killed two of our fish because it was too strong and sucked them up:( I would also change how we learned how to take care of them after we got them.  Going into it we were really confused on what to do at first and what it took to help them survive haha.  The guys at pets mart said only certain fish could live at certain temperatures and some fish had to be in groups and most fish you added wouldn't survive if you added more than five fish or such. We went to pet co first and didn't learn this until later. In our group we had three people and that was difficult because some people wanted different fish, but some fish needed to stay with a certain group.  Overall though it was pretty fun! It was also very sad though! I did not want to lose so many fishies:(

May 21

 Our aquarium was going pretty good on this date!  Our temperature was fine and was around 76 degrees Fahrenheit and 25 degrees Celcius.  We added another plant to bring our nitrate down because it was too high(10).  But our ammonia was very good at 0!  This means that we were taking good care of our tank and the ammonia level means the siphoning and water change paid off!  For observations I wrote down that Catie's fish was actually skinnier it looked like and one of our shrimp went missing!  We never did find his body or anything so it's a mystery. (I don't remember Mrs. Wind saying that shrimp jumping a tank was possible but who knows haha).  But overall, not bad!

May 20

The Autumn Olive(emergent) is 20 feet in height.  Leaves are dark green and untoothed.  The underside is covered with silver-white scales.  The flowers are light and yellow and are borne along twigs after the leaves have appeared early in the growing season. Due to the nitrogen-fixing capabilities it has the capacity to adversely affect the nitrogen cycle of native communities that may depend on infertile soils.


The Oxygen Weed has numerous threadlike roots, which are adventitious (branching from the stem) and, along with rhizomes (horizontal stems in the sediment), anchor it to the bottom.  This plant grows supper fast and takes up most of the oxygen for fish and hurts the ecosystem.


Duckweed is a free floating plant that has individual fronds that produce fine roots.  Mature fronds appear 1.5 to 2 times longer than wide, with widths measuring from 1-3 or five mm. Fronds are narrowly egg-shaped to slightly kidney-shaped and intensely green in color. As a problem it can become a serious nuisance due to its rapid colonization, easy distribution and quick dispersal rate.



These invasive plants are more troublesome than it's natural home because people aren't accustomed to them in different areas whereas where they used to be, people developed different ways to lessen or get rid of them.

May 17

Our water quality throughout has been pretty good!  Overall we've taken very good care of them.  Some issues we had was when it got dirty we siphoned it and one time we did a full water change when four of our fish died. This was because our tests were kinda bad at first but we did succeed to get it to a normal level. Most of our fish died because Mrs. Wood gave us the wrong bottle on accident. It was supposed to be the dechlorinator but she gave us the bacteria instead!  So that showed us how important the water quality test is and to keep our tank well maintained.  After that there was a point our Nitrate was too low so we had to steal plants from anothter tank to keep it balanced.  Sadly, right when our tank was at the normal level and perfect we had to take them all home or give them away): However, we learned so much about different algae and polution, about nitrate and ammonia, dissolved oxygen, and the pH of the water during this interesting project!

                                                                            

5/16/13

This day we did not do a water quality test, we did power point presentations.  But what we did do was a complete water change and clean the rocks of our tank because our fish died and we got even more fish.  We did not want to lose another fish ever again!   Our fish freaked out when we put them in a different container with the volcano as the bubbler, but it was for the best! The different fish we got was a guppy, a snake like fish, and two ghost shrimp.  Our snail, Gary, once we put him back in, went into shock.  Apparently the water change was to much for him and he had died the next day.  We all literally work so hard so please give us a good grade.  We do not kill our animals on purpose!  We added this big rock looking thing for the fish to swim in between and the two Platties that we have, when we put them back in, swim next to each other always and were never someplace without the other.


This is the snake looking fish, he is on the wall of it.