Here is a video of my Angels and Cardinal Tetras. The male Angel Fish is quite violently cleaning a leaf to spawn on. 
Cardinal Tetras
I LOVE schooling fish. One of the reasons that I am into freshwater aquariums is because you can afford a school of fish.
Yesterday I went to 2 different pet stores. The second trip was to actually buy fish. I went for Cardinal Tetras, and bingo, they had them. They where pretty cheap too! $1.49 each or 4/$4.99. So I bought them up. I got 9 of them.
It took about 3 hours to get them into the tank. I had topped off the tank earlier in the day, and had filled it to almost overflowing. I let the bag float in the water for half an hour (I had to take a liitle bit of water out of the tank first, it was THAT full). Then the bag of fish got emptied into my water change bucket. A bit of airline tubing siphoned a bit of water out of the tank. Every 20 minutes or so, a little bit more water got siphoned into the bucket. After 3 hours, I had about a gallon of water in the bucket. I then netted the fish out of the bucket into my tank. This is about the most effective way I can come up with for adding fish to my tank. The fish get a slow change of water to adjust to, and no pet store water gets into my tank. I have also in the past added a drop of general cure-all type medicine to help keep the fish healthy – tetras are pretty lightweight, so I don’t do it to them.
The cardinals picked up their color pretty quickly once they where in the tank. I try not to take photos of new fish the same day as I got them, their usually stressed and their color is off. The Cardinals are getting along famiously with my 3 Neons that I have already had for a while. The 12 of them are back and forth in the tank. A dozen schooling fish is so much fun to watch! The Angels are laying eggs YET AGAIN as I type this, so they have been pretty teritorial the last day or so, so they would run the school off if they felt a little crowded.
It is so interesting watching my tank now. With just the 3 Neons, there wasn’t much schooling going on in the tank. When I FIRST got the Neons, I had a half a dozen, and they didn’t school up all that much even then. It looks like somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen might be the number to half to get good schooling behavior. We will see how many of the Cardinals make it a week.
Pangio kuhlii (Coolie Loach)
Here is a photo of my Coolie Loaches, well, about half of them anyway. They like to hang out in the little rock cave that I made for them. I bought half a dozen new ones last weekend. You can see that they are only about a quarter the size of the 2 that I have had for a couple of years. Here you can see the front 1/3 of one of my old ones, and a several of my new ones.
More pruning
Well, after only a short 10 days, I needed to prune my plants yet again. Some of the leave tips where getting all yellow and such. The tank was starting to grow shut again too!
Doesn’t this look a little better? Nevermind that the water looks dirtier then normal. How come, when you clean a fish tank, it looks dirtier when you finished then when you started?
Salad anybody? Yet another bucket of nice, dark green foliage from my Amazon Swords.
The Angel Fish eggs made it through the night! I was quite surprised. I am thinking it was the Pleco that cleaned them up last time. Mommy Angel has been constantly fanning them all day. She will knock an egg loose, quick grab it, roll it around in her mouth, and spit it back onto the leaf, hoping it will stick. Most of them are gone now. I don’t think I will have any in the morning.