Last year we were watching HGTV one day, and someone on the show had a fish tank in their wall. That got Jacob thinking, and before you knew it, he had found a cheap 125 gallon (6 feet long) fish tank on KSL, cut a hole in our wall, dug up a special sand out by the Great Salt Lake, and located a bunch of Lake Tanganyika fish. The front of the tank faces our living room. The back side of the tank butts out into our storage room, so Jacob was able to rig up an elaborate filtering system behind the scenes. It's been a lot of fun watching the fish, and some have even had babies. But last week the tank got a leak. Nothing catastrophic, but we decided the tank has run its course. We're hoping to put a cabinet in it's place, maybe a future place for toys. Anyhow, here are a few pictures to remember the fishies :)
Here's the tank in the wall. It was cloudy that day because Jacob had just put the sand in it. Since then he also framed it in.
Jacob put the lights on a timer. It looked pretty cool at night unless you were trying to sleep--which happened to a few of my family members who visited.
Here's one little couple. They're called cyprichromis utinta. This was when they first came to the tank, and over time their colors got much brighter. The male (in front) tail turned bright yellow and his body was a deeper blue. The female would store herfertilized eggs in their mouth. As the babies got bigger, her jaw would extend. The babies would even hatch in her mouth and she'd continue to hold onto them until she could find a safe place to spew them out.
Unfortunately, this handsome fish, a neolamprologus brichardi, would eat their babies as soon as they became available. But that was one blessing about the end of the tank. We were able to separate these fish from the others and see the mommas release their babies. The smaller striped fish is a juliachromis marleri. He could swim upside down.
