# Low maintenance tank



## Lawrence Lee (Jul 17, 2004)

Here's my fiancee's low maintenance tank. Overhead filter, 18W FL, no waterchange, minimum fertilisation weekly, only water replenishment and copious feeding. (We're fattening the pacu up for the dinner plate hopefully in december, because farm bred pacus are fed a poor diet of chicken intestines)

Hope you like the tank.


----------



## Angie (Dec 4, 2005)

Looks great. That was a joke about you eating your pet fish? Right? I hope so anyway.


----------



## schaadrak (Aug 18, 2006)

Lawrence Lee said:


> ...(We're fattening the pacu up for the dinner plate hopefully in december, because farm bred pacus are fed a poor diet of chicken intestines)...


Is that why they taste like chicken?


----------



## Bumble (Sep 14, 2006)

Do you not have a problem with your Pacu eating your more delicate plants?
BTW if you decide against eating this fish then I hope you're prepared to invest in a very big tank for when it starts to really grow!!


----------



## Lawrence Lee (Jul 17, 2004)

Angie, it's no joke. We bought the fish specifically to fatten for the table. Some do it with turkeys, we do it with fish. It's just that we didn't have a bare tank to keep it so it shared living room with my fiancee's low tech. Mine's all CO2 and stuff and we don't want it to stunt on us and produce tough meat.

Shaadrak, I don't know if eating chicken intestines will make it taste like chicken. I'm thinking that the intestines might come from chickens culled from bird flu etc, so better not take the risk. At the fishing pond where we pay to fish these, we use chicken intestine as bait. But we dump those we catch back in as we'd not dare to eat fish that's been fed those nasty stuff stuff.

Bumble, those plants are not delicate. Microsorum, Anubias and Hygrophila difformis are hardy, tough plants. But I feed it with grapes, blackberry, pumpkin, sweet potato, cucumber, corn and lettuce for the greens part of the diet. It is the meats side of things that's making it expensive to keep going.

We thought of giving it a share of what we have for dinner, but decided against it as sharing food with it can cause emotional attachment, then we'll not be able to eat our fish.


----------



## Stargazer53 (Oct 12, 2006)

Wow lol....Sounds like you both are putting a lot of work into fattening the pacu. Best of luck!


----------



## sarahbobarah (Sep 5, 2005)

My mom has a cichlid farm that she keeps to grow fish for eating. Any good tips I can pass on to her?


----------



## Lawrence Lee (Jul 17, 2004)

Stargazer53 said:


> Wow lol....Sounds like you both are putting a lot of work into fattening the pacu. Best of luck!


Thanks, I need the luck.

My fish is now ready for the table IMO; it's already 9 inches long not counting the tail. It sure grows fast, making it an excellent food source for poorer, developing countries, as it eats almost anything, plants included. It also thrives in very poor water conditions. I've fished pacus from ponds that's so anaerobic, almost nothing except catfish and anabantoids can live, but the pacu is growing well there. The problem I see with introducing this hungry omnivore to 3rd world nations will be if accidental release into the wild happens. It will be a serious problem for local fauna's survival.

My school of 10 Chilodus punctatus in the tank is decimated to but 1 on Friday evening. And because my fiancee got lazy in the feeding routine on Saturday and Sunday morning (while I was away in Indonesia), I returned Sunday night to count 0 C. punctatus remaining. 

But the story doesn't end here. The missus-to-be loves naming things, and guess what? Pacu now has a name - Percival! Now, we can't eat Mr Percival can we?!!! 

My LFS is going to love me for the good business I'm giving him (buy a small dollar sized fish, return with thanks a foot-sized fish)...


----------



## onemyndseye (May 12, 2006)

I dont know.... Percival sonds like a delicious name :twisted:


----------



## SunnyBetta (Oct 18, 2006)

Aww, Percival is such a cute name! I get way too attached to my pets...and I guess once you name the food fish there's no going back...

You must get good discounts at your LFS


----------



## Cassie (May 27, 2006)

I don't know if you know about this...but you should be careful that the fish (or the fish that the fish has eaten) didn't have any antibiotics or other medications used on them before you got them. Most, if not all, medications say that they aren't for use on fish for human consumption...


----------



## Tentacles (Jun 25, 2006)

Mornay de Percivale sounds like a good menu item... altho it seems like a lot of work for one meal. What's this fish worth now in terms of food cost, labour... love?


----------



## Lawrence Lee (Jul 17, 2004)

Cassie, the tank is free of any medication. I'm a firm believer that healthy plants = good water = healthy fish and that had proven to be true to this day. The fish that I had which were eaten by Percival were all raised from very small juveniles, so again, no meds to worry about. So far so good, but...

Tentacles, so far Percival had cost me 4 bricks of frozen brine shrimp @ S$2.00 each, 1 box of TetraBits @S$4.00 and a large 1kg packet of el-cheapo brand pellets in green and red $5.00 (but Percival dislikes the taste unless starved). In between, it shares our corn, carrots, grapes, cherry tomatoes, blueberries, cucumber, lettuce and pork. In short, Percival already cost us too much more than paying $15 to fish up 4-5 pieces of these in the 5-8kg range.

It was a hairbrained idea to start off with, and we never quite bothered with cost-effectiveness, but more the interest to experiment to see if the fish we fed with "Our formula" will taste any better than the fish we caught, fed on rotting chicken gut.

Now the situation have changed. Nobody in the family wish to see the tank missing one large fish that they've grown attached to. So this evening, I'm going to get some gravel to start another tank to house Percival, sparing the rest of the smaller fishes in this tank. 

BTW, Percival is a misnomer. from what I read about males having a sharper dorsal fin, Percival should be a she.

Thanks all for reading.


----------

