Choosing the Fish for Fish Bowl #1

Finding a Home for Our Endler Fry

Our first choice for "the best fish for a fish bowl" came out of necessity more than anything.

We have been trying to perfect some rare Albino Hybrid Snake Endlers and have a need to monitor the fry closely to determine if they are male or female as well as isolate them from the larger Endlers so they can be fed a different diet.

This hybrid is not as hardy as some of our pure strain Endlers so we figured this would be an excellent choice for the largest of our fish bowls.

The Advantage of Choosing Fry

Another reason why we thought this would be a good choice is because the bowl would start with tiny fry.  These small fish are so small that they will do very little to add harmful ammonia to the bowl and their waste will contain some of the desirable bacteria that we are hoping to add to the fishbowl.

This will give the tank time to cycle as the fry grow.

About Hybrid Endlers

One of the things that makes hybrid Endlers a good choice is because they are small and relatively hardy.  One of our concerns is that they like their water fairly warm at 75-81°.  That's warmer than most tropical fish.

As it is summertime right now a heater was not critical for our little tank however we bid on 25 Watt heater on eBay for $5 with free shipping and we are awaiting the results.

The larger bowl size will help stabilize the temperature once we start using a heater.

Adding Bacteria to the Bowl

Since these fry came from an existing tank we were able to add a little bacteria to the new bowl by squeezing water out of one of the sponge filters that was in the existing tank into the new tank.

We also added a few small plants to the bowl that we took from another tank.  The plants should help to reduce the amount of Nitrates in the tank as well as give the fry a place to hide.

The finished tank

The finished tank turned out quite nice looking.  There are a few scratches on the used acrylic tank but they are not noticeable with the water added to it.  After letting the tank sit for a week we put a total of 7 fry to the small tank and we are eager to see how the little fry do in this small tank.

Our plan is to allow these fry to grow to a size where we can see which ones are males and which ones are female.

The Fry in the Bowl

After adding the fry to the bowl we noticed that the small filter we added to the bowl produced a little bit more water movement than Endlers really seem to like.  Because of this we turned the outlet pipe upward a little so the water did not have as much force when it hit the water.  We hope this should provide ideal water movement for the Endlers.