Without Dark You Cannot Have Light

So after much studying, we've added some salt to the platy tank.. In addition our new glass gravel came today, man its gorgeous. In addition to that we have two live plants to put in it, an Amazon Sword plant and Peacock Fern, very pretty. The tank gets sunlight so hopefully it will work well. It gives the fishies more places to hide, something to nibble on and more good nutrients in their water. OH! we also got for .25 cents... two little ghost shrimp lol. Supposedly it will help keeping the tank cleaner. So this is what is in our tank:








These are not my actual fish, just pictures from around the net :) Most are very very similar to my fish. But anyway they are all set up and ready to go.. hopefully the sick one (The orange and black) we can get better.... I'd hate to lose him. And their tank btw looks amazing now.. just gorgeous.

So I was really bummed about how sad my long time betta seemed... He seemed to be getting more and more depressed, and additionally his little aquarium had developed a small leak. So, Taj surprised me the other night with a brand new aquarium Its hard to tell from the picture, but its gorgeous. The lid is pearlized, and the white thing sticking out from beneath the aquarium is an LED switch box. The LED lights sit beneath the aquarium and light it from below. It glows up through the rocks and through the tube in the center. The Airstone for the undergravel filter is white so it lights up as if it has a light bulb in it. The pearlized lid even lights up from the glow. It has 6 colors you can switch between as well as an option for it to cycle through all the colors repeatedly. Its quite pretty and we love it. It suggests using "clear gravel" for the lighting.. but we could find no such thing. We got the best we could find which was glass marbles petsmart offers... they were on clearance cheap.. what a bad choice. The undergravel filter won't work without.. surprise gravel to be under. So... I went searching on line and found this! Its gorgeous! at only 4 dollars a pound it won't break the bank to buy 3 pounds either (thanks mom for the gravel!) Specifically the "jelly bean" stuff you can see at the bottom of this page. So we're getting 2 bags of glacier ice, and one bag of blue raspberry you can see those colors on the gasp.. color page!

Also.. my beloved betta we were trying to make happy.. ended up dying after we got him two girlfriends and a new house... he just continued to go down hill and was gone this morning. Taj took me out and told me I could have any fishes I wanted (like we can afford that while trying to get a house!) I couldn't really decide because I was so bummed so we went home with one little yellow fishie that looks identical to this one
I've decided I really like him, and he's quite friendly swimming around and looking for food... The one female betta that Taj had picked out for the male though.. total demon. We've had to remove her and she'll be going to live in mom's 55 gallon tropical community. So now that we know we really like the platy.. Taj is taking me tomorrow to get a couple more so the little yellow one can have some buddies to school with... Thank goodness they're on sale for .99 cents.