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My arowanas are also not eating…

Date : May 15, 2008 · 103 Comments

Hi all,
I seem to have a problem with my 5 arowanas at home as well. Because I see many of you having this same problem, I thought I’d post this now. This started about 2 weeks back. I think from the video I shared here http://www.arowana-care.com/aroblog/arowana-news-others/feeding-my-5-x-back-asian-arowanas
you can tell that my arowanas used to have damn good appetite! icon smile My arowanas are also not eating...

BUT that changed about 2 weeks back…They just stopped EATING!! I have not changed much in what I do every week. I change water, add blackwater and a bit of salt about once or twice a week. No big drama… same old boring thing! They are still swimming around as usual but the only thing is… they refuse to eat!

So I tried to find out what else has changed in the environment… As I go to work in the morning, I can’t really tell but 2 things different was happening in my housing estate. They were repainting the block I am staying in and my direct neighbour upstairs was renovating their home. I deduce that it is the renovation upstairs that has probably upset my babies! I came home during lunch one day last week and they were hacking the floors upstairs and it was such a ruckus! The vibrations were extremely bad and I could feel it in my bones! They are still renovating now but all the hacking is completed now! Thanks God!

Anyway, my arowanas are still not eating much now… just a little.. they are more likely than not to just bite the prawns and spit them out. I might buy some feeder fish for them today to try and bring back their appetite.

So do check your environment if you encounter these kind of situation. Hope you learn something here.

Cheers!
Steven

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Arowanas will jump so cover up well!

Date : May 8, 2008 · 50 Comments

Hi all,
Thanks for your overwhelming support for this new part of the blog which I have set up for you to share stories for everyone to learn from.
NB: IF YOU HAVE PERSONAL EXPERIENCES THAT YOU WANT TO SHARE, PLEASE SEND ME AN EMAIL WITH THE DETAILS SO THAT I CAN SHARE WITH EVERYONE AS A SEPARATE POST. (PLEASE DO NOT POST IT IN THE COMMENTS AREA BELOW EVERY POST AS READERS WILL MISS IT IF THEY ARE NOT READING THE COMMENTS.) THANKS!

Without further ado, here is the first one from readers… This is the email I received and is posted verbatim to you.

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Hi, I just thought I’d share my recent tragedy with you and perhaps you can pass it on to our extended Arowana lovers family.

I recently did a 25 percent water change on my 140 gallon Tank that housed my 26 inch 7 year old silver Arowana. After the change, I noticed he was acting very nervously. He was jumping and smashing into the glass. When I tested the water, I noticed the salt was much higher than I normally have it. 0.40%. It is usually between 0.15 and 0.20. I don’t know if this is the reason for his behavior (perhaps you could theorize…). The next day, I changed 20%, and the day after another 20%. Incidentally, he seemed to calm down allot. The following night after returning home, we noticed he was not in the tank. He had managed to knock a weighted piece of glass off of the tank and strand himself on the back edge of the glass. I don’t know how long he was out for, but he was still breathing when I put him back in, but his equilibrium was gone, and he died late that night. We feel as if we lost a member of our family. He will be missed, his name was Sparkles.

Thank you,

John Doe (All anonymous will be John Doe ok. icon smile Arowanas will jump so cover up well! )

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My observations and recommendations :

1) I will also add some salt into my tank with every change of water. Many people have asked me how much salt to put. To be frank, I really don’t measure but to give you a gauge, I have a 5x2x2 feet tank and I usually add about maybe 150gms of salt in it. (Why I know is because I buy 1kg bags of salt..) I will also add some black water in it.. How much? It does not really matter because in my experience, this is harmless. (Ok I do have one reader who wrote me another post who stated otherwise but I will share that in another post to you. That reader does have a point because by process of elimination, it does sound like it was the cause but anyway… will share later … suspense! suspense! icon wink Arowanas will jump so cover up well! )

2) John did the right thing by changing water. As I have mentioned many times, if your fish is acting strangely for no apparent reason, this should always be your first cause of action!

3) Cover your tanks properly. Arowanas will JUMP! It is in their nature ok! A few readers asked me in the past about how to train their arowanas to NOT jump! This can’t be done and we will have to live with it. In the wild, arowanas jump up from the water to catch small preys like birds! If you do not cover your tanks properly, there is a high chance that they will knock the cover off and you will have an arowana who thinks that it can breathe air and fly! (Sorry no pun intended but just trying to drive the point across!)

In John’s case, we won’t really know what caused it to jump but the most probably cause is an insect or something on the top cover. My previous arowana (which is at the farm now) has bruised it’s mouth many time trying to catch insects that landed on the top glass cover. In my arowana care book, I narrated a story about a close personal friend of mine who was ONLY third time lucky because his first 2 red asian arowanas jumped out of the tank. The third time, he put bricks on top of the glass cover. icon smile Arowanas will jump so cover up well! A bit extreme but it worked!

How heavy must the top cover be? This is really subjective. What I have are pieces of glass on top of my tank and two 5 foot lights sitting on it. This should be sufficient..

Ok hope you learn something from this. Let me know your thoughts below. Cheers!

Steven

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Sharing of reader’s personal arowana stories..

Date : April 28, 2008 · 32 Comments

Hi all,
I have received many many personal experiences from readers and I thought that I would pick some of them to share with you as I think that you can learn much from them. I will also give my own personal views of what could have happened and how to prevent it in the future. You do not have to agree with it but hey, that’s life right! icon smile Sharing of readers personal arowana stories.. Where would the excitement be if everyone agrees with you! icon wink Sharing of readers personal arowana stories..

But seriously, I just want people to contribute so we can all learn from each other. Nothing is cast in concrete and to be frank, I am also learning alot from all of you.. so thanks a lot…

BUT don’t worry, I will ONLY share your stories once I have received permission from you to do so. Also if you want to remain anonymous, let me know… no worries there… SO I would encourage you to share your arowana stories/worries/concerns/etc so that we can all learn from it! I really want to see the arowana community thrive and this is a good start!

I will try and showcase stories that I think will help make us all better arowana hobbyists. No experience is too silly because we all started as amateurs.

Will start the first sharing session the week after May Day as I’ll be flying off to Perth for golf this coming Tuesday. Need a break! icon smile Sharing of readers personal arowana stories..

Talk to you soon.
Steven

Feeding my 5 x-back asian arowanas …

Date : April 7, 2008 · 26 Comments

Hi all,
Hope everyone’s having a great day. As for me.. well down with flu and cough.. just one of those days.. icon sad Feeding my 5 x back asian arowanas ...

Anyway, have created a new video for you.. I’ve not updated anyone about my 5 golden arowanas for a while now. They are doing fine! Still fighting amongst themselves though but this is expected. Have good appetite but been getting flak from my wife because of the smell in the water especially if you leave uneaten food in there for too long. So now what I do is when I feed them, I will open the back door and windows and also take out all uneaten food within 30 min. This will help to air the place and get rid of whatever smell that could be lingering because of the prawns that I feed them.

Cheers!
Steven

Been busy lately setting up something for you arowana/fish lovers…

Date : March 23, 2008 · 31 Comments

Hi all,
Some of you had probably wondered why I’ve been missing in action for more than a month now! Actually I’ve been busy setting up a couple of things for you arowanas/fish lovers. icon smile Been busy lately setting up something for you arowana/fish lovers... Had to decide what I wanted to do first but have now settled on 2 projects that I will be launching soon.

1) I think some of you know that I have wanted to setup a forum for sometime now but the problem was I already saw many arowana forums already available out on the web. I was reluctant to start another one unless I could make it a bit different. Then I received an email several weeks back about a software that I could use to setup a community site like myspace or facebook. Now this I felt was definitely something different and worth looking into!! I have done a bit of research and exploring and have already installed the software but will play with it a bit longer so that I know a bit more on how to set it up right! icon smile Been busy lately setting up something for you arowana/fish lovers... This community sites will allow you to create profiles, upload your fish photos/video and also have a forum in it as well. I hope that this will be a community site for all fish lovers, and not only arowanas ok. Anyway hang on there and I’ll have this site up live soon. (I hope!) If anyone who is IT savvy and would like to help me with the testing and setup, I would be forever grateful! icon smile Been busy lately setting up something for you arowana/fish lovers... You can drop me an email at steven@arowana-care.com if you have experience with testing and running of community sites. Thanks in advance.

2) This second project is a fish material site. (concentrating on arowana info initially) Well it started off as an arowana book site but I decided to make it broader and will also include books about other fishes as well. Most of these books will be books that I already have myself (especially the arowana books) and which I think will interest you. I have already contacted many of the publishers and they have stock for most of the books I will be recommending. However I must say, with the weakening US dollars, the shipping charges now have increase quite a bit I must say. I hope it recovers soon so that I can lower it. I should be able to launch this site in a couple of weeks time.

Let me know your thoughts about this. Anything else you would like see happened, do let me know. Cheers!
Steven

Conclusion to the arowana farm lawsuit?

Date : February 23, 2008 · 10 Comments

Hi all,
On 16 October 2006, (yes a long time ago. icon smile Conclusion to the arowana farm lawsuit? ) I published a post on my blog about a lawsuit that took place then when an arowana farm in Singapore sued a construction company for $1M.

Please refer here – arowana lawsuit for the original story.

Here is the final chapter in the court case. (only the damages has not been decided by the courts yet.) Please refer to courts decide on arowana lawsuit for the full story.

If for any reason you cannot access that story, I have posted it in full below anyway.

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Feb 22, 2008 The Straits Times by Selina Lum

Appeal court tackles ‘fish and chips’ case
Contractor loses appeal over dead arowanas

A CASE about ‘fish and chips’ came before Singapore’s highest court on Friday.
A construction firm was appealing against the decision of a lower court, which had found that it was liable for the deaths of 31 prized arowanas at a fish breeding farm.

When the firm’s lawyer, in raising doubts about the number of dead fish, referred to the microchips implanted in the arowanas, an appeal judge quipped: ‘It’s a fishy case about fish and chips.’

At the end of the hearing, the Court of Appeal decided that the firm, Lian Shing Construction, was liable for one less fish.

The fish in question had died four months after the bulk of the arowanas perished. It had been sent, close to the death, to the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) for tests.

An autopsy found that it had chronic liver and kidney disease. Arowanas cost between $500 and $10,000 each depending on age, size and breed, say fish enthusiasts.

OTF Aquarium Farm’s lawyer told the court on Friday that some fish can fetch as much as $70,000 each.

The saga began in 2002, when Lian Shing was subcontracted by the Public Utilities Board to carry out drainage works at an area bordering the farm at Pasir Ris Drive 12.

PUB had received feedback that the drainage reserve area was soggy and carried a risk of mosquito breeding. OTF breeds tropical fish for the domestic market as well as for export to China, Taiwan and Japan.

After the works started, the fish farm suffered flooding during heavy downpours. The floodwaters flowed into one of its fish ponds on a few occasions between Dec 2002 and Feb 2003.

A total of 42 arowanas in the pond died over the next six months.

In 2005, OTF sued Lian Shing for negligence, seeking damages for the 42 dead arowanas, loss of future income from breeding the fish, and repairs to the pond. It alleged that the construction firm?s works had caused the flooding.

The court, which also comprised Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong and Judge of Appeal Andrew Phang, dismissed the appeal. A separate hearing will be held months later to assess the damages.

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Please let me know your thoughts below here if any. Can’t imagine if more ponds were polluted and more arowanas died! PAINFUL exercise!!!

Steven

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