Articles

Tips For Your Fish Room

Tools That Make Your Work in the Fish Room Easier or Make it More Interesting

PART I: Long Handled Toe Nail Scissors and a Light Box You Can Build Yourself. This is planned to be the first in a series of articles on tools that I have found useful in the fish room. Some are obviously well known, found in most everyone's fish room, but possibly used in unobvious ways. Others may provide you a better way to do a job and do it more easily. Take scissors for instance. Everyone probably uses scissors in their fish room, but long handled scissors do not cost much and are useful in cases where other scissors are not.

Figure 1. Long handled toenail scissors used to expand end of airline tubing.

Long handled toenail scissors

These long handled toenail scissors are unexpectedly very useful in a fish room. They are available on-line for $11 or $12 from a number of places. Just do a search on "long handled toenail scissors."

Figure 2. Long handled toenail scissors used to remove tubing hardened onto airline valve.

Because of their short cutting edges, they are easy to use underwater to cut specific plant stems when you are trimming your underwater garden. That is what I bought mine for, but it turns out they are useful for other things. Sure they are good at cutting airline tubing and by design give you leverage and thus are good at cutting tough things like thick reinforced tubing or even rigid airline tubing (as long as you cut slowly the rigid tubing does not crack). But what makes them so useful in the fish room is for expanding the end of airline tubing (as seen in the picture) so that it is so much easier to slip the airline tubing all the way onto those metal or plastic fittings/valves. And since the airline tubing is really elastic, it tightens up in just a minute or two, so it does not come off easily. And when you finally have to take the airline tubing off of the fitting, these scissors are just what you need to cut the tubing off the fitting, as shown in the second picture. Or if the tubing fails because it cracked, cut a small piece off and expand the end of the tubing and put it back on. This old tubing becomes harder with age but there is no problem expanding it with this tough pair of scissors.

Light box

Figure 3. Homemade light box (1'X2') makes it easier to see small objects like fry.

Figure 4. shows how the opaque glass is attached to the box.

Figure 5. shows how the corners were made and the kind of light sockets used.

Basically a light box is just that: a light in a box (see figure 3). You can buy one ready to use at a number of craft stores. You can build one using wood box and a piece of glass and a light socket or two and a couple light bulbs. I used 1X4s and scrap wood to build a box and put a ceramic light socket on each inside end, with instant-on fluorescent-light bulbs. You will want to paint the sheet of glass with a white paint that holds up under heat. You want the glass to be opaque. See the pictures for how the glass was fastened to the top of the box and how the box was made in Figures 4 and 5. The painted side goes down and you place objects you would like to look at closely on the top with the lights on.

A light box is simply a visual aid. Place any container or aquarium with a transparent bottom on the light box and objects in the container are highlighted. I use it with plastic 2.5-gallon aquariums and with the plastic sandwich boxes. If you spawn fish like killifish in the 2.5-gallon tank, the light box allows you to readily see any eggs on the bottom of the tank. If you use the plastic sandwich boxes to incubate killifish eggs, the light box allows you to see, in conjunction with a magnifying glass, eye development in the egg, ant to readily see if any of the eggs have hatched. Even for German Blue Rams, I take the eggs from the parents and incubate them in a 2.5-gallon tank with fungicides and a moderate stream of air. The fry are almost transparent, so the light box allows me to readily see if the eggs have hatched, because the fry will no longer be on the rock but will be on the bottom of the tank. And then I can also see if any are close to being free swimming. I move them to a larger aquarium when they are about to become free swimming. And if you discover a small container hidden away, well forgotten, and you do not know what is in it, the light box allows you to see any other creepers or crawlers that might be present.

The light box works best with only an inch or two of water in the container. Unless the water is very clear and without color, water that is over 3 or 4 inches deep is hard to search with a light box. Of course, you could make it work by changing to brighter lights and/or less opaque glass.

This article first appeared in PVAS’s Delta Tale, Vol 35 # 4.