Some feeding, maintenance, and other updates.
New Life Spectrum Grow is proving to be a good pellet food for the kuhlis to get their share quickly. Its smaller 0.5mm size compared to the Krill Gran/Discus Gran that I would usually feed is letting them eat their fill easier (think of the time difference between swallowing chocolate chips and kisses).
Getting their fill quickly is useful when they're kept with larger, fast-eating roseline sharks and growout pictus catfish (and when the pictus catfish grow big enough to be moved to the archerfish tank, the zebra/Burmese loaches will fill their place of fast eating larger fish). They still do like to eat a few bites of the Krill/Discus Gran that is fed to the larger fish though.
Bloodworms, brine shrimp, and mysis shrimp are what's on hand at the moment for frozen food and are all big hits. Only caveat is that surprisingly the roselines will eat sinking bloodworms before floating and leave the floaters for a long time, so I have to remember to make a point to feed floaters first.
Maintenance is straightforward, the usual 50% water replacements and filter cleaning every Sunday+Tuesday+Thursday with the occasional Sicce Voyager degunking. Only surprise is how much detritus I end up rinsing out of the filter relative to the fish and their feeding - I would have expected, at best, 1/2-2/3 the amount of detritus.
It seems this is because the kuhlis and roselines poop a LOT more than I thought (whenever I watch them I always see a few pooping, and since I obviously can't watch them 100% of the time, all the pooping they do when I can't must be what's behind all the detritus). They are only given as much as they can eat in 30 seconds to a minute, twice a day, so it's not overfeeding. I would guess perhaps their new diet just makes them poop more than I thought, or their frequent nibbling of biofilm off the walls and decor is behind it.
Upsides are that it's always fun/satisfying to rinse out the sponges and see how much detritus there is, and every filter cleaning makes me grateful it's a cleaning-friendly Aquaclear hang on back instead of a cleaning-unfriendly pressurized canister filter like an FX6 that turns into a leaking NO3 factory. Plus, it also helps me appreciate how much biomedia I have in the tank simply by having sand, rocks, caves, fake plants, and a piece of wood - all that surface area is good for plenty of beneficial bacteria, so I can rinse out all the media without fear.
Otherwise, it looks like some of the black kuhli loaches are gravid. If they spawned I would expect few to no eggs or fry to survive (especially if it happened before the pictus catfish grow big enough to be moved), but I would LOVE if some did!