Brief information about myself: Friedrich
Holländer (everybody calls me "Friedel" - which I prefer),
52, teacher (German Gymnasium; subjects: English and French);
used to have up to 5 fish-tanks with mostly African cichlids in
the 1970s; restarted keeping cichlids in 1998 after a long
pause; at the moment: only one fish-tank of 300 litres with:
2 Astronotus ocellatus (the remainder of originally 4, a sad
story...), 1 plecostomus ..(?), and 1 geophagus
steindachneri (?) ,
the latter being a really oversexed "monster" that is
responsible for the untimely death of his 2 females ! He is
about 10cm long and a "tough guy" - but has to watch out for
unexpected attacks from the real masters in the tank ! The
plecostomus (about 27cm) knows very well how to defend himself
and sometimes even starts quarrelling with the astronotus.
I also hope to acquire (at least) one
second fish-tank, soon. My Red Oscars could do with a
500 to 600 liter tank, and my current 300 liter tank should be
populated with some colourful mbuna from Africa
again.
No secret about my photos: all of them taken with my
Sony DSC-S85 (4.1 megapixels), some of them slightly zoomed in
digitally; before sending them attached to my e-mail I used
Adobe Photoshop 5.0 to reduce them in size, from about 80 X 60
cm to 15 X 11.25 cm (1476 X 1107 pixels). Then I increased the
resolution to 250 pixels/inch and saved them as....jpeg.
That's all the "trick". As some of the photos clearly reveal,
it's of great importance to take the photos through a clean
front pane/glass. Algae are spoil-sports ! Two of the photos
I'm sending you today were taken in April this year. There
were still some plants in my fish-tank then, but a couple of
weeks ago I had to remove all the damaged remainders of what
were once healthy plants.
My "oscars" did a "good"/ thorough job !
