It's 877 days since planting the cichlid tank - the fish are MASSIVE!

Welcome back to the channel, this is my Oase Highline 300 room divider, or peninsular tank, home to some Malawi cichlids. It divides the room between my wife's home office, Emma, and you can see her right there, and the other side is the living area, so I spend most of my time on the sofa when I'm on the sofa looking at this beautiful planted cichlid tank. It's home to Chindongo saluzzi, that is a species of Mumbuna cichlid, and the male, fish are blue, and the females are yellow. There's about, I think there's about 20 fish in here at the moment, I have rehomed quite a few over the last four or five years since I've been keeping this tank. It was originally set up in a Highline 175, but they quickly outgrew that. So here you can see the living space where I just sit on the sofa, have a cup of tea, maybe read a book, and yeah, I just really enjoy looking at this tank, it's so active, the colours are really great, the yellow and the blue. And no Christmas by the way, you can see our Christmas tree there. The plants are mostly Anubias coinleaf and Anubias carin from Tropica, there's around 50 pots in here all together, and I planted this about two or three years ago I want to say, I will check on that for you. But as you can see the fish are looking absolutely magnificent, here's our very dominant male, you tend to find the most dominant fish are the most colourful or darker, you can see that contrast to the really dark dorsal fin, and really bright blue. What I love to do is actually get really up close to the aquarium and put my hands right up so literally all I can see is the aquarium, and you get this feeling of actually being underwater with the fish, and it's actually quite therapeutic I find. So let's do some maintenance now here, just starting the water change process, siphoning the old aquarium water into the garden, and as that's happening I tend to just give the plants a really good wave around, you might know this technique before, I tend to do this on my aquascapes, and this dislodges all the waste organic matter and the excess detritus, stir around the substrate as well, and all of that waste laden water gets siphoned into the garden as part of the water change, and that high organic waste water is really great for the garden as well. Now you might notice the DJ there on the right, that's Chris Alune, one of my favourites. So yeah, just siphoning down to about half here, it's really good to do probably a weekly water change in this large aquarium, even though it's 300 litres, relatively large, the fish are huge and they do get fed quite a lot of food, so there is quite a lot of waste build up, so we do need to do these large frequent water changes. Clean the glass with a Dennerle Cleanator, with surprisingly little algae on the glass considering the tank's location near some skylights. So now it's time to clean the Oase Biomaster pre-filters, there's two Biomaster 850 thermos on here, so I just take these pre-filters to the kitchen and give them a quick rinse under some running fresh tap water. Because they're a pre-filter it doesn't matter that they're cleaned in any chlorinated water because all of the biological media is kept in the actual canister itself. I do love these pre-filters, so easy to clean, and here you can see I'm mixing a couple of different sizes of sponges, so we've got a really coarse sponge and the next size down. I find this is a really great combination of keeping really clear water but also maintaining flow rates for a couple of weeks or so. So now we start the filters and now we start filling up the aquarium with dechlorinated tap water. This is plugged in straight to my kitchen tap and adjusted to the right temperature and as it's going in there I just add some dechlorinator. Just having a little fiddle around with some of the Anubias here, just thin out some and relocate some. You can see there's quite a lot of algae on the leaves, it's no surprise, there's no CO2 on here and I'm happy to live with that little bit of algae because it really is a fish tank and as you can see the main attraction are those very high impact, colourful and active fish. They have been breeding in here but I think they've stopped now, I think most of them are getting quite old. There are some Simodontis catfish in here as well which I believe may prey on any babies but you don't really see the Simodontis catfish so much, they tend to come out in the evenings as do the bristlenose catfish which help to keep the rocks and the wood relatively free from algae. By no means this is an algae free aquarium as you can see but that is one of the trade-offs of having a very high fish load. Arguably this is overstocked, in terms of fish welfare I think it's okay with the large frequent water changes, there isn't any excess aggression in here and no damaged fins or any bullied fish so I'm quite happy to leave things as they are. The fish are approaching absolute maximum size, I think most of them. There are a second generation in here as well, maybe even a third generation which have a Who knows how long we'll keep this beautiful blind cichlid tank running for, it's just a real easy tank to live with despite the high waste and a lot of food going in there. Those two Bimaster 850 filters are more than capable of maintaining water quality and obviously that's in conjunction with those 50% weekly water changes. So I do hope you've enjoyed this video guys, if you have enjoyed it please consider hitting like, subscribe if you haven't done so yet and if there's a hype button available please hit that, it would be really appreciated and it really helps to support the channel. And if you fancy leaving a comment please do so, many of you may remember the old loyal viewers, old school viewers, I even remember these juveniles when I got them probably about five years ago and stocked them in the Highline 175 and it's just been a real treat to live with these fish as they've matured along with those very hardy Anubias. So yeah, it's a joy to live with. Thanks for watching, take care and I'll see you in the next video. Bye bye.