My love of fishkeeping started young — my dad kept fish, and some of my earliest memories are of tagging along to fish shows with him, and falling asleep to the hum of air pumps from his little fish room, tucked into a cupboard in my bedroom.
I've kept fish on and off my whole life, but the last two years have been different — I've properly caught the breeding bug, with a particular soft spot for nano species and planted tanks. What started with one 3ft tank and a couple of small ones slowly spread through the house, until my husband very generously agreed to let me convert part of our shed into a proper fish room.
The room is a cosy 3m x 3m, fully insulated — which matters more than you'd think here in Australia, where keeping tanks cool in summer is a bigger battle than keeping them warm in winter. Between the fish room and a coldwater setup out in the greenhouse, I'm currently running around 35 tanks.
My current species list includes Skull Creek rainbows, several Pseudomugil species (luminatus, furcatus, mellis, and gertrudae), Celestial Pearl Danios, and a handful of dwarf corydoras — hastatus, pygmy, and metae. In the coldwater setup I keep long fin danios and medaka.
Below, I'm keeping a running diary of what's happening in the fish room — spawns, hatchings, new techniques I'm trying, live food cultures, and just general goings-on. It's partly a record for myself, but I hope it's an interesting read for other fishkeepers too.
What's happening in the fish room, as it happens (roughly).
📅 8 July 2026
🐟 Spawning/Hatching - Pseudomugil gertrudae began hatching this morning. Moved to raising tank.
🧪 Cultures - Microworm culture going strong, feeding daily all the fish fry.
🔧 Projects/Techniques - Suspended an acrylic tray in the hastatus corydora tank to hold fry. Made a slit in short lenths of irrigation tubing to hook the tray onto the sides of the aquarium.
📝 Notes - Metae corys settling back in after the move to the new fishroom. I am experimenting keeping spotted blue eyes with them. Blue eyes are spawning in the mop alongside the corydoras. At first I thought this was pretty cool, but am discovering many of the corydora eggs are infertile. I suspect the males are being distracted by the blue eyes in the mop and are not fertilising the eggs.