Office Aquarium Update

A quick update on office aquarium. Plants are growing like crazy. Every one of them looks healthy. Specially the floating duckweed and amazon frogbit. Of the 6 shrimp, at least one died. It's difficult to find them, so I am not sure how many are still alive, as far as I can tell, they have not bred. Snails have, lots of tiny snails and eggs all over. Also for the first time, I see tiny crustaceans in one of my aquariums. I need to get a good magnifying glass to figure out exactly which but it was very cool to see them darting around. I removed the filter media from the water filter, so it is now just used to provide water movement.

The biggest problem has been brown water. I have had to twice change about 60% of the water because it becomes so brown that almost no light reaches the bottom. Oxygen also seems to be a problem in this state and I see all the shrimp sitting on the surface of the water. I have also had H2S bubbles from substrate, but they seem few enough to not be worried about.

A list of plants in, before I forget them:

• Java Moss
• Subwassertang
• Cabomba
• Najas (Guppy Grass)
• Amazon Frogbit
• Duckweed
• Ludwigia
• Dwarf hairgrass
• Some sort of Amazon sword
• Spiral Valisnaria
• Some sort of chain sword
• Green Wendtii Crypt
• Java Fern
• Baby Tears (?)

Here are couple of pictures.

Top shot with duckweed and lots of floating plants

Side Shot showing the rooted plants. Floating plants are not very visible because of the glare from the light

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking

The best description for India Calling that I can think of is "Indians for Dummies", those three words describe both what is great about the book and what its limitations are. Its a great way to quickly learn about the India, its people, its customs and shared heritage, but always keeping in mind, that what you learn is only an approximation.

Indian emigre's usually are much more conservative than Indians back home. Their "Indian" values and customs stop evolving as soon as they leave India, so ironically enough when they go back to India, they usually find that Indians have progressed far while they still have a vision of India that is stuck in the past. Our author also suffers from this, since his version of India is from 1970's. His problems are compounded because his India of background in India was in the british influenced upperclass household that has as much in common with a average Indian as Paris Hilton with average American.

The book is basically a series of character portraits of a number of Indians. A long chapter on Ambani's seems out of place, it looks more like a piece for Vanity Fair rather than saying anything insightful about India. Moreover, that one chapter also undoes a major theme at the beginning of the book - that India in 1970's was a stifling place where to be successful you had to emigrate. Ambani's were contemporary of author's parents and brought up in much poorer circumstances, still they were able to reach epitome of success in India.

The most interesting parts of the books were little insights into Indian society, and a way of looking at them that I never did. The author is at his greatest when he talks about the individual and families, the "the family relations of guilt", "the vibration and madness that numbed one's sensitivity to oneself", "lightness of being without roots". At the other end of the spectrum, I thought he failed miserably when he tried to talk about the overarching conflicts and path of history and society. A section on Maoist insurgency is shallow, at times devolving into meaningless drivel you will expect in a liberal arts journal

"Just as the new self-confidence in India was nourishing a rediscovery of traditional ways, so, too, the individuation ushered in by modernity was, in fact, ..., a return to the past, to an older pattern of division known from the villages."

How any of it is relevant to realities of Maoist insurgency and mass killings is left to reader's imagination. Talking about corruption and Amabani's it seems that author was one of those "journalists covering the company were made part of the family". PR department of Reliance Industries could not have written a better profile of Mukesh Ambani.

For all the harsh words, I enjoyed reading the book. It broadens your horizons and shows you a different way of looking at things. Overall a pretty decent book.

Low Tech Office Aquarium

I recently read a book on aquarium ecology - Ecology of the Planted Aquarium by Diana Walstad. It's a pretty interesting book, filled with scientific tidbits, informative though more like scientific notes of a person, rather than a book. Anyway, the book review is for another day, whatever my cribs about it, its should be a definite read for anyone trying to keep planted aquariums or trying to recreate a system closer to natural aquatic world.

She proposes a "low-tech" aquarium, sans all the expensive equipment and specialized additives that I was familiar with. The idea intrigued me, the book convinced me that it could work, and Google search turned up various posts and pictures of the aquariums setup using her methods. To try it out, I decided to set up a 5 gallon aquarium for my office. She claims that an aquarium set up like this needs minimal maintenance - water change once in 6 months! Only regular maintenance required is plant pruning. Low maintenance works perfectly for an office aquarium.

Here is a great post on how to set up the aquarium with step by step pictures. My short setup:

1. 1 inch of potting soil, mixed with a handful of dolomite to neutralize the acidity. Crushed Oyster shells would have been better, as they are less reactive, but I could not find any at short notice.


2. Put a layer of small gravel along the edges about 1 inch think.


3. Plant as many plants as you can in the soil, put a layer of gravel around the stem.


4. After all the plants are in cover remaining open soil with gravel.


5. Slowly fill with water using a small bowl taking care not to stir up the gravel. If water is very cloudy siphon it out and refill.


6. Clamp on light fixture from hardware store and 23 watt full spectrum CFL bulb.


7. Bunch of floating plants, java moss etc.


8. 6 Red Cherry Shrimp.


9. A small submersible power filter - I used smallest that I could find, you do not really need a filter, just something to make the water move around, so a plain power head will do too.

Two days in, water is yellowish, from all the DOC (Dissolved Organic Carbon - read the book) from soil. One of the Shrimp has molted, may be two have. It's fun to try to find them while my code compiles. The experiment is on lets see how long the shrimp survive.