12/15/13

Today I officially started my olive rockfish project. I went to the aquarist ally and got frozen smelt and a box of frozen squid. While the smelt was easy to thaw, just had to put it in a pitcher of water, the squid was not. I had to let it sit until it became soft enough to cut out one from the block. I actually had to have help with this because I wasn't really sure how to do it at first. Then I had to prepare them. I gutted the smelt and chopped the two up. I had to measure out 0.5 grams smelt, 0.5 grams squid and then 0.5 squid and smelt. Then I had to remove the plants from their tanks and replace it with my inch graphs. I had to be careful though because they jump when they're scared. After this I video taped each for one minute before feeding. Then I fed each fish their assigned food with a feeding stick. Then I took video footage again of each for one minute. Then I drained the tanks until they were low and took pictures of each fish and their graph. Then I filled the tanks back up fully. This all took a really long time because it was my first time doing this all. Andres and I decided that since my fish were bigger than we had originally thought they'd be, we changed the grams of food from 0.5 grams to 1.0 grams.