Some New Fish For Our Aquarium

We added a couple new fish to our aquarium yesterday. We’ve had it set up for about a year now and figured it should be established enough to add a couple more. We started out with two Long-finned Rosy Barbs, then a couple months later added two more. One didn’t make it past about three months but the other three still remain, healthy and rambunctious as can be.

We decided to add a small algae eater, he’s been hiding in the back behind some plants so I can’t get a photo of him right now. But our new Gouramis are pretty photogenic, we got a Powder Blue Gourami and a Dwarf Gourami. They’re really quite interesting fish. They’re labryrinth fish, like bettas, which means they will swim to the top of the tank and grab a little bubble of air in order to breathe. Here’s a little more info on that:

A labyrinth fish is a fish that uses a special organ called the labyrinth to breathe air from the surface of the water.

How can they do that? When they gulp air from the surface it gets forced into the labyrinth organ. In the labyrinth there are lots of small maze-like compartments of thin boney plates called lamellae. The lamellae are covered with membranes. Blood passes through the membranes and the oxygen is absorbed into the bloodstream.

If a labyrinth fish ends up out of the water it can stay alive for a long time if it stays moist. In fact they can even crawl across land to a different body of water if they have to. The climbing perch has a labyrinth organ so it can breathe out of water, and can even climb trees.

Source: About.com

The Gouramis seem to be a much more peaceful fish than our barbs, and fortunately as of day 2 everyone seems to be getting along. Some photos of all the fish are below, sorry they aren’t the greatest, fish aren’t very easy to photograph. They won’t stay still!

Our long-finned Rosy Barbs

Our new Powder Blue Gourami

Our new Dwarf Gourami

You can also see the fish and other photos of our aquarium on the ‘Our Aquarium’ category of the PhotoBlog.