Aquarium babies

Neon tetras are not particularly difficult to breed so long as a few basic requirements are met regarding softness of water and its associated pH. Soft, soft, soft, filtered, filtered, filtered, reverse osmosis, whatever.

I have a 10-stage tower type water filter in the kitchen used for the aquarium and for the garden and the neon tetras frolic and play. 

The thing is, this happened before in an aquarium with r/o water and the bright blue line on the body of the tiny little baby in the grass stuck out like a ... like a ... neon light. Poor thing. Gave itself away trying to hide.

While these babies do not shine like that. 

Their distressing lack of shine has me disbelieving these are actual neon tetras. 

I had to turn up the camera's ISO in order to get pictures. This particular camera requires higher ISO and this particular lens requires higher ISO, so double whammy there, plus it is very dim and the aquarium light should do it, but it doesn't, so very high ISO it is. 

This is what happens with high ISO. It's like film with high speed grain. The sensitivity is turned up so each tiny sensor gets information from its neighbors. Information leakage all over the place. This is 1:1, right here to show how indistinct the image due to this sharing. This is what high ISO does to an image. See? Photography education right here.

Okay, so how can you even form a sharp picture of a fish with all those scrambled dots all over the place? 

This tank is extremely active, the groups settle down to sleep while individuals remain active. It is the most active community that I've ever had. And I've had some great communities. But this one is like NYC. It's driving me a bit nuts watching them. Especially the Boesemani rainbows are particularly sexually active. In groups. The two large ones are gay. The smaller younger ones are working it out. They intermingle. The old gays come out of character and intermingle with the young straights and then return to their flirting and posing and mating rituals. 

The tank is trying to be like sunken ancient Alexandria Egypt. But it is too overrun with statues and with plants and with fish. Both statues and plants must be thinned. It has too many Chia Pet rams pretending to be Egyptian ram sphinxes. They are too close together. With everything else piled up in between and now with plants obscuring everything, it's more like a dumped pile of Egyptian ceramic artifacts. Those orange things are Chia Pet rams and the dark thing leaning against one of the Chias is the back of Horus falcon. Nothing can be seen because everything is obscured by plants that cannot be seen for being covered with algae. That gets rubbed off but grows back. More slowly each time. Like the tank is balancing over time. It started out everything brand new to prevent snail infestation, including plants from tissue samples, and this is the price that I am paying for that.

Along the way babies are born. Neons. The touchy precious little things. 

I am very very glad that my neon tetras are breeding in my community tank. While the other fish are sexing it up even more than they are but so far to no production.