Sorry for the late notice on this, but it completely slipped my mind to post it here.

We will be closed on Friday, July 4th so that we can celebrate the holiday with family and friends.

We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause, and want to wish everyone a safe and happy 4th!

- Bill

Due to a number of factors, we have decided to slightly change our hours for the summer. Starting July 6th, we will be closed on Sundays.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this causes folks, but after much consideration, we feel this change is necessary.

- Bill

Got a bit of news about our discus stock. We got an order of discus hand delivered by the man himself - Discus Hans - at the last GPASI meeting. Hans brought us some extremely choice discus in this order. In my opinion, every single one of them could be rated a 9 or 10 out of 10! Just so many beautiful fish!

With this new order of fish, we're also trying something new with our old discus. We've setup a tank with some of the discus that have been hanging around in the building for a while and marked them down drastically. 2.5" discus start at a mere $22.49, 3" are $39.99, 4" are $59.99 and 5" are $79.99. These prices are absolutely highway robbery for discus, but we'll give it a shot and see how it works.

This Saturday's PAPAS meeting has been rescheduled to 5PM (as opposed to the original 7:30PM) to help facilitate the meeting being done in time for everyone to head home and watch game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals. So don't worry about having to pick which event to miss. Stop by for the meeting, then head home and watch the Pens game! GO PENS!

There are a couple fish club meetings this weekend that we want to pass along to everyone.

First - Friday night is GPASI's meeting with guest speaker Hans Koops van 't Jagt or more well known as Discus Hans. Hans is the guy that we get all of our discus from, and he definitely knows his stuff when it comes to discus. This is going to be a nice talk. And since Hans will be in town, we'll be getting a new batch of discus at the store. Check GPASI's website for meeting times and locations

Saturday is the PAPAS meeting with guest speaker Jason Baliban. Usually PAPAS meetings are on Sundays, but this one will be at 7:30PM on Saturday evening. Jason will be giving a talk on aquascaping and fertilizing techniques. The PAPAS meetings are here at the store in our meeting room upstairs.

- Bill

First, we want to announce that we will be closed on Monday, May 26th in observance of Memorial Day. We want to also pass along our appreciation for everything our veterans and current military personnel have done.

On the pond front, just a quick note to let folks know that we now have bullfrog tadpoles in stock. Also, we have some pond/bog plants in stock - yellow iris and arrowhead plants. These plants are both perennials so they'll come back up each spring, and work both semi-submerged or planted around your pond. They certainly make a nice accent to your pond.

Lastly, we need to get a photo up for this, but we want to let folks know that we have found a local source for Blue and Gold Rams. This means that these rams are much hardier than the ones imported from the far east. We have both blue and gold rams, and long-fin versions of both. Stop in and check out these somewhat hard to find dwarf cichlids.

Just a quick note to let folks know that we have finally gotten some pond plants in stock. Currently, we just have some water hyacinth in stock, but it is a start, and it has been going quickly! We'll keep working on getting some water lettuce and maybe some pond lillies too. We've got some pretty nice pond fish in stock too - perfect Mother's Day presents (hint, hint if you forgot or need help coming up with an idea!).

- Bill

Alright - a couple website updates here.

First, we think we have definitely tracked down and fixed the issue some folks were having with subscribing to the site (particularly for folks with verizon.net and comcast.net email address). We've tested this a bit more extensively than last time and it definitely seems to be working, but just the same... if you try creating a new account and don't get an email from the site about it, please use the contact form and let us know.

Another feature we've added (that might not seem like such a great feature right off the bat, but trust me it really is) is the addition of what is called a 'Captcha'. Captchas are those little slightly distorted images that you need to type in to submit a form in order for the form to work. These things help us keep the site clear of any spambot submissions (which we've already been hit with two instances of), and keeping spambots away is essential to keeping the site usable for real people. So while it does mean an extra step for folks using our site, it also means the site is a bit more protected.

Finally, I've gotten around to creating the user accounts that have been requested via the store sign-up sheet. My apologies for not getting to them sooner, but the email issue above was preventing me from doing this. For these accounts, I simply used the same username as your email address. If you would like to request a different username, simply drop me an email and we can get that taken care of.

- Bill

First, let me announce that this weekend we will be working with the members of the Pittsburgh Area Planted Aquarium Society (PAPAS) to setup a couple aqua-scaped aquariums for folks interested in keeping live planted aquariums. For those folks who really hated to see Tim's display tank go, this should come as good news. More on that as it develops.

Currently, we also have two new frog display tanks at the store. One tank will house our Dendrobates leucomelas (Bumble Bee Poison Dart Frogs) which we have for sale - in the photo above, it is the larger tank on the left. The second tank will house our Vietnamese Mossy Frog. Currently, the Mossy Frog is not for sale, as I am hoping to track down several more and start a breeding colony of them. These tanks help to show the great variety in setups you can use for various reptiles and amphibians.

A little more info on the Mossy Frog tank... This tank is a fairly simple setup (and subsequently, fairly inexpensive. The tank itself is actually a 10 gallon aquarium - it actually even has one side with several cracks, so it works well as a tank to use for something other than fish. I turned the tank on its side and stood it up with the open top facing forward, and then siliconed a piece of glass in across the bottom of the opening to allow the tank to hold some small amount of water. Next, I constructed a container to bury in the substrate to hold more water as well as a small Repti-Flo pump. I covered that with Hydro-Balls (ZooMed's new hydroton pebbles that are available at the store), then a layer of filter floss, then a layer of Eco Earth, followed lastly by a mat of moss that we had grown at the store. Then I took a piece of cork bark and drilled a small hole towards the top, and then ran a hose from the pump up to that hole. This gives the nice effect of water constantly cascading down the cork bark, as well as dripping off the leaves of the pothos ivy placed in the tank. Also in the tank are some plant trimmings from the other frog tank, and an Anubias barteri. The cork bark needs a bit more trimming to keep the mossy frog from constantly hiding behind it, but the bark is currently secured in place by some velcro (which works better in my opinion than permanently securing the cork bark with silicone). Alternative to the cork bark, you could run a setup with the Exo-Terra terrarium and run a water feature down the styrofoam background included with those terrariums.

I have a few more photos of these tanks, just view the comments for this post to see them. (I didn't want to clutter up the main page too much with them).

Note: I am also trying out letting folks post comments to news posts here, so if you have questions or comments about this stuff, feel free to post a comment.

- Bill

Well, unfortunately, some problems with the website seem to have snuck past us during the beta testing. It seems some issues have been creeping up for folks trying to create new user accounts. If you experienced this problem, please use the Contact form to send us a quick email so we can resolve the issue.

I believe that I've found the source of the problem and fixed it, but if it shows up again, or if anyone continues to experience the problem, please let us know so we can continue trying to figure out what is going wrong.

I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused anyone.

- Bill