Introducing Gussie & Finknottle!

I love them already. The bottom one is Gussie; she (just guessing gender) is slightly bigger, super greedy for worms, and interestingly has uncolored tubercles along her side, they are the same pink as the rest of her sides. Finknottle, meanwhile, has pale orange tubercles and a barely visible black pinpoint at the top of most of his (or her) skin bumps. So it will be much easier than I thought to tell them apart!

As you may have noticed, Finknottle has a bad arm, I think his buddy chomped it in transit. There's no other bruising or stress so I don't think it was jostling, and they're from a forum member so he confirmed it happened overnight. Reading up it seems like it may heal in a week or two? He's not using or moving it at all, but it didn't seem to interfere with feeding. The skin color on it is uneven; don't know if it's scrapes or just bruising but the skin appears unbroken, so I'll keep an eye on it and hope for the best.

They're so awesome! I wish I had another for my guy to mess around with. Do they greet you when you walk in the room?

The wild-type (in its own tank) is now used to getting watched and has figured out food only happens once a day. The leucistic are new yesterday, and this morning they positively scrambled to greet me, I really think they remembered all those worms I fed them yesterday! :grin:

Update: One week after Finknottle's arm was crushed to the point of being totally limp at his side and a dark color, it's now completely healed. Way faster than I expected! They are both fat as little manatees and have both shed this week. I let them go 30 hours without food once, because they'd had a big meal the day before and I wanted them to eat the worm sticks fast before they softened into a big mess. It worked, but they FLIPPED OUT with food excitement, they were biting each other's faces. (No injuries!) I told my kids (ages 5 and 2 1/2) that it was like if I gave them a bowl of goldfish crackers and they frantically started trying to eat each other. :grin: I felt bad for them and ended up feeding them an extra snack of bloodworms. The only downside is all this eating, shedding and pooping is tanking my cycle, they need a way bigger tank soon because I'm getting pretty sick of water changes.

After a few weeks of insanely fast growth (are they supposed to shed more than weekly?!) even after adding 5 live plants and reducing feedings I'm over here doing 50% water changes every other day to keep the ammonia below 1.0. (Tank was cycled but just too small at 5 gals water volume; I knew that but underestimated how fast ammonia would build up.) Their new 50-gallon tank arrives Friday!! I am so excited both to have a new tank to set up, and to get a break for more than 2 days between water changes!