I Started My Scarlet Shiner Display Tank

I've had a group of about 15 scarlet shiners plus a few striped shiners that are left over from my parasite study. They're all yearlings, 20-30 mm long, and stay together in a nice school. The tank they've been in is needed to house future fish collections for parasite work, so I've moved them all to an empty 20 gallon tank in my main teaching lab. There's about 5 cm of medium coarse sand on the bottom, and an oversize hanging filter to generate steady current flow. I've been congratulating myself all day for how good it looks, with a tight school of fish moving away from motion but towards food. I'll try to get a decent photo to post soon.

Next week we'll go out to collect more shiners for various projects. Until then, I'll just clean up what we've been working with. I have to get some paper and string price tags to ID sacrificed shiners that have had their gills removed. Right now I have a growing mess of jars of formalin with small numbers of fish from the same stream and date. Once I get the right tags we can mark individual fish and put them in big gallon pickle jars for long term storage, in such a fashion that they're out of the way.