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My mom bought a couple of cheap tanks at an auction and decided to gift one to my son for his birthday. She outfitted the tank with a little bubbler, a bit of decor, and went and bought a couple of feeder goldfish from petsmart. My son loved it. I wish I'd gotten it on camera, he was instantly enamored and stated that it was "just what I've always wanted". But beyond buying the sad little goldfish the tank was not cycled, didn't have a filter, and was only a gallon in size. Poor fish didn't make it a week.  Sad as it is, seeing his reaction reignited my love of aquariums, so I've set out to do it again and do it right. I went out and bought a 9 gallon fluval flex and I'm going slowly to build it up as it should. I want to do a planted tank and I could use some feedback and advice. My family and I have had aquariums off and on since before I was born, but they've always been either your standard plastic plant and little diver statuettes or get some fish from the pond and toss them into a bare tank (these were display tanks for my Grandpa's hatchery, not long term habitats). Suffice it to say a natural looking planted tank is new to me, as is actually reading about it instead of working off what I've picked up just having them around over the years. Here's my tank so far. Front  Right side  Left side  I set it up last night. Added the hardscape (all dragon rock), substrate (fluval bio stratum), plants (spiral vallisnaria, duckweed, red root floaters, water lettuce, java Fern, and a couple of freebies the fish shop guy threw in that I've forgotten the names of), and bacterial cycle starter (Tetra Safe Start). I plan on letting it go for a few weeks to get established and then add a few fish. Anyone see anything wrong with it so far? Is it ok that my floaters are moving around in the eddy current? How do you suggest getting plants to stay down in the substrate?
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Jul 3, 2023 02:17
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 05:11 |
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I'd like to, but with the way the Fluval Flex is set up one of the two filter intakes is low down and more substrate would block it. It's currently about 2 inches deep.
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Jul 3, 2023 03:31
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I'm still cycling my new tank. The plants seem to be doing well aside from one having some white mold growing on it. I walked by yesterday and saw something stuck to the glass inside of the tank, so I investigated. Looks like my plants were not alone.  Upon closer inspection there are tons of the little dudes in there. I'm curious to see what variety they grow into.
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Jul 20, 2023 16:49
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As a kid we never bought snails. Instead we would put whatever snails we found in the pond into our tank. It's a wonder that we never had something nasty piggyback in and wipe everything out.
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Aug 6, 2023 22:54
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Does anyone have pygmy corydora catfish? If so what the hell are you supposed to feed them? Their mouths are so tiny that I took a mortar and pestle to the catfish pellets I bought and the bits are still too big.
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Aug 11, 2023 19:55
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Thanks for the advice. I'll try grinding the hell out of it and try to feed them powder and if that's not working I'll move on to one of the suggestions. Looking on Amazon I saw a bunch of *golden pearls" listed. Is there an actual brand you all were talking about? Because it doesn't at all look like they're unavailable.
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Aug 13, 2023 00:33
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What's the word on a cheapish light for a standard 10 gallon tank? I'm setting up an old tank of mine for my classroom. Today I transferred a few plants from home and loled out loud at how pathetically inadequate the old florescent light obviously was when I turned it on.
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Aug 23, 2023 02:15
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Rated PG-34 posted:So far the hygger I bought has been holding up. Can’t speak too much about longevity as I’ve only had it for about 5 months. Also, it might burn down my house in the near future with how hot it runs. The version I have is also a bitch to program (programmable version). Otherwise it’s been great bang for buck. Ok Comboomer posted:I've been running a non-programmable 3-button remote one since 2020, and another since 2021 Ok, that's what I've heard, but you never know how much a company is throwing money around to shill their stuff. Since this will be at school, I'll need a timer for the weekend, so I'll probably go with the programmable one and just deal with the annoyance.
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Aug 23, 2023 06:26
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I bought a fluval flex over the summer, same 9 gallon size, but I'm black. I've been very happy with it so far. I have kinda kicked myself for not getting the bigger 14 gallon one, but the 9 has not given me issues. Its bowed front is quite nice looking and it's very quiet. The light is good enough to keep the plants I bought going well. I can definitely recommend it if you don't want to mess with all the work trying to research and piece out one of your own. I filled mine with fluval stratum, a few pieces of dragon stone, the aforementioned plants, four neocaridina shrimp, four neon tetras, a half dozen pygmy corydora catfish, and about four dozen ramshorn and bladder snails that hitchhiked in on the plants. I'll eventually replace the two neons that died the couple days after purchase and maybe add either a guppy or a honey gourami. I've also been working on piecing together a new/old setup for my classroom using an old tank and a mixture of the old pieces: tank, filter, thermometer, and maybe heater (I haven't tested it yet) and new pieces: light, stratum, and hardscape. Of the two, the pieced together one is going to be cheaper and would still be even if I had to buy it all new, but the flex has been much easier and has been waaaay easier to get looking really nice. I may very well eventually upgrade to the 32 gallon one if I keep liking it.
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Sep 11, 2023 02:19
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I know people here order from buceplant, but I feel like something must be wrong. I loaded a cart with 10 shrimp and a single plant and the two types of shipping listed were both over $50. I'm in the US and not in any exotic, hard to get to location. What the hell.
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Sep 13, 2023 01:37
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Ok Comboomer posted:when you ship animals you’re automatically bumped up to overnight. Ah, everywhere else I've looked at has a like $10 bump for two day instead of straight overnight shipping. I'd like to buy high quality stuff, but $30 of neocaridina and a plant don't make sense to tack on more in shipping than the cost of the critters. Rated PG-34 posted:Try aquahuna for livestock. They ship via usps. I did look there, but they have a frankly shocking number of reviews from the last year where shrimp orders are arriving underfilled. Like where a person orders their eight pack and gets five or six. And not because of them dying in transport, but that there were just not enough shrimp sent. After the like fourth of those in just a few minutes of looking and a couple of reviews ragging on the color quality of their orange shrimp, I decided to go elsewhere. If I can't find someplace else, I'll probably hit up one of the eBay sellers. There are several with good prices and thousands of positive reviews.
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Sep 13, 2023 06:48
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I'd definitely insulate the sides. As you're going to be losing a lot of natural insulation the ground provides. How cold will it likely be in your area?
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Sep 17, 2023 20:58
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You could just use the gallon jugs of distilled water from the supermarket. They were $1 each back when I was having to buy them.
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Oct 3, 2023 02:10
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One of the new shrimp I got for my classroom tank is berried! My kids are gonna go nuts tomorrow when I show them. Hadlock posted:I have on the rare occasion see a youtuber admit that their tank design was a failure. Very rarely. Like two or three times. Seems like within six months everything grows wildly out of control and reverts back to chaos It's funny to see a youtuber's parade of new builds that start as overgrown messes that seem to appear as if from nowhere. So few channels ever revisit a tank after its initial setup video.
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Oct 11, 2023 00:18
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Since you only have a 10 gallon tank you really don't need to siphon. Just scoop it out. I have an old yogurt container that I use to scoop out the water into the bucket I use. Then I pour the new water in straight from the bucket. All told it takes like ten minutes and that's with letting the new water sit with the conditioner for five. My shrimp in my classroom tank have started hatching. It's crazy that the babies are basically adults, but only a millimeter long. 
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Nov 9, 2023 00:53
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Yeah, you've gotta remember that getting with your sibling is pretty common amongst animals, especially as you get to smaller and "simpler" species. It usually will cause problems eventually, but it might take a bunch of generations. For example, when you do scientific research, you want to minimize absolutely any differences you can. Because of this, if animals are involved, you want them to be as similar as possible. In mice, different strains are established by breeding brother to sister for 20-30 generations. By then their genetics of any two individuals are very, very similar to one another. Mutations do arise (and are often the point), but some are completely fine. You can keep on inbreeding them to keep the strain going. Your classic white lab mouse strain was developed nearly 100 years ago and some lines are at 200+ generations.
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Nov 24, 2023 09:32
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gently caress, I'm like 95% sure I have ich and apparently anything available to treat it locally will murder my shrimp.   I'm currently slowly increasing the temperature to try to treat it with heat. Edit: I've also bought an air pump and got a bubbler system set up to combat the oxygen drop the increase in temperature will bring.
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Dec 7, 2023 04:25
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Cowslips Warren posted:ich: I have scaleless fish so meds are usually a no-go. So I use temperature; at 85* ich stops reproducing, at 86* it dies. So sloooooowly raise your temp, stop feeding, and increase air flow by a ton. Extra sponge filters, air stones, powerheads, etc. I plan on taking it up a couple of degrees per hour tonight until I'm at 86-87. This tank uses water surface agitation for oxygenation, so the fish are not used to an air stone. The setup I bought was producing so many bubbles that the poor things looked scared and stressed. Thankfully the Fluval Flex has a rear compartment that holds the filtration setup. Putting the stone back there instead of out in their area seems to have calmed them down considerably.
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Dec 7, 2023 05:33
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Came back from a shower to find one of my pygmy corys lying on its side/back and occasionally swimming around frantically for a few seconds before settling back down. The temperature has only gone up 4 degrees so far (in about two hours). They like to hide, and I've only seen two out at a time for the last few weeks and they've seemed fine. I don't know if this one has been suffering in the background or if I cooked him by increasing temperature too quickly.  Edit: I checked the parameters and they're normal. 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite, between 5-10 ppm nitrate, and 7.8 pH (which, while a tad high, is just what the tap water is here and what these fish have always had). Prof. Banks fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Dec 7, 2023 |
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Dec 7, 2023 06:23
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It's possible. Those spots have been there since shortly after I started the tank. They're also in my shrimp-only tank in my classroom. And those do not get very much food at all. I just don't know what to do.
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Dec 7, 2023 19:28
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I figure it is ich. I bought a new guppy and plant thanksgiving week. And they could have brought it in/stressed the neons. I already cranked it up to max this morning, so it's too late to go slow. Unfortunately it's only getting up to 85. I have an old heater that I'm considering cleaning up a bit and putting in with the current one to see if I can get it higher. I also thought that I might be able to raise it by wrapping the tank in a blanket, but that seems fiddly and since the heater is thermostat controlled it would likely just mean that the heater turns on less. I was considering pulling the plants/snails/shrimp out and putting them in a tub and treating with salt or even one of the non snails/shrimp safe medicines. But while the fish still have spots, they are duller than they were yesterday/this morning and there doesn't seem to be any new spots. This is the worst one and the picture honestly looks worse than it does in person. 
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Dec 8, 2023 01:16
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Pilfered Pallbearers posted:Did you not quarantine? Your risk here is there is some kind of disease you can’t see that’s stressing them and causing the ich to appear. Most of us have probably made this mistake, but this is why you always quarantine. I only have a single 10 gallon tank, so I don't really have a place for quarantining. I guess I could go buy another tank setup, but other than this guppy, I really didn't plan on getting any more fish until the residents of this tank died of old age. Doubling my amount of home setups for quarantining a single fish didn't seem like a great buy/use of storage. In total, I have 4 neon tetras, either 2 or 3 pygmy cory cats (depending on the fate of the one having trouble yesterday), and a guppy. It's not exactly a big setup with expensive animals. So I didn't have much to protect. I guess I'm paying for it now. But, by buying the aeration setup yesterday I've already spent more on trying to save these guys than it would take to replace them all. And I don't mean to be callous, but as a teacher with a kid and a mortgage, I'm not exactly rolling in cash here.
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Dec 8, 2023 03:14
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Prof. Banks posted:2 Just found him while trimming back plants.
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Dec 8, 2023 03:53
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I guess I could transfer the fish to a plastic container I have. Treat them with normal ich meds. Keep the snails and shrimp in the tank and keep it at high temperature. Let the ich run through its life cycle and die off in the tank through a lack of hosts and die off in the QT bin through meds. I do have an old heater and the air pump I got is stout enough to be split and aerate both simultaneously. I think all I'd have to go buy for that plan is meds and a sponge filter, so that's doable.
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Dec 8, 2023 06:18
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CaptainTofu posted:After threatening to build a Betta tank a while back when I posted my nano riparium I actually got myself in gear and did it. Ended up building a 45 litre high tech, with an emmersed section of course! Very nice. Hefty general aquatic hospital has been set up. They are really unsure about the sponge filter, but otherwise they seem to be doing fine.  I had to disassemble my hardscape a bit to catch them out, but the tank is not completely wrecked. 
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Dec 9, 2023 02:40
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I feel like one tetra is breathing much more rapidly than normal, but otherwise they seem to still be doing ok today. I checked parameters and they are all at 0 ppm for ammonia/nitrites/nitrates. Though, I haven't fed them since Thursday. I was unsure about it, but I guess as long as I'm careful to not overdo it and to keep on top of checking the water, I should be ok to give them a bit, right?
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Dec 10, 2023 03:35
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Actually, that tetra really isn't looking good. It's having trouble keeping itself horizontal and keeps tipping nose-up. The guppy also seems to be chasing the tetras and fin nipping. I assume that is stress/food related. So I went ahead and fed them. I'm also going to see what I can do to give them all some cover, so they can hide a little. Edit: he's now getting stuck in the java moss/guppy grass I threw in there to give them cover. Doesn't look good. Edit 2: video of him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUP300C-_nk Edit 3: it died.
Prof. Banks fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Dec 10, 2023 |
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Dec 10, 2023 03:48
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 05:11 |
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Last year I bought some dwarf hair grass on eBay. I got a note left in my mailbox about needing to come to the post office to pay extra postage in order to receive some mail. Dude literally shipped it in a Ziploc bag inside of a standard size letter envelope. It of course exploded in a sorting machine and I was presented with a baggie of soggy envelope. Got a refund at least.
Prof. Banks fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 08:28
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