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Well, I should clarify that I was talking of the eheim canister which can also be flow restricted if that is an issue.
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May 11, 2016 17:24
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As of yesterday all of my keyhole fry are gone. No idea what happened.
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May 12, 2016 15:29
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Soylent Yellow posted:I'm going to be setting up a 10 gallon tropical aquarium, and I'm shopping around for a cannister filter. I have an eheim 2213 going spare, but I'm thinking it would probably be a serious case of overkill for something this small. I can pick up a Fluval 106 locally, but was wondering if there are any other (possibly cheaper) options. I use two 275Gph canister filters on my 55. There is no such thing as overkill with filtration or water movement. http://www.amazon.com/TechnToy-HW-6...canister+filter Smaller but two of these in a ten would be nifty.
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May 13, 2016 01:15
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Remember that you can always turn the flow down if it is too much for the fish, but the larger surface area the filter affords will be a boon for keeping it more clean reducing chances of the levels to bounce on you.
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May 13, 2016 01:54
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Bulky Bartokomous posted:As of yesterday all of my keyhole fry are gone. No idea what happened. Mom and dad got hungry
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May 13, 2016 01:59
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So I've been running a 50 gallon tank for about a month now with fish, after doing a fishless cycle. I have 2 three spotted gouramis, 3 armored catfish algae eaters (tiny, less than 2 inches) and 10 neon tetras. It's full of growing plants. I planted 14 of them, and there's a large piece of driftwood. Just so you can get a feel for it; The thing is ever since I started, my ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels have been 0. I feed them 4 times a week and I know that the kits are working because they told me exactly what I expected during the cycling. I know plants can reduce nitrate, but I did not think they could do so with such efficiency. Fish and plants seem to be happy though. So, is this normal? edit; I did a PWC of 10% after the first week (and also checked the values, all 0), none since. Namarrgon fucked around with this message at 18:29 on May 13, 2016 |
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May 13, 2016 18:02
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Seems legit, plants plus a low bioload and feeding schedule like that could easily be keeping your nitrates at undetectable levels. You shouldn't ever see ammonia or nitrite in a cycled tank anyway. You probably should still do small water changes every couple of weeks even if your levels stay at zero to make sure you're replacing other minerals that might be getting used up. It's good that you've left plenty of room for your fish to grow, find territories etc.
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May 13, 2016 19:23
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That's a nice looking tank, and similar to what want to do this summer. Do you use dirt at the bottom of your tank for the plants? I keep seeing YouTube videos for "Dustin's Dirted Tanks" but I can't tell if it's some fringe practice or what.
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May 13, 2016 19:49
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Is using soil in tanks the same as the Walstad method? I'm trying to have a read now but my internet is crapping out. I can't remember off the top of my head if Walstad is associated with freshwater deep sand beds or with use of soil. Maybe you will find some more info searching for "walstad" as well as searching for "dirted tanks".
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May 14, 2016 05:35
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Pretty much everyone on plantedtank.net uses soil in tanks. 
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May 14, 2016 08:27
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Stoca Zola posted:Is using soil in tanks the same as the Walstad method? I'm trying to have a read now but my internet is crapping out. I can't remember off the top of my head if Walstad is associated with freshwater deep sand beds or with use of soil. Maybe you will find some more info searching for "walstad" as well as searching for "dirted tanks". Walstad method is trying to do a "natural" tank, to the point of usually using actual sunlight and only the lightest filtration if any. You see lots of sweet bowls and vases if you google around for 'em. They'll typically have soil in the substrate but that's more because that's how it works outside and junk. Speaking of soil in tanks, I've got my new tank set up and that thing is farting up a storm. Miracle-Gro phased out their Organic Choice line and replaced it with Nature's Care. I was reeeaaally hoping it would be close if not the same as the old stuff, but even though I sifted the the hell out of it I've had like three weeks of huge methane bubbles, so much so that I've got lots soil and Safe-t-Sorb blowing straight through the two inches of sand onto the surface. Gonna do a light re-cap once it slows down but it still irks me 
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May 14, 2016 23:21
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I was recently gifted a ten gallon tank, and it was cycled and set up with 5 neon tetra and an apple snail. The filter I identified was a marineland magnum 250, and it looks like it can service up to a 50 gallon tank. It seems like it blows water back into the tank pretty fast for the tetras, and while I have like a 600 percent filtration level on aqua advisor, should I drop to a smaller filter?
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May 15, 2016 23:16
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Is there any way you can change the way the water's discharged or set the filter motor to a lower level?
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May 16, 2016 00:07
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Not Your Senorita posted:I kept having the same issue, though I finally was able to figure out they were getting hole in the head (the internet is a really terrible resource for this disease, unfortunately), and nothing I tried for any of them was ever able to stop it before they died from it, so I've just given up since that poo poo's probably gonna be in my tank forever now. Sucks because angels are my favorite fish to keep for their personalities, but I can't subject any more of them to the deathtrap that is my aquarium, I guess, unless anyone knows how to get rid of it in a planted tank without messing it up. What organism is doing this to your fish? Going to guess its a nematode or some protist.
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May 16, 2016 04:40
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SynthOrange posted:Is there any way you can change the way the water's discharged or set the filter motor to a lower level? As far as I can tell there's not a way to slow down the discharge, but the exit port for the water has an alternate tube online that spreads the way the water leaves the thing. I might have to look into that.
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May 16, 2016 06:35
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You can DIY up solutions yourself like baffles, spray bars and deflectors cut up from drink bottles, straws or whatever you have on hand or can find at hardware stores if that piece is overpriced. Aquarium stuff all fits pretty standard connectors.
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May 16, 2016 06:44
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I currently have two species of mudpuppy (large aquatic salamanders) set up in 500 and 200 gallon swimming pools in my backyard, and I'd like to raise some small fish to feed them. My first thought was to culture some Gambusia, collected locally, but the last time I tried this a few years ago, I never had any real population growth. I have a spare 200 gallon pool set up outside for whatever fish I decide to go with - anyone have any recommendations? Feeder guppies - would they survive a winter outside in SC (pools tend to freeze over in winter, then thaw out during the day)? Basically, I want to have fish available, but don't want to worry about parasites. Any thoughts?
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May 19, 2016 16:54
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Guppies are probably the easiest and quickest to breed, but I don't think they'd survive a winter freeze. You could always set up a 30-40g tank inside for the winter and keep a healthy breeding population going. Pulling the tub into a covered garage or shed and dropping a heater in would probably work too.
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May 19, 2016 17:34
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Would guppies be okay during the hotter months here, too? Temps get into the 100s regularly, though water temperatures are probably high 80s in the deeper sections.
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May 19, 2016 17:39
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Mosquito fish? About the size of guppies and hardy as hell
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May 19, 2016 19:45
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Yeah, that's what I thought of first (Gambusia), but I didn't really have much breeding when I tried it last. Not sure what was wrong, but I had the same number of fish for half a year and just gave up.
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May 19, 2016 20:20
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Your population losses might just have been due to insufficient cover for the fry, they could have been eaten by adults, or if you have dragonflies or damselflies in your region, their larvae prey on fish fry. Hydra are another possibility for fry loss, water beetles, even birds I guess, there are dangers for fish living outdoors. Guppies are tropical so would probably be fine over summer and really struggle over winter. They're very adaptable but not so far as frost - in Germany for example feral guppies thrive where industrial cooling water carries waste heat into the environment but don't seem to spread into colder zones. Gambusia are invasive too so I suspect they are probably about as adaptable as guppies. Maybe a pool cover, floating heater or other means of keeping it warm enough will keep some guppies alive and breed up a temperature tolerant population? For cooler areas rosy barbs and zebra danios are anectodally able to survive a frost. If there is enough bottom cover ie pebbles for their eggs and floating cover ie hornwort for the fry, they can be fairly prolific breeders but I suspect they are seasonal egg layers so you maybe won't get constant fry like guppies can do. I've only seen them breed in warmer weather. Rosy barbs don't seem to mind the heat either, I had four outdoors in a pond that got there as unknown eggs in wastewater and survived a week long heatwave of 100+ so they would be fine in a bigger pool that stayed cooler. Rosy barbs seem to prefer eating from the bottom and picking at plants so once their fry got to cover they'd probably be fairly safe. I think they eat their own eggs moreso than eating their own fry. Danios seem a lot more prey oriented and probably would eat anything small that moved so might be less useful for feeders even though they can survive the cold. Useful to thin out an excessive guppy population maybe? Do you gut load your feeders so that your mud puppies are getting good nutrition? What size feeder is ideal? How many feeders do you need? Guppies will explosively fill any available space and might end up being overkill depending on how much your mud puppies eat. Maybe keeping a mix of feeder fish will help ensure you always have something that survives no matter what the conditions are. Edit: had an idea on your lack of gambusia population growth, what were you feeding them? If you were just relying on mosquito larva it might not have been enough. Stoca Zola fucked around with this message at 05:58 on May 20, 2016 |
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May 20, 2016 05:55
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I'm not sure how I had it set up last time - it was five or more years ago. Hydras are a possibility - they wipe out my Daphnia cultures after they've been set up a year or more, generally, and I may have turned an old Daphnia pool into a fish tank. Dragonflies and damselflies can be issues, but I'd be more aware of them when they're present; lost some axolotls after putting some eggs in a pool and didn't realize it was full of dragonfly larvae, oops. The good thing about dragonfly larvae is that they don't get established usually if there are active predators in the water, which would probably include Gambusia, or whatever might have been in the pool before them if not Daphnia. I fed them Daphnia, whatever put their eggs in there naturally, and had some fish food, too, so diet was pretty balanced. Maybe more cover for fry might have helped. I won't do any gutloading - fish would be a smaller part of their total diet - I love feeding them worms, and they'll eat tadpoles (gray tree frogs breed in my pools, and if they don't get the right pools, they get eaten) and anything large that gets in there, such as dragonfly larvae, so they have a pretty balanced diet. I just wanted another food source, since the N. lodingi should be eating small fish as part of their diet, and the N. punctatus might eat fish a bit in their diet, but they're not a big part of it. Small fish from a clean source would be useful to have, though, since axolotls and maybe even my sirens might eat some - guppies are a bit smaller. A small fish would be nice to have in small numbers in the mudpuppy pools, though, since I don't currently have any juvenile salamanders that might be eating mosquito larvae - there are some mosquito larvae in there right now. I think I might just set up another swimming pool, try both guppies and Gambusia, and see how it goes. If one doesn't work, I can just turn it into another Daphnia pool. Danios would be cool, they seem like neat fish, I might try them at some point. Rosy barbs would get too big as adults, might pose a risk to any offspring if I'm able to breed these guys - I'm basically looking for small fish, under an inch, though that'll change if I get some of the larger species later this year - I used to feed my N. maculosus six inch minnows by hand, it was really cool! Thank you for the suggestions, even if not for food, I might give Danios or barbs a try at some point - if you have space for 200 gallon swimming pools, including substrate they're only $40 or so to set up, and it's like an instant pond!
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May 21, 2016 00:34
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So would anyone be willing to send me a few MTS? I'm in the Cleveland OH area and I've searched all over my local fish shops and no body seems to have them. I've got a planted 10 gallon tank with sand and I want a few to help stir everything up. I know they're going to multiply, but I'm ok with that since they mostly hang out in the sand. I can paypal shipping plus a few bucks for the hassle of rounding them up.
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May 21, 2016 17:44
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Get assassin snails instead. Seriously MTS explode and you can never sell or give those fuckers away. Assassins breed slow and are always able to be sold.
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May 21, 2016 19:54
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I've got mystery snails in the tank already that I really like, also do assassins mix up the sand?
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May 21, 2016 20:04
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Ashes_to_ashton posted:I've got mystery snails in the tank already that I really like, also do assassins mix up the sand? Er, nix the assassins if you have mysteries. They will be eaten.
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May 22, 2016 00:55
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I've got two juvie frontosa that I kept out of my last batch, and have been raising them with the main colony in my 180g. They are both about 3" now, and this past weekend I realized that one of them was missing. I still hadn't seen him by last night, so figured he was a goner. I couldn't find any evidence of him after moving every rock and branch in the tank, so as a last resort I took a flashlight and checked the overflows. Sure enough, there he was. With a buddy. I was able to pull the drain pipe, and reach down to the bottom to scoop both of them out. Apparently one of the original fry got into the overflow long ago, and has lived in there ever since. It has to have been in there for at least 4-5 months, surviving on whatever food made it's way in. It's about half the size, and much paler than the others, but I'm hoping it will recover nicely. I'm going to have to check the overflows as part of my weekly maintenance now though, I think.
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May 26, 2016 15:05
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Enos Cabell posted:I've got two juvie frontosa that I kept out of my last batch, and have been raising them with the main colony in my 180g. They are both about 3" now, and this past weekend I realized that one of them was missing. I still hadn't seen him by last night, so figured he was a goner. I couldn't find any evidence of him after moving every rock and branch in the tank, so as a last resort I took a flashlight and checked the overflows. Sure enough, there he was. With a buddy. I worked in an LFS when I was growing up and we found a 3 inch firemouth in the central filtration system. He looked like an albino cavefish but otherwise seemed none the worse for wear.
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May 26, 2016 15:52
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It got a lot colder here a lot earlier than usual and I haven't got all the bits in place yet for my planned guppy segregation tubs so I have a bunch of guppies outdoors in a smallish pond with temperatures going as low as 6 deg C soon. It's already gotten as low as 8 a couple of nights, but so far the pond fish still seem okay. I'm not so worried about the rosy barbs, they can probably take it, but I don't want to lose my pond guppies! So far I have made a flat spiral of black pipe that sits between the pump and the filter as a solar collector/heater and I have covered 2/3 of the pond with a layer of bubble wrap suspended above the surface with a narrow air-gap, held down around the edges by rocks and bricks. I'm hoping that will help retain more heat overnight after collecting more during the day. The water was 18 deg C today after a fairly overcast afternoon with few patches of sunlight, and that's not so bad for feral guppies to handle. They seemed quite active and normal, no signs of distress. I hope it manages to stay warm enough for them tonight. My initial plan was to forget about segregation and just get the guppies inside but the filter on the tank I had planned to use has started leaking. I have had it running for weeks with no leaks or problems, just trying to get the media started and seeded. Decided to rinse the gunk out one last time before doing the guppy move only to find the o-ring doesn't seem to be sealing properly now and it's leaking from under the clamp. Seems to be a common issue with the fluval 206 canister. I've got another o-ring on order, hope it gets here soon. I tried going over the o-ring with Teflon tape which helped a bit, but it's still leaking fast enough to half fill an ice cream tub in about an hour. Not useable at that rate of leaking. I don't mind the idea of only the hardiest guppies surviving outdoors but I would rather be running that experiment just with fry, not with colourful adult guppies that look like they belong inside. I'm a bit worried they will all die and then the pond will be a stinking mess.
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May 26, 2016 20:12
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Hey fishgoons! I bought a little 2.5 gallon tank the other day and planted it with no real intention of adding any livestock due to how small it is, but I'm wondering if there's anything I could actually keep in there in the future if I decided that bubbles and plants became too boring to look at (right now I'm in love though). The filter and hardscape take up a fair bit of room in an already small tank. Is this simply too small to keep a betta in? If I were to put some shrimps in there (I assume shrimps would be okay) what sort of number should I be looking at? African dwarf frog? Or any other suggestions? If it's too small for anything other than shrimp that's fine, though. lovely pic sorry, and I'll be trimming the plants a little when they've hopefully taken root a bit and when my scissors actually arrive. 
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May 27, 2016 23:09
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Hello al! I've just finished reading through everything and wow, you guys have been through a lot. I've especially enjoyed seeing republicant's journey from brine shrimp experimenter to full fledged MTS snail breeding wonder. Here's my current story, let the tank shaming begin! I have had a 5 gallon planted tank for a little over a year now. Original resident was a betta named Damien I had in this gimicky bullshit for 2+ years https://backtotheroots.com/products/watergarden before I knew any better. I cycled the tank properly after getting it before adding Damien, and everything was great.  I started getting algae, so I got a nerite (Kevin) a couple months after adding Damien to the tank. Here's a photo of them meeting for the first time:  Unfortunately, a few months later, Damien died suddenly. Water params were normal and he didn't have anything visibly wrong with him, so who knows. He had been getting a little slow in the months before that, so it was probably just old age. He was the first betta I've ever had, so when he would fall asleep mid swim I thought that was normal. Now that I have a second one, I think Damien may have been a little narcoleptic. I definitely also overfed him (hence the fatness in those earlier photos), so that probably didn't help. Here's the first picture I have of him (just outside the pet store). I love his little angry face :3  After Damien died, I changed all the water in the tank, tested everything and planned to wait before getting another fish. But, as always seems to happen in this thread so I know I'm in good company, I went to the store (just to look) and came home with a new betta I named Shane. Here he is soonish after taking him home (disregard the tetra, he enters the story later). Note his long and flowy tail.  Now, while Damien had been fine with Kevin and pretty much ignored him after their first meeting, Shane was the exact opposite. He attacked Kevin nonstop; I would see him flaring at him before I left for work in the morning, and when I came home he'd still be flaring. I tried coming over to the tank when I would notice him flaring, and giving him snacks to try and reinforce that Kevin wasn't scary (I know you do that with dogs to get them to stop barking, thought maybe I could apply the same logic to fish?). Needless to say, that didn't work and Shane kept flaring at Kevin nonstop. Video for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTjvipukPeg I was worried because Shane started getting tears in his fins, so I went back to the pet store where I had picked up Kevin and asked them what I should do. Here's the part where it gets a bit dicey... The people at the pet store recommended I get a small school of neon tetras (5) and add them to the tank to distract Shane. They said that the tetras would be too fast for Shane to catch, but more interesting than Kevin so he'd chase them, get tired out, and not flare so much so his fins would start to heal. I know now that they were probably just trying to make money (but the neons were something like $1.69 a piece; it was hard to imagine that could be worth it for them but who knows), but I came home with my tiny tetra school and added them to the tank. At first, it worked out like they said. Shane chased the tetras, didn't flare as much, everything was great. This was before I knew about quarantining (stupid I know), so I had to deal with an ich outbreak :|. I ended up treating the tank with a dog dewormer (very diluted down and soaked into the fish food) which totally cured the ich but almost killed Kevin. I then put Kevin into his own quarantine after figuring out what had happened, and miraculously he recovered totally fine and is still in my tank to this day. I lost one tetra to jumping out of the tank, one to probably new tank syndrome and one to what I think was a swim bladder issue (he started swimming vertically, with his head up, and finally died after slowly deteriorating during a few weeks in quarantine). This was all during the first month or so after getting the tetras, and I honestly expected the other 2 to go the way of the first three any moment. That was probably about 6 months ago, which brings me to the reasons I'm posting here now. 1. The remaining two tetras are still going strong. Unfortunately, they also turn out to be nippy assholes, so now Shane's poor tail is somewhat stubby.  Is there anything I can do to mitigate this? 2. I've been trying to get on board with the recommendations everyone has been making throughout the course of the thread. I looked at aq advisor, but the stuff they sold me at the pet store isn't on there, so I can't tell anything about my fish tank. This is the equipment they sold me, and it's what I've had for the last year+ that I've had the tank: http://imgur.com/a/pfRN3. I did a bunch of water tests this week (parameters have been stable, so I got lazy and didn't test because I didn't have any sick fish/algae/etc. issues) and this is what my current readings are: pH 7.5 Ammonia 0 - 0.25ppm Nitrite 0ppm Nitrate 40ppm KH 3/50ppm GH 14/250ppm Phosphate 0 - 0.25ppm For comparison, here is my tap water: pH 8.4 Ammonia 1ppm Nitrite 0ppm Nitrate 0ppm KH 3/50ppm GH 0ppm It seems like I need a better filter (especially since the one I have is rated for "2 gollons"), but most of the recommendations I've seen in here so far have been for larger tanks; is there one that would have little enough flow for Shane but is a legit filter and not this weird knockoff I have? My plants are growing ok, but I'm also open to upgrading to a real light; would the finnex planted+ be crazy overkill for my 5 gallon micro? 3. I've started to get a little bit of green fluff algae, and am wondering if I could support some shrimp in the tank. I've read how people find the dried up shrimps outside their tanks and mine has no cover, so would I need to get a cover if I wanted shrimp or would they stay in the tank like my bettas have? For reference, here is a full view of my tank: http://imgur.com/a/mUraR 4. How much am I supposed to be feeding my fish anyway? I know the instructions on the packaging are total BS (as much as your fish can eat in x minutes), and that Shane's stomach is roughly the size of his eyeball, but what I want is a concrete amount. I feed Shane 2 of these http://www.amazon.com/Hikari-Betta-Bio-Gold-Pellets-0-088/dp/B00025Z6JS every morning and every night, and then a freeze dried something from http://www.amazon.com/Zoo-Med-Laboratories-AZMBP5-0-12-Ounce/dp/B003ZWCTZO once a week or so. The tetras get a teeny pinch of http://www.amazon.com/Tetra-77006-TetraFin-Goldfish-2-20-Pound/dp/B003E2NLCA the same twice a day as Shane eats so they don't come in and steal his pellets. For comparison, I used to feed Damien 10 pellets twice a day (20 pellets total per day), following the instructions on the hikari pellet package of "Feed 5-10 pellets per day up to 3 times daily". 5. Kevin's shell has this weird white spot. It's not a fungus or anything, it just looks like his shell has no color there for some reason:  . You can also see from that photo that the newer growth of his shell looks different from the older stuff. Are either of these something I should be worried about? Finally, 6. I also want to shoot the breeze and share fish/snail pics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UXowLOV0cE   Edited to finish the thought in 4. heidi fucked around with this message at 05:01 on May 28, 2016 |
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May 28, 2016 04:54
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Thanks for posting a heap of pics, it's always nice seeing other peoples tanks! Your plants look pretty healthy too. 1. The remaining two tetras are ... nippy assholes. Is there anything I can do to mitigate this? Tetras need to have their big schools and pecking orders and room to swim around or they will stress, they will nip, they will behave quite badly, even peaceful species. Two tetras is not big enough for a school, but 5 gallons is not big enough for a school either, even for little neons since they still need lots of room to swim around and do their thing. You probably would have been better off getting a betta mirror to distract Shane. Cheap version: re-home the tetras (and maybe Kevin too, or maybe rearranging the tank layout will help Shane leave Kevin alone). Expensive version: get another tank big enough for tetras, set it up, buy lots of tetras, put Shane in old tank next to the new tank and let him watch the tetras through the glass. 2. Water test parameters These look okay to me although nitrates too high at 40, should aim to max out at 20ppm. Water change more often since your plants aren't using it up. New filter Did you cram that bio media into the little hang on back filter? It looks very similar to one I have which has been doing okay on my fry grow out tub, I added extra sponge in mine so it goes from coarse to fine and I have a filter inlet sponge which adds a bit more surface area for bacteria. For one betta one snail and a few tetras it's probably fine especially in a planted tank, but if you are worried you don't have enough filtration maybe you could add a discreet sponge filter somewhere in your tank. All you need is to let it bubble gently, you just want slow flow through the sponge for biological action to take place. If you don't have room for a sponge filter you could probably get a slightly bigger hang on back filter so that there is more room for filter media, and just run it as slow as possible. Real light? More light can give you more algae if you don't also increase other things that plants need like nutrients and CO2. That up Aqua nano tank led light does look like a real light to me! If you don't have fast growing plants or carpeting plants that need that extra light, you might have to invest in a timer to get your light intervals set up to help stave off algae. More on this later. 3. Shrimps and lids Your betta would probably like a lid so that he has a nice moist humid layer of air to breathe from. The hang on back filter and clip on light don't really help here but you could probably still make a cover yourself from clear plastic with cutaways in the right place. Shrimp don't really climb out unless they are really unhappy in my experience. Being chased by a betta could be something that makes a shrimp unhappy but you can't tell if he will hate shrimps or ignore them until you try. Also keep in mind that not all shrimp eat algae and not all algae eating shrimp eat all types of algae. Shrimps are cool though! Get a couple of cheap ones and see how Shane reacts. They have a very low bioload and do okay in nano tanks as long as they can't get sucked up into the filter. A better way to get rid of algae is to work out what is causing the algae and remove the source. How long do you leave the light on each day? I've read that doing 4 hours in the morning, gap of 5 hours then 4 more hours is enough for plants but algae hates it. I'm trying it myself in my own algae infested nano tank but too early to see any results yet. 4. How much am I supposed to be feeding my fish anyway? I think your new feeding regime is a lot better than your old one, but I've never kept Bettas so I don't know if that's a good amount. A lot of people give their fish a no food day once a week and over feeding does a lot more harm than under feeding. 5. Kevin's shell My guess is the mineral content in the water changed at the time where you can see the newer shell looking different. Maybe that's when you got him? Maybe there isn't enough snail minerals in the water? What food does Kevin get, does it have minerals? The white spot is the oldest bit of the shell and once that bit is damaged I don't think it grows back. Not sure if it's harmful to Kevin's health. I feed my snails shrimp food and sometimes turtle food since that's what I have but also it has plant matter and minerals which I think might help them grow their shells. I don't have anything fancy though, just MTS and pond snails and they breed so fast I can't tell if I am caring for them well or not. I keep promising pictures but not posting them because my phone's camera is a potato, using the iPad camera is super awkward - I need to find the battery charger for my real camera and take some pics! I got my canister filter to almost stop leaking so I've moved all my danio fry into the new tank I got. They seem really happy with the extra room. I am taking out all the guppies except for a few pretty males from my corydoras tank in preparation for buying a lot more panda cories although I probably won't actually buy the cories until after winter is over. The guppies are just too competitive for food at all levels of the tank. And I took my shrimp out of quarantine and put them in with my other shrimp today. I only had one die and he looked like he was stuck midway through shedding. I can see four shrimp are currently berried with eggs but I don't know how long this species carries the eggs for before hatching, it seems like forever!
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May 28, 2016 19:17
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Thank you so much for the response! Water change more often Since testing, I've been increasing water changes as you suggested. get another tank big enough for tetras I started looking for a new tank on craigslist and hope to pick something up this weekend to move the tetras over. If I got another 5 gallon tank, would 5 tetras be ok in there, or would I need a 10 gallon or bigger? Did you cram that bio media into the little hang on back filter? Yep I just squished the whole bio bag in there. There's also a couple sponge sections inside that filter to sift out chunks. What food does Kevin get, does it have minerals? I don't give Kevin any additional food; he just scoots around and eats the algae off the glass and plants. I'll probably start giving him some boiled zucchini every once in a while, but is there a wafer or some other food that people here love? There's also a couple small chunks of http://www.amazon.com/Living-World-Cuttlebone-Large-Twin/dp/B0002DH2YW in there which I was told would make sure he got enough calcium. How long do you leave the light on each day? I have my lighting on 8-12 and then again from 5-10. Like you, I just made the adjustment a week or so ago, so it's a bit too soon to tell but it does seem like the hair algae at least is growing more slowly. I don't have a ton of algae, but would like to get rid of the little bits of fluff that always seems to be in there. I've also starting dosing with https://www.aquasabi.com/brand/do-aqua/do-aqua-be-green-200-ml; any idea how often I should be adding it? Sounds like your tanks are doing well! Great to hear that as a bit of a change from the mass hysteria some in here were dealing with not too long ago.
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May 28, 2016 20:18
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I've only been keeping fish just over a year and I've stuck to easy beginner fish like barbs, guppies and danios for now. I've had the most trouble keeping tetras alive (and corydoras but I'm not sure how much of that is sickly livestock vs poor keeping on my behalf). I would put neon tetras into the "too hard" basket for me at the moment, because as I see it, the challenges are: - giving them enough room: I've got tanks that are just big enough to keep some neons in, but those tanks are already full of other fish. I'd say they need 15 gallon at the very minumum and I'd want more than that so I could keep a larger than minimum sized school. I would want to keep tetras in schools of 15 or more and I wouldn't put them with bossy fish like barbs or danios, or even guppies which are fearless greedy little fuckers. 10 would fit in a 15 gallon with a little room for other things too I think. - giving them stable water parameters in a range that suits them: my local water has a very high pH and I am still trying to work out how to keep everything stable. It's easier to keep a bigger tank stable than a small one, though. I like the taller bodied tetras like pristellas, beacon tetras, serpae or ember tetras over the torpedo bodied neons/cardinal/rummynose type tetras. I've got 1 surviving beacon tetra of 5, and 3 surviving penguin tetras of 9 total and I've pretty much given up for now on getting any more since they just don't do very well. I haven't tried neon tetras and I don't intend to keep them any time soon, but maybe some green neons one day, in the right tank. My sister though, she's always buying a couple more for her tiny 5 gallon tank since they're always stressed, sick and dying. Most of what I know about neon tetras I've read up to pass along to her but she doesn't listen. She says she doesn't have room/doesn't have time for a bigger tank but I don't think it would take much more maintenance time really! Healthy neon tetras can live up to 10 years so it seems really awful giving them such bad living conditions that they die after only a couple of months when you could be caring for them for years of healthy happy life. Anyway I don't know if thats a path you want to go down, maybe keeping neon tetras humanely is a bigger commitment than you are willing to take on right now especially since you'd be getting heaters, lights, filters, the works just to make life better for a couple of cheap fish (but personally I ended up buying a 120 litre 80cm long tank just for 3 derpy trash feeder rosy barbs that my sister couldn't keep any more). Having a bigger tank does mean more room for aquascaping if you are into that sort of thing, and you could pick some compatible fish to live in the different levels of the tank. Maybe corydoras or kuhli loaches for the bottom levels if you have a sandy bottom, or shrimp if all your fish are small enough. I like the idea of species tanks, or community tanks that are stocked if not with fish that naturally would live together, at least fish that have their own zones and territories and aren't competing for space or food. My first big tank is a mishmash of fish that I either bred by accident or were unwanted and given to me and they really don't go together that well. It's overcrowded now too but I keep on top of water changes and make a lot of use of duckweed for nutrient export so that tank has stayed fairly stable. The barbs eat almost every plant I've tried so my aquascaping has been demolished and is now down to some patchy looking rotala, a few manky bits of eelgrass, narrowleaf java fern (they rip off the new growing leaves even though they don't eat them) and I'm trying an anubias nana to see if I can get something different to survive in there which so far seems to be doing well. Anyway one thing I found really early on when mixing fish is that aggressive fish will go after fish of a similar size and shape to themselves, even if they are the wrong species. Zebra danios are close enough to penguin tetra in shape so there were huge problems and fights among those, so I had to split them up. Zebra danios were also bullying guppies, however when living with rosy barbs which are bigger and very boisterous (but I have enough of them now that they don't nip) the danios just ignore guppies and swim with the rosy barbs. Similarly a singleton penguin tetra would harass guppies but as soon as other penguin tetras were around he completely ignores the guppies. You just can't tell what will happen sometimes even doing lots of research and reading up about which fish behaves like what. The rosy barbs are supposed to be the worst nippers and most violent bullies (and the three that I started with had killed fish before in my sisters small tank) but in a bigger sized tank, with a decent sized school, they completely ignore their tankmates (even when the male guppies try displaying to them) and are what I would call very peaceful. More on your hang on back filter: I have one of these http://www.petsofaustralia.com.au/aquatopia-hang-on-aquarium-filter-650-650l-h/ because I was tired when I ordered it, I thought I was getting a HOF 150 but I got a HOF 650 suitable for a 150 litre tank by mistake. The media baskets seem woefully tiny and inadequate for a 150 litre tank, especially considering the in-build filter on my 120 litre tank is about 60cm long and holds so much more media. I have the 650 in a 5 gallon tank taking up the whole of the side, and it does seem like overkill! I run it with the flow turned right down which means the water spends more time in contact with the media which hopefully allows for better biological filtration. Anyway, when filtering and especially for ceramic media you don't really want heaps of flow blasting quickly past the media so I don't know how much good your ceramic baggie in the hang on filter is doing - but I bet its definitely better than not having it. If your filter is big enough to hold a ceramic media baggie its definitely bigger than my small hang on back that I started out with, that fits a piece of sponge which is less than an inch wide in its media section and I have a single piece of seachem matrix in the bottom because nothing else really fits. So it might be fine even though the box only says "2 Gollons". I found this for Do!Aqua Be Green - Dosage: Daily about 1ml per 10l of water in the aquarium so thats 2ml per 20l, which is about equivalent 5 gallons. I bought some cheap plastic pipettes from ebay which are great for measuring small doses of things like this! Also useful for feeding pre-soaked food, squirting hydrogen peroxide on algae, and many other aquarium tasks. Anyway dosing this fert will probably help fight off the algae. I just did some water changes tonight and I totally forgot to put any ferts in so I'm going to go do that now! Thanks for the reminder.
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May 29, 2016 16:53
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Well, summer is here, which blows for us without central AC. I returned after a week vacation to hot weather and my tank sitting at 82F. I immediately ran out and found two window AC units on Craigslist. That temp is not ideal.... is my only real option to run window AC units and keep the place cool enough to get the tank back to 77-ish? I can't afford a chiller...
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May 31, 2016 17:03
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You can run without lids, and point a fan at the surface. You'll have to top off for evaporation a lot more often, but it should get you a few degrees at least.
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May 31, 2016 17:49
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Enos Cabell posted:You can run without lids, and point a fan at the surface. You'll have to top off for evaporation a lot more often, but it should get you a few degrees at least. My cat doesn't seem to care that much about getting into the tank, so I'll try that. A few degrees is all I really need, it was down to 79 this morning after keeping the AC at a moderate level in a nearby room overnight.
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May 31, 2016 17:54
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Dropping your water level a bit so that the filter outlet falls further into your tank, to increase your surface agitation, can help both with increasing evaporation and increasing oxygenation which is good since warmer water holds less oxygen. I'm having the opposite problem here. Despite the blanket and solar heat collector that I've set up for my pond, I haven't seen too many fish out there lately. Hopefully they're all just hiding under the blanketed part of the pond where it's warmer. It's not like we get frosts here or anything, but this is the first winter for a lot of these fish so they will have to harden up if they want to survive. I had hoped to get a chance to collect the more interesting looking ones to bring back inside but I think it's too late, if the cold was going to kill them I think they'd already be dead by now. Survival of the fittest I guess, and I did my best to keep them warm with what I have. Since everything has apparently settled down after the great finrot disaster from a couple of months ago, I'd like to get more panda corydoras so I'm considering some options. This time I'm going to get rid of all the guppies from that tank first since I am pretty sure they have been outcompeting the corys for food so it should be just penguin tetras at the top, cories and shrimp at the bottom. But which fish supplier to use? My options are:
I'm pretty sure this time I can't rely on breeding more fish myself as all the corys I have left have the same shaped ventral fins and I think they're all female, even though one is big and the other two are small. The only thing that is stopping me from impulse buying some more cories right now is that I haven't got a quarantine tank ready and I am definitely going to try and get that part right this time.
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May 31, 2016 19:00
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ShaneB posted:My cat doesn't seem to care that much about getting into the tank One of mine has jumped in to my main tank twice now while I've had the hood up and it is truly an amazing thing to see a wet cat levitating away at the speed of lightning after they realise what they've done. I guess he couldn't see what was what from floor level until he'd already committed to it. He doesnt give a poo poo about the fish, he just wants to sit on the hood because he knows it'll make me yell at him (and any attention is better than none, right?)
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May 31, 2016 19:03
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