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so uh, 2 of my discus are breeding...unexpectedly. Gonna be super interesting though; parental care in fish is neat to watch. Neat to watch them go and "blow" water on the eggs    Guess I've got some reading to do. edit: they would of course lay them right above the filter intake. Gonna need to address that first probably. wuffles fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Feb 8, 2019 |
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Feb 8, 2019 03:22
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Nothing that can't be fixed by a bit of fine sponge prefilter slipped over the intake cage. I prefer sponge to putting nylon stocking over because I think it diffuses the flow more, there is less chance of an area of high suction developing as parts of the intake inevitably clog up. I don't really like discus that much (or angels or any of the flat/tall fish), but they look like such sweethearts when they are in parental care mode  I hope it goes well for you!
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Feb 8, 2019 04:16
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wuffles posted:edit: they would of course lay them right above the filter intake. Gonna need to address that first probably. Probably on purpose, because that would be a spot of high flow with the least potential for fungus.
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Feb 8, 2019 05:46
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One of my striped raphaels had been in the same spot for 3 days, kind of on his side with his tail sagging down, apparently wedged tight in between two rocks. I wasn't able to get him to shift even shining torches in the cave so I decided it was time to pull the cave apart and make sure all was well. I'm not entirely sure if he was ever actually stuck because as I carefully pulled out the rocks that make up the cave I was distracted by two things: firstly, a really sad flat skeleton wafted out from between two of the flat rocks - apparently one of the borneo sucker fish went too deep or became somehow wedged; secondly a juvenile sterbai cory darted out from the cave. A really small one, but not a baby, probably the size of the first joint of one of my fingers. So somehow despite the super high flowing powerhead, the presence of three large predators, the lack of what I would have thought of as good cover for fry, they've still managed to successfully breed in the tank. The sterbai in there are maybe 9 months old at the most, although they look bigger than the ones I had breeding in quarantine so I really shouldn't be surprised. Anyway I got visual confirmation that all three platydoras were fine, fat and healthy looking, and even saw 3 of the 5 borneo suckers that I had in the tank. Haven't really been able to put their cave back together right though so once again it's bigger than it was, and the fish are all sulking about it and cramming themselves in the smallest tightest corner possible.
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Feb 8, 2019 06:29
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Hah, I almost had to tear apart a bit of rockwork last week because my raphael cat was being a jerk. Hadn't seen him move for a few days and wasn't sure that he was still alive. Naturally, as soon as I reach in to touch the closest rock he darts out and looks all pissed that I disrupted his ambush nap. He also sucked at keeping my julidochromis population under control!
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Feb 8, 2019 14:44
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I've had a spotted raphael cat for over a decade that doesn't give a poo poo about anything. Won't even move if you touch or poke him directly, only if you do it persistently.
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Feb 8, 2019 15:59
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Doing a fishless cycle, and after three weeks and half a bottle of Fritz Zyme I've got a happy healthy tank full of hair algae a ton of ammonia with no other nitrogen compounds. Water changes just seem to feed the hair algae and ammonia slowly creeps back up. I'm feeding water directly from the tap then adding dechlorinator to the tank. I'm thinking I should fill a bucket, dechlorinate, then add it to the tank and try another dose of cycle starter. I assume amano's will make short work off the algae once it's safe to get some, I'm just stumped as to having zero nitrifying bacteria at this point. In better news, my mini recknii are getting perky and bushy in spite of having to brush algae off near daily. They're losing some red color but I assume that's because I'm not dosing iron fertilizer yet. I've also got a grip of new plants from H2O Plants I'm excited to see next week.
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Feb 8, 2019 18:51
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Any seed bacteria from another tank?
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Feb 8, 2019 18:54
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w00tmonger posted:Any seed bacteria from another tank? Our other tanks are 5g and 2g so there's not a ton of media to spare. Last night I swapped the small ceramic media packet from the 16 gallon for one of the 2 inch sponges in the 5g hob, so I'm waiting to see if that helps at all.
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Feb 8, 2019 19:14
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If you have any filter floss that you can attach to an established filter somehow that's great for transferring over bacteria. You don't need a lot to get it going. Also - my apistos are already spawning! I'm rather shocked but happy. Gotta start planning for the tank to hold the young.... gah.
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Feb 8, 2019 21:01
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Mozi posted:If you have any filter floss that you can attach to an established filter somehow that's great for transferring over bacteria. You don't need a lot to get it going. What flavor are they?
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Feb 8, 2019 21:10
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Apistogramma bitaeniata "Tefe", from The Wet Spot. Can't really see their colors here.
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Feb 8, 2019 23:26
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wuffles posted:so uh, 2 of my discus are breeding...unexpectedly. Gonna be super interesting though; parental care in fish is neat to watch. Neat to watch them go and "blow" water on the eggs I've gotten so used to just goldfish that the Discus photos seem so strange but also incredibly endearing to me.
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Feb 9, 2019 02:47
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mango sentinel posted:Doing a fishless cycle, and after three weeks and half a bottle of Fritz Zyme I've got a happy healthy tank full of hair algae a ton of ammonia with no other nitrogen compounds. You could try cycling with the lights out, that should nuke the algae and the bacteria don't need light. Hair algae should pull out manually pretty easily too. Any muck you can squeeze from sponges in other tanks will help get a bunch of bacteria and other tiny living things into the new tank! I started working on water changes today and got distracted by how filthy some of my glass tank covers were, ended up scraping them all spotless with a razor blade so they look brand new. Was so satisfied with a job well done I sat down for a "break" and 10 hours later realise I forgot to actually do the water changes... 
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Feb 9, 2019 15:09
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I'm planning a little planted 5g tank and I'm a bit unsure how to stock it. For some background, it's been a while since I've had any kind of aquarium, and I've never had anything set up for breeding. I know I want either cherry shrimp or crystal red shrimp. I also want a few fish. I'm leaning towards some endlers to keep things small, but I've also heard of people housing Betta with shrimp. My main question is whether the idea of keeping breeding populations of the endlers and shrimp is workable. I'm ok with some fry being eaten, but I don't want either wiping the other out, or populations exploding out of control. Open to hearing some other suggestions and ideas.
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Feb 10, 2019 06:34
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eSporks posted:I'm planning a little planted 5g tank and I'm a bit unsure how to stock it. For some background, it's been a while since I've had any kind of aquarium, and I've never had anything set up for breeding. I have amano shrimp in a 5g. I don't think you want cherry or crystal red shrimp because they can breed in freshwater and you'll end up with a lot more shrimp than your tank can handle and you'll have to either cull them or try to sell them. Amano shrimp are bigger, eat more algae, and can't reproduce in freshwater so I think they're a great pick. Some bettas will gently caress with shrimp, personally I'd be heartbroken if I got a betta and it started picking on my shrimp.
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Feb 10, 2019 07:24
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Velocibacon has got it in one, if you want to breed anything you should try for at least a 15g, which helps with stability as well as providing sufficient real estate (especially important if you want to keep any of the crystal type shrimp, caridena species). For cherry shrimp, neocaridina, they still need stability but are a lot less fussy about what exactly that is as long as it's not too soft or acidic. Endlers will breed to fill any tank you give them and they will hunt and eat anything that moves (except not so much on their own fry, from what I've seen they are a lot less cannibalistic than standard guppies). You can house endlers and cherry shrimp together but the cherries will not thrive due to predation, even with cover endlers are small and pushy enough to get what they want. You probably shouldn't house endlers and crystal shrimp together, they have different needs and that is some expensive snacking for the endlers. You could easily have a colony of over 100 shrimp in a mature established 15g tank. Since you're in the planning stage right now, was there any reason you wanted such a small tank to start with?
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Feb 10, 2019 10:30
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I didn't have the best start to my day.  I took this photo a week and a half ago. This is one of the other two fry I found with the much larger one I posted a little over a week ago. It's the first time I've seen them and they're surprisingly really small. Sadly, I didn't realise the older one was big enough to eat them. One of them vanished one morning, and I separated the older one into another tank. It's something we were already going to do and I regret I did it a day late.  It seems to like its new space so I'm happy I did that. Bizarrely, two fry--still not free swimming--fell out of the filter as we were moving it to the new tank. The filter had been off since I first switched it on (like I said in my last post). Suddenly, we were up more fry somehow. I moved some plants over so I guess they hitched a ride. A couple of days later, two more showed up in the tank we set up for the oldest one, so I quickly transferred them over. It's felt rather busy lately.   Sadly, this is what I woke up to this morning. That's the original two from the younger batch now gone, and I feel kind of bad about it. The other four smaller fry are fine, and the water tested fine. I wonder if I just didn't scale up food for it properly. The others all grazed on any food that dropped before I cleaned them up, and the big one used to just ignore them and eat the algae off the plants. I'm guessing the algae and what I supplied wasn't enough anymore? Or maybe it's just one of those things. I was pretty excited to see what it'd look like. A real shame. It'll be more than another week before the other fry catch up. I'll kind of miss the curiosity from this one whenever I was nearby doing anything though.
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Feb 10, 2019 15:12
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Facebook Aunt posted:Probably on purpose, because that would be a spot of high flow with the least potential for fungus. yeah you’re probably right. Mom & dad have been culling the last day or so...but now:  Got tails pokin out from what’s left and the parents are busy spitting the loose ones back on the glass CrashScreen posted:I've gotten so used to just goldfish that the Discus photos seem so strange but also incredibly endearing to me. Thanks. I’ll keep adding photos as this goes along. Time to put a sponge on the intake for real and think about brine shrimp hatchery. Edit: can’t remember what I have to do to fix the imgur thing for bb code but on mobile rn and I’ll fix it later. Here’s the direct link: https://imgur.com/a/yghtj6k wuffles fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Feb 10, 2019 |
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Feb 10, 2019 17:24
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Aww CrashScreen, I'm sorry you lost him. When I've raised fry I've always kept them in very small fry boxes to start with and fed them around 5 times a day, the idea being to make sure its as easy as possible for them to eat while they're so small that finding food is a challenge - but I've only ever raised species that are much less robust than goldfish. Fry food tends to have specific ingredients and higher levels of protein to help them out since they're growing so fast when they're smaller. It could just be that they ran out of food or were too derpy to find the food that was there; the other thing to keep in mind with egg laying fish is that it is pretty normal to lose a number of the fry as they don't always form properly - sometimes you can see externally that they look wrong but I think sometimes they are missing something internally and waste away or stay stunted from not being able to digest their food fully. It sounds to me like you were doing all the right things really. I think it's an intended feature for bigger fry to eat littler ones, goldfish can spawn so big that it would be catastrophic if every fry survived. I saw this guy's unexpected spawn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_sJ7ZC76HE and they thrashed around so much it flicked the eggs up onto the brace and the inside of the lid. They did this every night for quite a few days in a row and it made an awful mess. Anyway hope your other little guys continue to do well. Hey wuffles, imgur have made it next to impossible to get a proper link to the image on mobile (they want to force you to use their app and see their ads). You end up with the gallery address instead, which doesn't work. I've only really had success doing it from a desktop browser the usual way of right click - show image in new tab.  For a different size of the image you can put an s, m or l at the end of the name of the picture, imgur auto generates these for small, medium and large. code:Stoca Zola fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Feb 10, 2019 |
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Feb 10, 2019 17:31
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Stoca Zola posted:
thanks for the tip. I was actually using the app, but it doesn't give you the option to see the different share links and I couldn't recall which one was needed to be marked up in BB code (its the direct link, apparently) so I fixed it now that I'm on my desktop. came home to an oto party 
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Feb 10, 2019 19:31
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Stoca Zola posted:Since you're in the planning stage right now, was there any reason you wanted such a small tank to start with? Lots of good info, thanks guys. I'm definitely into the idea of having something breeding in there. Does cherry shrimp with male only endless sound like a good idea? The endlers helping to keep the cherry population in check.
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Feb 10, 2019 19:55
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wuffles posted:
Ain't no party like an oto party, cuz an oto party don't stop!
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Feb 11, 2019 05:25
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oto boogie oto boogie edit: sorry for the rather lousy video but hopefully it's good enough to see - lots of baby corys! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlhB64mB6pE rather a lot actually... I hope they don't keep growing in numbers too much. Mozi fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Feb 11, 2019 |
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Feb 11, 2019 15:06
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Hey ya'll I'm starting a freshwater tank for the first time since I was a kid and I've been doing my research into the nitrogen cycle, bioload, the types if fish, lighting for plants etc... However the only thing I'm finding a real hard time getting info on is the actual tank. It seems I can find like a 50 gallon tank (sans accessories, equipment, etc. . .) For like 120 bucks, but other tanks that are smaller and also standalone are more than twice as expensive. Is it the shape of the glass? Or is there a quality difference I must know about? I was thinking about getting a 50 gal if the price stays at around 120-150. Is this reccomended or should I go smaller? I've seen people say that for beginners, a 30-50 is preferable. Should I go for a 30 then?
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Feb 11, 2019 17:48
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Phi230 posted:Hey ya'll I'm starting a freshwater tank for the first time since I was a kid and I've been doing my research into the nitrogen cycle, bioload, the types if fish, lighting for plants etc... 50 gallon is a fine size. It will probably cost a bit more in the long run because you have more to stock and decorate, but probably not significantly different in maintenance. More tank space gives you a lot more options for what you can keep and lets stuff that would be a little cramped in a 30 feel much more comfortable and active. The price of a glass aquarium depends on a lot of factors like curved glass, rimless, build quality (can you see a lot of extra sealant on the seams), and glass content (low iron glass is more crystal clear but expensive.) There's nothing wrong with a real basic tank, you're mostly paying more for aesthetic improvements. My suggestion if you want to maximize your value is be patient: PetSmart and PetCo regularly do Dollar Per Gallon sales on their basic models and if you can wait a few months you'll pay a third as much for that 50 gallon.
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Feb 11, 2019 18:22
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I think going that size range is a great idea for a first tank for a few reasons. It's easier to keep your water parameters stable with a higher volume, and you open yourself up to a much wider range of fish that you can keep. I really like the deeper footprint of the 40g breeder, it's not as wide at 3' as the standard 4' 55g but I think the extra depth is more versatile. If you've got the space and want to spend a little more, the 75g is as wide as the 55g but has the depth of the 40b, which is really nice.
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Feb 11, 2019 18:39
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Phi230 posted:Hey ya'll I'm starting a freshwater tank for the first time since I was a kid and I've been doing my research into the nitrogen cycle, bioload, the types if fish, lighting for plants etc... Does the tank you are looking at include a lid with built in lighting? If not, that could be the reason it is cheaper than ones that do. The lid/lighting doesn't seem like a big deal, but aquarium lighting is hilariously expensive. Tall tanks are often cheaper than long tanks with the same gallons. Some fish prefer long tanks and they are slightly easier to landscape, but tall tanks are fine. Anyway, the biggest tank you can afford is always better than a smaller tank. Easier to manage, more flexible. You will need a bigger filter, more substrate and so on, so it will be more expensive to set up than a smaller tank.  Caution: you need a place to keep it. For a rule of thumb consider that each gallon weighs 10 pounds, so a 50 gallon tank will weigh nearly 500 pounds when filled. If it doesn't come with a stand, do you have a stand that can safely hold 500 pounds?How well do you know your floor joists? If you live in a house it's better to set up the aquarium so it is over at least 2 joists, if possible. It's a lot of weight in a small footprint which can lead to problems if it isn't well supported. Are you allowed a large aquarium? If you rent, check your rental agreement, for example mine says I'm not allowed aquariums over 20 gallons. If you have insurance, check your policy -- like waterbeds large aquariums are a leak hazard and may not be covered or may require special coverage.
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Feb 11, 2019 19:02
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Update: my local fish store has a 75 gallon + metal stand for MUCH less than a 50 gallon + stand at petsmart so I'm goinv with the 75! Weight should not be an issue, even 800 lbs
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Feb 11, 2019 21:20
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Phi230 posted:Update: my local fish store has a 75 gallon + metal stand for MUCH less than a 50 gallon + stand at petsmart so I'm goinv with the 75! Nice!
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Feb 11, 2019 21:31
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Phi230 posted:Update: my local fish store has a 75 gallon + metal stand for MUCH less than a 50 gallon + stand at petsmart so I'm goinv with the 75! Awesome! When I first got back into the hobby I started out with a 55g, and almost instantly regretted not getting a 75g instead. I think you're gonna dig it!
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Feb 11, 2019 21:33
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So I guess the last question I have is filtration. I've seen that you should get a filter rated for 2x the volume. So I should get a filter rated for 150 gallons? Should a HOB work just fine or at this size is a canister more appropriate? How do I actually remove the water for changes? When I was young I would siphon it like you siphon gas by suck starting a hose. Gross, I know but I was dumb.
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Feb 11, 2019 22:03
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There's a better, reliable technique for starting a siphon that doesn't involve sucking. I can find a video later but basically you submerge the siphon at an upward angle, raise it up above the tank until water starts draining, then completely submerge it at the same angle and you should have suction. For a tank that big I would definitely look into a Python hose. I'm also curious about filtration on a tank that size. For a big tank without sump/canister intakes I see a lot of people on youtube running two large HoBs or a combination of large HoB and sponge filters.
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Feb 11, 2019 22:18
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Phi230 posted:So I guess the last question I have is filtration. I've seen that you should get a filter rated for 2x the volume. So I should get a filter rated for 150 gallons? On a 75g I think an Aqua Clear 110 would be pretty ideal. You could also go with a canister filter, but I'm not really sure what's good in that size range. I do like the big Fluval FX5 and FX6s, but don't have experience with the smaller ones. For water changes a length of tube and 5g buckets still works fine, but a Python can make your life easier for sure. mango sentinel posted:I'm also curious about filtration on a tank that size. For a big tank without sump/canister intakes I see a lot of people on youtube running two large HoBs or a combination of large HoB and sponge filters. Yeah I use a combo of Aqua Clear hobs and sponge filters in my tanks under 90g Enos Cabell fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Feb 11, 2019 |
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Feb 11, 2019 22:21
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If I only have that 1 110 HOB will I need to worry about oxygenation and get an airstone? Flourite or ecocomplete for the substrate? Phi230 fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Feb 11, 2019 |
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Feb 11, 2019 22:39
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Phi230 posted:If I only have that 1 110 HOB will I need to worry about oxygenation and get an airstone? It will create enough surface movement on its own that you'll be fine. I like running a sponge filter hooked up to an air pump as well, but it's not something you absolutely need.
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Feb 11, 2019 22:41
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Where do you get pure ammonia that's safe for aquariums? Is ammonium chloride safe? When during for the cycle process is it safe to start planting? Is shrimp substrate necessary if I wanna put shrimp in, in the future? Phi230 fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Feb 11, 2019 |
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Feb 11, 2019 22:48
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You don't need to dose ammonia. If you want to jump start you can just drop a flake of food in there, but most of the aquarium dosing products are ammonium chloride. You can plant your tank immediately. Plants can uptake ammonium and nitrates and are safe with ammonia and nitrites outside of crazy high amounts. Edit: I have no idea what shrimp substrate is, but no, you don't need it. Shrimp like heavily planted tanks with maybe a little calcium supplementation but are otherwise not fussy livestock. mango sentinel fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Feb 11, 2019 |
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Feb 11, 2019 23:17
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Thanks everyone for being so helpful. I'm very excited to get this thing started and growing my bacteria I read online that someone just dropped a raw, unprepared shrimp into his tank to start the process. I think I'll do that
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Feb 11, 2019 23:24
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Still no nitrifying bacteria but my plants are doing well. Here's when they were planted on the 2nd  Here's today the 11th 
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Feb 12, 2019 01:17
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