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I have a hospital tank where i keep lose plant trimming to grow out. My theory is the dense vegetation also helps reduce stress in fish while quarantined. I was trimming plants in my guppy tank and i went to throw a plant in there, and i noticed a tiny blue dot moving. I dropped to the floor and looked closer and saw a cloud of blue dots. There's fry in there. I haven't had a fish in there for like, 2 months. The last fish i had in there were forktail rainbow fish and i left them in there a little longer than intended (5 weeks) before moving them to my main tank. Zero clue how the fry have been surviving or how long ago they hatched. Thankfully i have fry food on hand and started feeding immediately. I'm still blown away that i somehow bred fish.

My day job is beekeeper. Bees have parasites too, just like fish. The one beekeepers fight the most is Varroa destructor and it is a mite. You think killing a parasite on fish is hard, try killing a bug that is on another bug. Formic acid (a chemical in ant stings) is the only approved organic treatment for Varroa. But it is still nasty stuff that you do not want to breathe or touch. I normally work my bees in shorts and t-shirt with no veil, but not today! The 2 pads you see on top of the honeycomb frames are the formic acid. My goal is to send the colony into the winter with very few mites to maximize winter survival. Last year, I took 51 hives into winter, and by spring I still had 51 hives.

Yes, stand too. For $200 that felt like a fair bargain for 3 30gs and a stand to hold them, was my mental justification... I could wait til a dollar per gallon sale, get some 29s and a metal shelf or DIY something to hold them all, and at that point I’m out probably nearly equal cash and more effort, for something with less “cool factor”. They threw in 3 HOBs but I bought sponge filters from the co-op, planning to leave them substrate free and use lots of floating plants. Definitely made a mess rearranging the office to fit but hey! Soon all my conference call audio will just be bubbling sounds.

40 gallon mini pond with flagfish I started right before the covid madness began. The only plants that grew this summer was the bacopa and java moss I snatched from one of my tanks. Bought some more plants lil over a month ago which are doing great. Black magic taro, a dwarf lily, and pickerel rush. The taro isn't happy with the sun switching position though. Which is where my lovely green water went too.... Diy spitting frog from Dollar Tree with a small fountain pump from Lowes. Being in Central Florida, I'm going to try over wintering it with only a few of the fish. Dean had mentioned in a video about a role of privacy reed as insulation so I picked some up to try my luck. I didn't get a huge boom of fry, but there's a lot more fish than I started with. I will be setting up a couple more next year without pumps with white clouds and hoping for some orange ricefish.

@Rikostanand @StephenP2003, Irene of Girl Talks Fish is definnitely one of my favorites. She seems so sweet and always has the best information. It is kind of funny how you get invested in the people you watch. I was so delighted for her this week when she posted about getting her mustard gas betta, Sonic.

Ok, I did end up buying them. I have an endler breeding project I want to tackle and they dropped the price to $200 and dropped it off. Said they got it some time ago from someone in SD who was breeding discus. They used it for bristlenosed plecos. It looks like it was originally drilled through the slate and then that was sealed?

I have a spotty track record as a fishkeeper and I am lazy. Usually I just want know the trends on water parameters and the strips work just fine for that. Most of the time I don't know and don't care what my water parameters are. It would probably freak me out if it I did and I might go dumping a bunch of chemicals in my aquarium sparking a vicious downward spiral of chemical chaos. The main test is are my fish happy. Do they eat? Do they breed? That's my primary yardstick.

Today, and yesterday, I painted one of my walls black, got new dressers for the aquariums, and got a new desk. First, I had to get rid of the old cabinets and move the tanks somewhere else temporarily. After that I painted the wall, put the new dressers and desk together, and put the tanks on the new dressers. And lastly, I put all my stuff in the drawers.

Fish

I just started a growout for my 70+ pleco fry (not to mention the batch inside the male's cave that I also moved to the growout, along with the male to give him a break). Before moving them to the growout, I kept them for about 4 weeks in two different breeder boxes: The Fluval/Marina Breeder Box It hangs on the outside of the tank and recycles water using an airlift system. It can be super noisy/gurgly unless you reduce the airflow enough that the water trickles in. I wanted more flow than that, so I actually modded it with a cheap USB submersible pump. Info in this thread: The Ziss breeder box that the co-op sells: Hangs inside the tank, uses air to circulate water as well, an overall drastic improvement on the traditional net breeder. I preferred this one for my plecos. In the marina, I was using a turkey baster every day to remove veggie/repashy refuse and poop before the next feeding. In the Ziss, the mesh on all sides allowed a lot of the broken-down uneaten food to fall through and feed the other fish in the tank. My pearl gourami hung out by the breeder box all day waiting to grab a snack. Much less cleanup, less noise without modding, and a great amount of flow throughout the whole box. Here's Dean showing it off: I only have one small complaint about it, which is that you have to keep the top of the box above water or it will float away and let your fry escape. With the suction mount option, I would like to have a top that you can lock in place, and a feeding hole that can snap shut -- merely because it is kind of a pain to move the box down and then back up during a water change. There's probably an easier solution I'm not thinking of, though. Anyway, those are my experiences with the "high tech" breeder box solutions. I think both work great overall despite each having some minor inconveniences inherent in the design -- but if pressed to pick one, it would be the Ziss.

Vallisneria Spiralis - I think a dense background, full of Vallisneria looks really nice, in an aquarium.

I am green with jealousy

Baby Brine Shrimp in a sieve

I lied. I did nothing. I asked my daughter to do the water changes.

Its possible that CO2 is off gassing from the tap water leading to rising pH levels over time being plateauing. Tap water often has a lot of dissolved gases out of the tap. Try making the RO water and letting it age a day or two first before adding the buffers.

I have a pair of jack Dempsey's raising their third set of fry, I didn't get any from the first batch, and I have 20-30 from the second batch, the third batch just got to free swimming 2-3 days ago, I have 200-400 of them currently and am hoping for 20-50 to get to sellable size.

USB Aquarium heaters

Not a sexy plant, but if I could only have 1 plant, it would be hornwort. Because: Easy to grow (or hard to kill), absorbs nitrates like a sponge I never cycle my aquariums - my method is to fill a new tank with water from established tank and throw in hornwort and voilà, instant aquarium! I don't run tops on my aquariums because I am too lazy to be bothered opening the lid, and hornwort represses jumping Hornwort provides a place for fry to hid while they mature Bubblenest builders like bettas and sparkling gouramis readily build bubblenests in hornwort Can be found growing in most road side ditches in the coastal areas of North Carolina, so is a native plant at least for me Holds blackworms at the surface for days at time so surface feeding fish can partake in the blackworm feast.

247/12.35/20 This is after adding 6 grow out tanks today....including one in the bathroom (next to the BBS hatching system)....empty flat surfaces are prime real estate in my apartment!

@SpongeFilter, There is nothing better than getting first-hand experience with plants, seeing their rates of growth, how they propagate, what they like, and how they go together. You grow a list of your favorites, start trying the cousins of your favorites, and then you find yourself with a new tank and a shopping cart of just the right plants for a new project.

I am assuming that your bylass valves are brass valves soldered to copper pipe? I would try applying a penetrating lubricant like WD-40 to the valve stems and maybe try to get the valves warm with a hair dryer. This has a chance to make them loose enough to get unstuck, but fair warning anytime you mess with old plumbing with issues there is a chance things will leak. Usually best to replace with new.

(Found on Reddit)

My mini pond has given me great happiness this summer! My friend built it for me about four years ago and it was deeply shaded until this season. Sunlight = pond steroids! The total water volume is about 375 gallons. The top box is filled with pea gravel and acts as a bog filter and water fall. The plants are the stars of the pond. In the bog box, I have creeping Jenny, blue lobelia, chocolate mint, elephant ears (taro), pickerel weed and bacopa caroliniana. I have water lettuce and water hyacinth floating. On the right, there is a laundry basket with three canna lilies. Dwarf papyrus ‘prince tut’ is in the ceramic pot on the left. The water lily is the hardy variety ‘wanvisa’. It blooms almost daily! I planted a lotus ‘.perkinensis rubra’ tuber about three weeks ago. I doubt it will bloom this year, but, who knows? If it gets too big I will transfer it to a tub. I fertilize the lily with pond tabs every two weeks. The marginals, including the bog plants get tabs every 2-3 months. Believe it or not, there are fish in here! I have gold fish that I bought as feeders who have grown fat and happy. I live in northern Indiana, zone 6A, so I do have to winterize this later in the fall. I will store the canna and elephant ear tubers in my basement. I treat the mint, lobelia, water lettuce, hyacinth and papyrus as annuals. The lily, lotus, dock and pickerel rush are all hardy. I will run an air stone for the fish and use a floating stock tank heater for the fish. I welcome other winter suggestions, though! Feel free to ask questions! I love my pond!

Fish Meds & Aquarium salts Fish food Declorinators & Water treatments 2 nets 2 syphon's Towels - big and small Extra bins Extra filters Extra USB air pumps 5 Gallon food safe buckets Master test kit Extra airline tubing, air stones

This is my first time dealing with egg layers and so I was really just trying to gage my ability to successfully breed them not overly interested in money from it at this point thats just a good side benefit. I estimate there to be over 100 eggs so if I get 25 ill be satisfied this go 👌

I'm dealing with snail overload myself. I've added assassin snails but only added 4. Bought 4 more and decided to help by putting pieces of cucumber on a suction cup and snails love it. So i give it a couple hours. Pull out the cucumber with snails on it and give it to my neighbor who has a tank full of clown loaches. I put about 4 pieces in last night and counted about 40 snails on the cucumber slices.

@DanielThank you for responding. Currently it's a shrimp only tank but I think I'll put a guppy cull in there to help with CleanUp, on Aisle 4. LOL

I've always kept my dry foods in a cabinet and haven't experienced any fish losing interest in them through the end of a container, which can be a few months. Fridge would probably be better but... I'm lazy. There are other things you can do to extend shelf-life though: Keep it cool. If not using a fridge, I mean room temperature here. Don't set the food on top of a heated aquarium, or worse, on top of the light. Keep it dry. One wet hand into the food jar and it'll go bad in no time. Lower humidity in the room doesn't hurt either. Keep it sealed. This is the one that's hard to control because you need to open it daily to feed, but at least don't break the seal until you're ready to use it regularly and always close the lid after feeding.

@Ben Ellison I got a small bundle from my LFS, and then have just been using cuttings to propagate from there. It grows like crazy. If your LFS doesn't have any, maybe ask around at a local club? If anyone has some, I'd wager it shouldn't be too hard to convince them to share.

I'm really digging sparkle swords. I have 2 plants sending out runners that are 4 foot long or more with several plantlings on each! It seems they are thriving at a level ive never been able to match with anything else.

Mine are fed to the woods. First come first served.

I'm really enjoying plants. I did a ton of reading, wound up really confused. I decided to just buy a bunch of them and see which ones died. None of them died!

I honestly couldn't give you an exact answer on when and how far apart. The tank was a shrimp and snail only tank for at least 6 months and after that I added the bristlenose. I would guess about a month to three months later I added the rice fish and shortly after the pygmy corys. It was a slow progression mostly due to me worrying fish would eat my shrimp and then finding the fish I wanted. I live 35 miles from a Petco and 75 miles from any kind of fish specialty store, so that kept me from just going and picking up whatever I was in to that week. Aside from the bristlenose everything is pretty small in the tank. I started with six pygmys and then one day I noticed that they had almost tripled.

10 gallons, currently home to 7 pristella tetras, 4 sparkling gouramis and 3 otos. Two molly fry in the photo have their own tank now. 🙂

There’s a practical benefit to it though, if all really goes downhill quickly...🍣 My dream fish is dwarf seahorse. Gonna have to be really really good at many escalating levels of difficulty before trying that one.

@Frogmouth Catfish I finally watched the Mudfish eat. Didn't really see the mouth come out but saw one actively swimming around nabbing at cyclops and what looked to be particles in the water. I did film it. Looks like I need to create a YouTube account I can try to upload the video to there if I find time.

For smaller fish you might be able to get away with a BBS only/heavy diet but if you keep larger fish it won’t be enough. Some fish may not bother to eat them at all because they’re too small.

Also, I've been keeping fish for a long time, recently the obsession has become extreme... but I have used test strips quite a bit in the past. I know a lot of people do the whole "test strips aren't accurate" stuff... but I've really never had issues with this. In fact I recently watched: Just really, how accurate do we really need to be? I mean sure, if you have super sensitive fish to a specific thing, I could see maybe going for exactly that in a liquid kit - but if not...

Looks like youre right. They had been breeding lately but i had never seen that weird swimming behavior before. Found these later today.

Not all of my fish are 'pining for the fjords' at the time my cats eat them. I don't run tops on my tanks and was always amazed at how few jumpers I noticed. But then there was that time that my jungle val turned in a jumper And it was then I connected the dots. But to answer your question, no internal parasite transmission from fish to cat that I am aware of. My cats (all indoor cats) manage to eat skinks, honey bees, crickets, green beans, garlic and plastic wrap. I have been especially concerned about the garlic and the plastic wrap, but it is possible the cats were self medicating against the internal parasites as it seems to have worked.

I moved to LA area in April They are doing great so far

Fantastic photo!

@jerseychef I do it the same way. On another post in the forum another person suggested putting an aqua clear 70/110 intake tube at the end of the python hook. I tried that and it works really well to divert the stream of water when refilling.

I add the "water treatment" to the tank for the total volume of the tank. I pour it in right where my python is in the tank prior to turning on the water. Once the treatment is in the tank I make sure my water is the proper temperature and turn it on. My thought is that the water flow from the python will help mix it into the tank. I also keep my sponge filter running to help circulate the water as well.

Yes. I mean it’s basically China inspired but let’s call it Pandaria so I can make it kinda cheesy... still trying to figure out which tank to attempt this in. Here is a head on shot of the Gupster’s Paradise: Here are the other current sloppyscapes. 36 gallon bow front with one high-sass blood parrot. This is a temporary tank for him, waiting on a friend to build a metal stand for my 75g. Guppy grass (as always), fake plants, Marimo moss, and some still-in-planter crypts. 20g with a pair of dumbo guppies, and some random small female guppies and molly fry. Definitely a WIP. Definitely a lot of things that need to be replanted. Mean Muggin Tank. One very shy pea puffer, three bumblebee gobies, and three amano shrimp to help take care of a nasty diatom bloom. Oddly, this tank is pretty quiet and peaceful. I would kind of like buy more peas to if more peas would help my one pea be more confident, but I would do that in a separate tank I think to avoid stressing the bumbles. pure guppy trio in a 10g hex. I love a hex aquarium, had one as a kid and never quite got over how cool they can look. This one has a mass of java moss and what else, guppy grass, as I wait impatiently for fry. 6 gallon nano with sparkling gouramis and velvet blue shrimp. I would like to redo this one soon, but I just got the gouramis and they are already so shy I would prefer not to give them a heart attack. But I would prefer to actually be able to see the little glittery guys so I know they’re eating and etc. 2 fancy goldfish and 4 guppies that refused to be caught when I transitioned the tank. These guys (well, just the goldfish) will be taking over the 36 bow front once the 75g is ready. quarantine. Fake plants and crap that came with used tank purchases. Hosting an electric blue acara (1-2 inches), 7 guppies (at first just to act as dithers, but then I bought two males from petco and added them in) and one cobalt blue jack Dempsey (1 inch). My hope is the acara and dempsey can be tankmates with the blood parrot in the 75g for a children-friendly crazy cichlid creation tank. the pond. Home to an unknown amount of guppies and mollies and scuds and snails and who knows what. We’ll find out in early September. Not yet in use, but being figured out: 12g nano with integrated sump. Really excited to try that out. Also just picked up a 5 gallon with something similar set up, and I have a 5.5 nano that is currently just holding some scuds and snails, along with a 10g I am thinking will be the dedicated quarantine tank once the current batch of quaratinies is freed. I don’t love where most of the tanks are at, but as I accumulate more plants, rocks, driftwood, and knowledge I’m looking forward to maybe getting past sloppyscaping with excess guppy grass and into some more elaborate and thought-out environments.

An expandable tank! You could start small and just upgrade over time by buying another section of tank, sliding a new section on to one side, remove a divider and viola bigger tank! Also you could divide the sections and create smaller tanks if you liked.

What immediately came to my mind was the Ronco Solid Flavor Injector, I bet that would work! 😆

This one isn't much of a fantasy, because I know they have to exist somewhere for saltwater if not freshwater, but just a relatively cost effective (obviously couldn't be cheap, but hopefully not insane) digital meter for all the stuff we'd normally test and more. What I'd love is just a handful of little meters that I clip to the side of my tank when testing or prop up inside a cup of the tank's water, and after a minute or two, it tells me all my concentrations accurate down to the decimal. I have found that a lot of the liquid test kits can give very different results each time since there's an infinite amount of variables that can be hard to prevent. Specifically the API nitrate test I have found to be inaccurate sometimes. What I would love to get first would be Nitrate, Ammonia, Phosphate, and then probably Oxygen, GH+KH, and CO2 would all be a dream come true!

I wish there was an underwater remote controlled submarine 4k camera that would swim in my aquarium and stream the results back to my phone. I could watch fish breed and check on fry from anywhere. And if I were in a boring meeting, I could get out my phone and watch my fish instead.