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There often aren't right answers, there is just the answer relayed by someone saying what has worked for them. In another thread I listed all the 'wrong' things I do. But for me they aren't wrong, they actually work really well. But I would never suggest to a new aquarist not to cycle a tank or not quarantine their fish. One way not to get confused is not to listen to all the opinions. For example, if you wanted to learn how to keep discus you would find on this forum that @Jessica. has really nice discus tanks and has the pictures to show the results of what she does. I would follow her methods and her advice and maybe filter out competing advice. @Jessica. also posts links to where she looks to for discus information, which is really helpful. So if there is a certain kind of aquarium you want to keep, find someone experienced here on the forum and follow what they do. It will cut out a lot of the static.

Yes! @clovenpine you found it! I wanted to be that boy, and I am.

That's kind of you, Daniel. It's funny you say that, because there would be many who would disagree or tell you my discus are unhappy. A popular plant seller ran some photos of my discus tanks in his videos & instagram, and got comments about how "Those fish don't have enough room to swim" or "The fish are sick, can't you see the stress bars on them." Everyone has an opinion, especially on the internet. We just need to filter out much of it. I think there are also lots of things happening for people that don't get communicated, unintentionally. For example, someone may tell you "You don't need root tabs. My plants grow beautifully without root tabs and have for 2 years. Root tabs are useless!" But, what that person may not know to tell you, or may not even know themselves, is that their well water is rich in minerals and micro nutrients, and the tank is stock heavily and they've never gravel vac'ed, so the fish poop providing all the needed ferts. So for them, no root tabs are not needed, but all the rest of us can benefit from them. I think if someone comes out and says "that's wrong, my way is better!" that's a red flag to perhaps question their advice. We all need to be open to learning. There really is 20 ways to do something and many will work. Some might work better, or differently, or be more labor intensive. Just look at filter options- canister, hang on back, undergravel, sponge, plants only, powerhead+plants, airstone only, internal filter.. they all work, yet people will tell you there's one best and all the rest are bad. We all just have to learn what works best for us.

My biggest pet peeve is when people in the hobby think that there is only a single right way and a billion wrong ways. There are so many different ways to do things in the hobby and they all work out differently for all of us. I think one of the best parts of the hobby is the journey to finding what works for you. We should all be open to trying new things, listening to other people and respecting other methods.

Sometimes I use the same knife for the peanut butter and the jelly. We are all horrible people.

I'd say it depends on why you want floating plants. Do you want them just for looks? Do you want them to reduce nitrates? Do you want them for breeding purposes? For looks, well that would depend on what you like, but some plants have much longer roots than others. So from the top they look fine, but when looking in from the side you'll have less visibility into the tank. I prefer shorter rooted plants like Red Root Floater, Salvinia, and duckweed. That's not an issue in a pond. For reducing nitrates, some floating plants are better than others, but most of them will do well at this since they are taking in c02 from the air and are closer to the light. I've heard that Hornwort is one of the best at reducing nitrates. For breeding, the longer rooted plants like frogbit and water lettuce will work well like a spawning mop, plants like hornwort and watersprite are pretty dense, and almost all plants can be floated in a tank for cover. In my opinion, Frogbit is a pretty good all around floater. It's not too big and the roots get fairly long but they're not super dense. I've found that they generally propagate at a fast enough rate that I will remove the larger ones with longer roots before they get too big for me and still have a decent amount of cover. Hornwort is also pretty good all around, but my issue with it is that it grows super fast and looks like it should be in the substrate and out of place just floating around. I really enjoy the combo of Red Root Floaters and Salvinia Minima. They both have interesting textures and colors and the roots stay fairly short. They are small enough that they don't look out of place or scale in my 12 gallon. They are also easy to remove when needed. The Duckweeds. I've had the large and small varieties. The large is alright, not much for roots, and easier to remove and maintain. The small is good to feed some fish and other tank inhabitants, but is a major pain if you ever want to get rid of it and will stick all over you and anything you put in the tank for maintenance. I haven't kept any varieties of water lettuce. Mostly due to size and root structure. Watersprite gets huge, but I would say is the best for spawning and fry cover. It has quite a bit of root structure and the leaves have a large spread. Although it doesn't really float on the water surface, more just under it with some leaves breaking the surface. Hydrocotyles or Pennworts will grow underwater and across the surface like a vine. I like to think of it as a small delicate pothos. I just ordered some azolla and am looking forward to seeing how it grows. I think it has a nice unique texture, but I'm not sure how useful it is. I have pretty hard water 300+ and all of these plants have done well for me.

Co2 injected 40 breeder, lily leaves getting big.

An old pic of my shramp nation.

Thank you so much @Jessica. And everyone for taking the time to reply. I'll be sure to get the ammonia test asap. So.. I have no fish, I'm not planning on adding anything for quite a while. (I'm thinking months. Eventually a Betta and some shrimps) I've not added any ammonia, but I did add a pinch of fish food to each tank on day one. I haven't added any fertiliser since day one (we're day 6 now) I also have a good bit of water evaporate every day. I tested before topping up. I add tapsafe and age my water for days.

Here’s my no-tech Pygmy sunfish cookie jar

One thing that helped me as a hobbyist was making my approach "I will gather as many opinions as possible while doing my research and THEN draw my own conclusions" and it's worked pretty well. I'm pretty sure every person who has been in the hobby has lost a fish to a mistake (be it through bad advice, forgetfulness, or anything else). I'm a person who can be hard on myself so I had to learn to forgive myself, let things go, and do better next time.

I've got better things to do with my time than worry about what someone else is doing.

Give your kids the gift of Murphy cookies, indoctrinating them in the Co-op ways and ensuring a bright a successful future :) Not spectacular results but not terrible, the wife and I are not cookie experts at all, although she is very good at most other forms of cooking/baking. Perhaps a shortbread dough would have had better results. This was just for funsies anyways. 3D printed cutter and stamp we tried.

Enjoying some snow capped mountains and pearling Dwarf Baby Tears.

I was cleaning out the Eheim Pro 3 on the discus tank today. If you’re not familiar with this canister there are 4 trays in the stack with the top one having the coarse sponge. I’ve got all the trays in the slop sink to clean the pads so as I clean them the trays go back in the canister. I get to the top tray pull out the coarse sponge and clean it before I put it back into the tray I rinse the gunk out of it and what’s flapping around in the bottom of the sink a pair of Sterbai Cory fry. They must of got sucked in when I took the intake sponge off to clean it early last week.

Harvested the daily Daphnia out of the summer tub.

Thanks @Ben Ellison thats good to know. My plants actually came with two stowaway bladder snails that I've just been watching make sweet love for the third time today! 😆 Hopefully I'll have snail babies soon! I attached a pic of them doing their thing 😏

Been an amateur hobbyist for about 5 years with a 10 gallon neon tetra tank and a 2 gallon Betta tank, with junky fake plants. But over the past 4 months I've decided to up my game! I can't comprehend how many hours I've spent watching (and re-watching) Aquarium Co-Op videos to make it happen. But I'm happy with the results (and of course the sponge filters and the plants)

If I could only have one it would be close between frogbit and hornwort but also depends what you are looking for.

Thanks and sorry to hear about your issues as well. I bet there are a lot of us out there that have turned to fishkeeping as a coping mechanism!

I like that the number one rule is to act like a decent human. I can't think of a single other forum that doesn't foster toxicity in some way, either through ego-driven moderators or an overall lack of moderation.

I highly recommend a system with the smallest barrier for use. I use Trello because I need spend no more than 1-2 minutes per day for all 12 of my tanks and 7 of my ponds. Any system we choose that takes extra effort and brainpower to maintain will not get used as much. Just like when Cory says that the fish food they actually eat is the best one to use, the same applies here: the system you'll actually use daily is the best one. 🙂

I don't remember what caused me to first get into the hobby. It was the late 60s. I think it was the only pet my parents would let me get and I loved anything to do with "nature" but I wasn't allowed to go camping or fishing or hiking... or well pretty much anything. When I finally broke free from that life, I dove into all those things I wasn't allowed to do. I went camping as often as I could and I lived for a good hike. I fell in love with kayaking, birdwatching, etc. I was always out in nature in some way. Get me away from people and civilization and that's when I felt most alive. Then a few years ago I got hit with an incurable auto-immune disease. My body was/is eating itself. Suddenly doing all those things that made up a huge part of who I was, just weren't possible any more. I retired from work and pretty much from life too. I'm lucky in that I have an amazing wife and three adult children who have all been incredibly supportive, but I still felt lost. I no longer had a purpose and I couldn't really do a lot of the stuff that made me happy. Then I saw a twitter post from a comic book writer I follow who's name is Greg Pak. He had recently got back into fish keeping too and was posting about his fish tanks. I remembered all the joy I got out of keeping fish when I was a kid and I knew we had a 10 gallon tank in the basement, so I had one of the kids bring it up for me and I set it up in my office. Suddenly I had something I could focus on and even on those days when I couldn't get out of bed, I could still read about the hobby and discover different ways of doing things. That was 4 months ago. I got my first guppies about a month after setting up the first little tank, and now I have a 55 gallon, two 45 tall tanks, and two 20 gallon tanks. I have guppies and shrimp in two of the tanks and some CPDs in the little 10 gallon, which is now my QT tank. I have some mystery snails coming this Friday and some Boesemani Rainbows are ordered too, but they haven't shipped yet. Now I can have that little piece of nature right by me. Even when I can't walk, I can still experience it and my quality of life has gone way up in the past four months. My wife has said she sees a big improvement in my outlook and I just don't feel as resigned to my fate as much any more.

I confess, it is true... I don't: do any cycling on a new aquarium and I put fish in moments after the water goes in to the new aquarium have a quarantine aquarium or think about quarantining new fish rinse my baby brine shrimp Probably the first 2 are much more serious sins than the 3rd one. I think I get away with the first one because all my tanks are dirty and I use a lot of hornwort. I think I get away with second one because most new fish go into their own (uncycled) new aquarium (or maybe it is just luck and I just haven't run out the string yet). I pretty sure @Dean’s Fishroom would give me demerits for the 3rd one, but it is my lazy way of providing trace elements to my fish 🙂.

For whatever reason, I can't stand a lot of betta owners. There are so many I've interacted who pat themselves on the back for rescuing/adopting their fish from a PetSmart/Petco when in reality they bought a fish at a store just like the majority of hobbyists. It's such a minor thing that doesn't really hurt anyone but it grinds my gears nonetheless.

Anyone here into planted terrariums?

An Inductively Coupled Plasma mass spectrometry test is pretty cheap and fairly accurate these days. This test is $30 and will test for 40+ elements in your water. I have used it and thought it was reasonably priced 1-Pack ICP Water Analysis Test - CoralVue - Bulk Reef Supply WWW.BULKREEFSUPPLY.COM Included in the tests are pH, GH, and KH too.

Thanks all. Fish food incoming from the Coop.

I will try and get some Black Diamond Blasting Sand (BDBS) from the local Tractor Supply. Also I ordered: Dwarf Sagittaria Ammannia Gracilis Bacopa Caroliniana Jungle Vallisneria Red Melon Sword Red Flame Sword Cryptocoryne Lucens Cryptocoryne Wendtii Cryptocoryne Lutea Staurogyne repens Baby Tears That should be a good start.

Snail foraging for bacter AE 😋

So that's meaning plant in your tank substrate. However I wouldn't plant it, instead I would place it on your substrate and let it grow. They say plant because you can and it helps if you push the bulb in the substrate a little no more than half the bulb height, but usually if it's just a bulb it can be hard to determine what's the top and bottom. So if you just place it on the substrate with the right side up it will root into the substrate, where as if you are wrong you can just flip it easily and let it be. Hope this helps! Also on the dirt with the bulb that's just to keep it moist and dormant. If you add that to your tank it will spike your ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates.

Hey everybody! My name is Mike and I’m a fish nerd from Rhode Island. I’m currently building out a fish room and some of the species I’m currently keeping are Gardneri, Golden Wonder, and Jordanella Killis, Lamprologus Occelatus, Variatus platys, cherry barbs, bristlenose plecos, and a few other random community fish. I’ve gotten bit hard by the BAP bug and am trying to work my way up the ranks at the Tropical Fish Society of Rhode Island BAP program. I look forward to learning and sharing with the community

i think the app is by tetra it just uses the camera to see the colors and give you a reading, its probably highly unaccurate cause light can effect how its seen.

You'll want to add plants to your new tank right away. Then keep track of their growth and your parameters. You may see a rise in ammonia and/or nitrite and some increasing nitrates. However, if your plants grow a LOT, you may not see these numbers rise very much. I always add some fish food every other day or so, too. Just to give the cycle a little boost. The trick is that as soon as you add fish, even just a few, you may see a spike in ammonia and nitrite/nitrate. That means that your cycle could handle the fish food, but it's going to have to grow more bacteria to handle the fish pee/pooh. Then as you add fish each time, or removed anything - plants, substrate, decor, etc, - you may see those spikes again, as you're disturbing the very delicately balanced cycle that you have started. Keep tabs on your parameters and watch to see how the plants grow. See how the snails do, if they are growing/multiplying. All these things are indicators of how your cycle is doing. Hope that helps. 🙂

I would suggest to test your tap water to get a baseline for the measurements of the tanks.

I agree with sleepy. They Co-op chat didn't make the the cut after a month, and a discord server wouldn't be wildly different than the chat that was tested or IMO provide more than this forum. Also it could potentially draw way from forum use.

I picked up a 400l aquarium for free! It must be at least 40 years old as its very heavy thick glass and a gold metal frame. Very very heavy. I know its leaking and will have to reseal it and I don't have space right now, but I am putting it in storage for my next place.

When I was 3 or 4, my dad and his bestie built me an aquarium. It was the 70's and we were living in Guyana in South America, so they went into the woods, to the creek and caught fish. My dad's friend was much more into the hobby so he may have been breeding fish too, I don't know. Anyway... I remember lots of plants, tetras, guppies, some suicidal hatchetfish, and one particularly nasty cichlid who was rehomed to the wild after it killed most of the tank. From my mom's reports, I spent hours watching that tank. I also remember my mom putting the fish in a bucket and taking the tank to the shower where she scrubbed it out and rinsed the gravel, replaced the water and put the fish back in. It makes me shudder to think of doing that now! My dad had an old book that had pictures of all the fish and that was a prized possession until we had to emigrate to the US. We (the kids) were growing up and we were all busy navigating life in a new country, and the fish hobby went onto the back burner. When we did get a tank a few years later, it was difficult to keep the fish alive and so different from the easy hobby back in Guyana, so eventually, after the last death, we put it away. Fast forward to this summer, and the epic tadpole rescue that my sons undertook, catching 20 odd tadpoles after summer storms. I thought.... ok, tadpoles... tank, water, some rocks to climb out on... easy peasy. Nope... those darn things died in droves. It was maddening... I mean, they live in dirty puddles! It was the midst of the stay home order here in VA, so i had plenty of time to research and deep dive into youtube. We eventually got a tank, a filter, airstones, etc., and finally three tadpoles made it to frog-dom. And I had a tank and a basic understanding of why our fish had died so much all those years ago. I got plants and used the dirty stuff from the tadpoles to start the cycle. 5 months later and we are 4 tanks in! And I still love watching them for hours after my boys are in bed!

This is why fishkeepers spend all that time in the gym. Gotta stay strong to lift tanks and carry buckets! 😆

AHHH the good well bad old days of 100% waterchanges and complete tank cleans even replacing all filter spongs and wool, dont forget to wash the filter and gravel under tap. It makes me cringe when i think of the things i did when getting into the hobby when i was younger, I honestly dont know how my gourami, anglefish, neons and pleco survived so long. I just never had anyone teach me right and the pet store people well they...... yea ill stop there not getting into the cichlid horror story that finished my fish off

I write down everything like when ive started tanks, parameters, when I have done waterchanges or added chemicals, when I got fish when they've had fry and how many theyve had. I have a list of everything ive bought for my fish room and im glad I did as I find myself reading through it daily. Having 12 tanks can get very confusing sometimes and i generally forget what I had done on them after a few days lol. I highly recommend keeping records of EVERYTHING.

The yellow patch is what is called a saddle. It is the shrimp ovary where the eggs develop. Got yourself a lady shrimp there 😉

@Rikostan Sorry to hear about your illness. I also have a chronic illness and have been going generally downhill for 4 years. I had to give up fostering kittens and horseback riding, but I’ve found that I can still manage fish. As for why I got into the hobby I can only offer this:

I've tried that before and wound up happier by recognizing how I feel and then moving on for the most part. There will always be thinks that irk me, but there's a difference between fixating on it and recognizing that it bothers me, having a laugh, and moving on.

@IreneI can't recommend them enough, if you have the inclination and budget. I'd certainly enjoy any videos you made keeping them. I get so much enjoyment from this tank. They develop their own personalities, the beg for food incessantly when I'm around. There can be a learning curve, and I did lose a few when I first got them as 3" fish. But, watching them grow and bonding with them is so enjoyable for me. I often handfeed them for fun-

Built new stand, setup breeding tank for the koi angels that spawned in my quarantine tank. Had two cycled coop sponge filters ready. The 230 fry are doing well alone in the 20 gallon quarantine tank for a while, growing fast on coop brine shrimp. Big thanks to @Brian Scott for his advice!

When I was a young lad ( two years old) I saw my dad's friends fish tank with silver dollar fish and I thought, woah, that looks so cool!! Then I saw movies with goldfish and I just got more and more interested. The first time I visited an aquarium I was amazed and practically died! finally 3 months ago, I got fish ( I am 11) and by that time, I had wanted fish for 9 years and now that I am finally in, I have no regrets.

I know how I got into the hobby. When I was 9 years old I read a book about a boy who kept guppies and the humorous plot centered on how fast the guppy population got out of control. So I gathered a dozen quart jars and saved my allowance and bought some female guppies. I could see the babies developing in the gravid females and when the first babies were born I was excited. But when it turned out some the babies from gray moms were golden, I was hooked. I think the why centers on glass boxes. Glass boxes allow us in the comfort of our own homes to see from only inches away the intimate details of complex biological systems with all the majesty and drama that life on our planet brings. I have an honey bee observation hive in my house also and it is a completely different more engaging experience than the other 120 colonies I keep outside. Our fish aren't in a barn or an out yard, they are in our living rooms, bedrooms and even bathrooms and aquariums contain entire worlds of wonder. And yet, I think this part is important too. Aquariums aren't completely dirt-easy. There is a learning curve and therefore a challenge. And just when you reach a new peak of competence there is yet another peak to climb, so it never get old. And the more you learn, the more fun and rewarding it is. It is a virtuous feed back loop.