Leaderboard

Younger aquarist think once you have money, and drivers license and you don't have to share a room with your brother all your problems are solved. They are not. They just get more complicated. I kept telling myself dollar a gallon...who cares...I need to take care of the tanks I have, not buy more. I kept telling myself, the spouse is calm about my ever metastasizing hobby, just be cool, be patient, and definitely no more aquariums. Hat tip to @MickS77 for the meme What if the dollar a gallon sale never ever happens again? Maybe, just maybe I could confuse her by being honest! She didn't approve, but she didn't say no. So I got two 75 gallons (not one like I mentioned and maybe not 1/3 of normal price). Now I felt embarrassed so I stashed them in the woodworking shop. Problem is these days she is out in the shop all the time working on beehives. So... Problem solved, right? Now I just I have to figure out how to tell her....

Or you have to find clever ways of disguising your grow out tub from your landlord.

Spent the first half of the day unloading a container. Restocked on metal air valves (along with many other items) and should put us in great inventory position for the upcoming winter/holiday season. Funny seeing @Cory working the sit down forklift lift a pro. 😄 Also, the Urban Fish Farm has come a long way since I was last here! I am already claiming one of the totes as my own but Cory still has to feed and do the water changes.

I have an odd arrangement with my LFS. I shopped there as a kid and since returning back after being out of town for ~30 years. I am friendly with the siblings that run the shop these days since their father has mostly retired from the day to day. I tend to drop off a bag of guppies or endlers about one to two times a month, plecos when I raise up a batch, and then multies about 1-2 times a year (not a terribly popular fish locally for some reason). I never have asked for any money nor store credit. But, every time I buy anything (I drop in almost every week) I get a discount. Occasionally fish at cost, sometimes a percentage off of my purchase of dry goods, etc. I have joked with my wife that I have no idea how much anything at the LFS costs as I don't think I have ever paid the same price for anything twice. We are a small town (~40K population) and I'd hate to lose my access to "my" LFS so I am very happy with my relationship with them. My hope is they only give me the deal they can afford and anything I get back is just gravy and an outlet for my fry that will hopefully end up making some other local fish keeper happy with some quality fish.

A case of the Mondays?

Yesterday, I had a huge list of chores I needed to get done. I didn't do any of them. I was too busy watching these adorable goobers explore their new home! I literally spent hours trying to get all 3 in frame, and watching them figure out the tank.

I got these guys about three months ago, they were stressed at the store and looked very plain with washed out colors. The brown one looked almost gray and very sad. I use the Ziss brine hatchery to provide live food most days. Fish return the favor with splendid colors.

Hi there folks I am posting Thanksgiving week hours. Basically we are closed on Thanksgiving and operating normal hours all the other days Monday 11am-7pm Tuesday 11am-7pm Wednesday 11am-7pm Thursday Closed (Thanksgiving, Tune in for Cory's Live Stream!) Friday 11am-7pm Saturday 10am-7pm Sunday 10am-7pm On behalf of the Aquarium Co-Op family we wish you all a happy and safe Thanksgiving. Sincerely, Robert 🦃

The real pro-tip is having a partner who is handy and into home improvement. Even if they don't like fish the way I do...they like landscaping and building things with me!

I have yet to meet someone who tried the old Sera O-Nip and didn't like it. I was (unfortunately) late to the party and didn't hear about it until after it was reformulated. When I started feeding Repashy foods I fell in love with experimenting with it (what if I add Vita Chem/garlic juice/duckweed/laxatives). My attempt at re-creating O-Nip has gone through a few iterations. My first attempt was attempting to find a way to secure Repashy to the side of the aquarium BEFORE it set. This was a mess. I think I've mostly got it down now. To re-create Sera O-Nip with Repashy you will need: Your Repashy food of choice Very hot water Suction cups A mold Here's what I specifically used: Repashy Community Blend or Soilent Green Hikari Freeze-Dried Bloodworms Boiling water Suction cups Candy molds My method: Do all of the prep. Set out the mold and have it ready (pouring can get messy so I usually place it on a plate), set the water to boil, and have the suction cups ready. I've had the best success rate doing 2.5tbs of water to 1tbs of pre-mix. Measure out the pre-mix and any inclusions into a clean bowl. I use freeze-dried bloodworms but it's possible to include other goodies. Add the hot water to the pre-mix and mix well. From this point on it's very important to work quickly so that the gel doesn't start to set. Pour the Repashy into the molds. I use a spatula to guide it into the mold. For smaller batches it's possible to spoon the Repashy into the molds individually, but for larger batches the Repashy usually starts to set by the time I'm done. ADD THE SUCTION CUPS TO THE MOLDS. In my specific set, there's not room for all of the suction cups to go into all of the Repashy. This works out for my purposes because it lets me distract the majority of my tank toward the surface and allows my Bolivian rams to feed closer to the bottom in relative peace. Refrigerate the Repashy for at least 1 hour, I usually leave mine overnight in the fridge. Challenges: The working time of the Repashy before it sets is NOT kind. In my early experiments with the suction cups I worked too slowly and it caused faults in the Repashy when I pushed in the suction cup. That fault would then break when impacted by fish feeding and cause the food to fall to the bottom. Too much liquid in the mix will also cause the Repashy to fall. More liquid makes it easier to pour the Repashy into the mold and add the suction cups before it sets too much, but can also keep it from setting enough to the point that it stays on the suction cup. I've had some demolding issues. This is just the shape of the mold not being well-suited to certain shapes. Luckily anything that falls is happily eaten by my rams at the bottom. I think I'm getting this method down but I'm very open to feedback. For this post I took photos while preparing my Community Blend, but what I ended up feeding them in the picture is Soilent Green that I prepared a few days ago. If anyone is curious, I can definitely post pics of the batch that's in the fridge right now once I feed it.

I mean, from that text, it sounded like she wanted you to get 2 75gallons

If it falls apart I typically find either my water wasn't hot enough or I used too much water. A little less water and make sure it is boiling made the difference for me.

Caught my Otocats in "flight show formation" this morning!

Yes, they are a separate species, Corydoras venezuelanus. I got a group of 8 of them at my local Petco a couple of months ago. They develop a nice reddish orange spot on their back and sides, and the dorsal fin does get a little longer than normal. Not my pic but mine look just like these.

@Brandy If you are feeding culls to a cat, do NOT use clove oil! This is a poison to them. It can not be proccessed in their body and can cause liver failure. So if you'd like to feed cull fish to a cat, don't euthanize them first with clove. @ChemBob @Hobbit Chickens can have clove oil externally, but the effects on them internally are not something well understood yet, at least not for me. Chickens are admittedly not something I work much with as a state veterinary inspector. I do know it is used externally (diluted in other oils like coconut and olive) to deal with mites and feather plucking. I do not know if that means they can have it internally. I know chickens will certainly eat fish, they used to stand around a water trough that horses would drink out of on a farm I visited. The trough had gambusia in it and sometimes they'd jump out when the horses drank. The chickens were there to snap them up. I am someone who is well entrenched in the 'circle of life' mentality. Everything is eventually consumed by everything else. How to do so efficiently with as little waste and as much benefit as possible is something that interests me. Some consider this cruel, and I accept that not everyone will see eye to eye with me on this topic. But I am happy to talk about the subject with anyone who desires to. Of course, it is not my forum, so if Cory or the mods would prefer I not, simply tell me so and I can also avoid such conversations. I feed my culls and any deaths to my rats currently. They are not euthanized beforehand. But my rats are also extremely fast to grab any fish I provide and consume them. They really like fish. And being omnivores, it is very good for them to have a little protein in their diet. These rats later go on to become feeders for my snakes. My snake lives in a paludarium (a 220 gallon) and when he defecates that waste is used as plant fertilizer - and I have to get it out of the water quickly or the corydoras and pictus will eat part of it too. It seems to do them no harm whatsoever, but they sure make a mess of it tearing it apart, so while it doesn't seem to notably affect the water parameters, I prefer not to have rat hair floating around in the tank. So the circle of life is complete in this example. When I get the chance again, I'd like to have an exodon tank again. They were fascinating fish to watch. The heirarchy in a group was really neat to observe to me. I've also considered getting bichir again, they're carnivores but I don't know that they'd be fast enough to catch a guppy. Certainly big enough mouths to eat them, but the catching part is what has me wondering if they'd be a good choice for that particular purpose. Of course, I love buchir even without them having such a purpose. I always found them to be like water puppies, took to hand feeding readily. However even the smallest bichir would need a 55 gallon minimum, but preferably a 75. So that's not a small tank.

The other night when I was boiling cholla wood my husband said, “Your hobbies are so gross. But I love you anyway.” That is true love! I just keep reminding him that at least it’s not shoes or celebrity gossip. There are much worse alternatives than listening to me talking about fish all day.

You know, younger aquarists are not wrong exactly. You just have to get the priorities straight...my pets generally last longer than my boyfriends, especially if they don't like pets! 🤪

I do K-12 school IT and networking in a district merged from about a half dozen town districts. It is challenging in a normal year. I need my aquariums, and this community.

No, not really. The first month or so will have some algae as you get the aquarium lighting/fertilizer dialed in, get through the new tank diatom stage, and the plants get established. This particular aquarium has been running for about four months and, other than weekly 30% water changes and monthly plant trimming, I don’t have to to any real maintenance other than occasionally wiping off small bits of algae on the glass. That being said, I probably wouldn’t run this rich of a soil (ADA Amazonia is above the lava rock, with UNS fine controsoil on top) if I weren’t injecting CO2. The best tip that I have, however, is my algae crew— clithon corona or clithon diadema snails (usually sold as horned nerites). They are very popular with aquascapers in Europe but less so here. I have no idea why. They eat algae like crazy and don’t leave the unsightly eggs that true nerites do. They also stay very small so they don’t look out of place in smaller aquariums. I usually also add one or two Amani shrimp to deal with hair algae early on.

Betta fry feed off of their yolk sac for the first 2-4 days of life so a good number of them should be okay! I wouldn't expect all of them to make it simply because fry can't live as long as adults can without food, especially in larger tanks where it's possible for fry to starve to death trying to find the food. If you're very concerned and also have a source, you can add infusoria to the container before you leave as it will live in the water column for much longer than microworms or other nematodes. You could hypothetically add it to the water right before you leave and some of the fry will eat it if they become free-swimming before you return.

All fish have teeth. The type and location of their teeth depends a lot on their diet. Some have sharp canines, incisors, molars, pharyngeal teeth, or teeth in multiple places. Here's a photo of my Red Zebra showing off his razor sharp little teeth. These are mainly used for scraping and ripping algae off of rocks. It's the pharyngeal teeth (the set at the back of the throat) that's mostly meant for trapping and chewing up prey in a lot of cichlids, but I believe goldfish also have pharyngeal teeth.

At PetSupplies Plus today, I happened upon a 50% all fish all week sale, and a betta that caught my eye. I'll put on a picture once he's had a few days in the tank and gets some of his color back, but I think he'll be red and black, so I am thinking chili rasboras or rummynose tetras will eventually be his friends.

Yes, when the baby plants are connected to the mother plant, they are still leaching nutrients from it. So the mother plant gets stressed and of course won't send out new runners, and at worst has to sacrifice its own leaves to regain nutrients. If the runner plants have leaves that are at least a couple inches tall, set those babies free and give them their own root tabs. With the exception of my red gigantea val, which took off immediately, my other vals had a fairly long adjustment period in my tank before multiplying like crazy. Now I have a surplus that my LFS is not interested in buying.

Went to Pet Supplies Plus to look around and continue thinking what I would want to put in the office tank. Found a sign for 50% off this week on fish, and saw a crowntail betta male who caught my eye. He will be my $3 centerpiece, and after a while my plan will be to get him some rummynose type friends.

Here it is at around three weeks. Gotta plant the new swords that just arrived, but I’m waiting for an air stone and doing a bit of rearranging. Tried some Repashy this morning but most of the fish were kinda meh about it.

Have you clipped the runners off the mother plant once they get a few inches tall? That helped me a lot.

I would look into quarter round molding too so you can keep a nice finished look.

Back when I was breeding bettas if I put a female in an aquarium with a male betta they would breed, which is what I wanted. After breeding he would chase her away with malice aforethought. I suspect that is what would happen in the hypothetical you are suggesting.

They are he-eere! So far, however, there has not been as much carnage as expected...I have yet to see them really contemplate any juvenile shrimp, and though they have given a snail or two a close eye, they haven't gone after them. One pecked a vibra bite and immediately spat it out, they have ignored the frozen brine shrimp and only eyed the snail egg cluster I offered with forceps until my arm wanted to fall off...Here's hoping that either they are finding seed shrimp and detritus worms or they figure out their neighbors are food soon. I will hatch some baby brine tonight. These came from ACO, so if anyone has any tips on how to make them recognize food without going the blood worm route...clearly that is what they have been fed in the past.

Fishroom design Part 3, Shelf Design: Due to my room constraints I have to go with a custom wood shelf system. I got started on the cut list Sunday and hope to begin assembly over the Thanksgiving weekend. Please excuse the cartoonish speed square, I can't find my good one.

Every once in a long while I see stuff like that. I don't what it is so I ignore it and then it goes away.

I lost a big 22" Arowana and also an Oscar once to jumping where they jumped up, hit a solid glass cover and killed themselves. Conventional tank covers give fish next to no jumping room and if they're prone to jumping they will hit the glass, possibly injure themselves badly and even die. To prevent that I've started making my own tank covers out of the 3/4" PVC trim boards that are nine plus inches wide. Here are a few photos of the one on my 30 high. The PVC will never rot or decay and the fish get about 8" of jumping room before they hit anything too solid above them. I just use a sheet of clear acrylic atop the trim that I caulk in place. You lose a bit of light transmission by the lights being higher, but you save the fish. It's especially good if you're trying to keep butterfly fish, hatchet fish, archer fish, or the like. The PVC can be pricey but it works like wood, never rots, The surface of it is white which makes it a nice reflective surface on the inside and is paintable on the outside. Construction is super simple. You just cut the boards to the size you need, glue them together at the corners, add some trim PVC (I used PVC quarter round molding) to hold the acrylic and you've got a tank cover that's safer for the fish, easy to work in, looks good, and does everything you need a cover to do. And you can make it whatever size you need. I just use a saber saw to cut out the door to whatever size I want, add a pair of cheap small hinges from Walmart, use some scrap, leftover PVC to back up the door to block excess light leaking out around it, add a knob for the door, and it's done. The fish have room to jump and are less likely to hurt themselves jumping. They cost me around $50 to make depending on the price of the PVC at the time. I've got that type of cover on my 30 high, 20 high, 50 gallon, and 10 gallon quarantine tanks. I wouldn't use anything else these days. Holes for things like heaters or HOBs are easy to cut out using a saber/jig saw.

This definitely gets me sometimes. I always have to remind myself that a lot of beginners don't know how to interpret parameters well and often the first thing they're told is what sticks initially. Not everyone is a nerm 🙁

Some more Fluval memes because #FLUVALSTRIPPIN is classic

Oh if you're going for a well planted tank I'd be tempted to try some sparkling gourami (they croak! It's so cool!) or scarlet badis. Not sure on group sizes for the gourami, maybe 1 male and 2 females? 🤔 I've had multiple bettas with shrimp but each one is unique so ymmv. The Amanos seem to be big enough to not tempt my king betta.

Red Root Floaters flowering in my 3 gallon.

I woke up to lips on the glass then found more guppy fry. I also fed brine shrimp to the Molly fry then soaked my breeder box in hydrogen peroxide 😀

My new floating plants and one of my Dalmatian mollies looking at us. My first macro photos, hopefully my subjects will take better pictures next time😊

I have 3 khuli loaches in my 29. They ignore my large ramshorns, but my bladder snail population started becoming discarded empty shells on the bottom, and I seem to have no young snails anymore. I don't KNOW the khulis are doing it, but they seem the most likely to manage to remove the snail and leave the shell intact. They are also incredibly fat. I still need a population reduction for my larger ramshorns... On the other hand, my kid has 3 khulis too. And bladder snails.

99% of people on this forum don't quarantine plants. It's very unlikely they will carry a disease that could affect your fish and I have yet to find a hitchhiker that is harmful (even things like planaria and hydra in invert-only setups). For root feeders specifically I'd really not recommend quarantine just because they take some time to establish in a new substrate and moving them around can cause unnecessary melting. If you really want to quarantine your plants I'd just leave them in the little black strainer and rockwool that they come in. It will probably be a little harder on your plants with bare roots but that's the best I can come up with off the top of my head.

I paint cars all day, kinda fun and stressful at the same time. Very repetitive but pays well for what I do. Lately due to covid workload has been cut in half 😑.

I occasionally do some work for the lab of Dr. David Tarpy at North Carolina State University (like gluing number tags to the thorax every bee in a colony so the honey bee's movements can be tracked individually). Above: Putting number tags on bees Above: Numbered bees He is one one the leading scientist studying what came to be called 'Colony Collapse Disorder'. He came to the conclusion there wasn't any one cause. Winter losses happen every year (it is the basis of my business). Our current winter losses of honey bee colonies are close to the historical average over the last century. The introduction of varroa mites in the 1990's has probably been the largest single factor in recent winter losses but they can be controlled with management practices. Just like one of the biggest threats to the well being of tropical fish are fishkeepers, one of the biggest threats to honey bees are beekeepers.🙂 Did you know that each winter over 2 million of the 2.5 million honey bee colonies in the US are loaded on to semi-trucks and moved to from places like Maine, and Florida (actually every state) to California to pollinate the almond crop? Each semi-load is worth about $90,000 in fees for the beekeeper and is a very important source of income. The loss of honey bees makes for a good story in the press, but honey bees themselves (which are non-native invasive insects from Eurasia) are doing just fine.

A few months ago I started a garden with only water sprite. Here is the update

Dwarf rasbora (boraras masculatus). I love a big school of them except it takes forever to get shots of them all alone.

I put some of my new Spiderwood in the quarantine tank, and the snails love the temporary white film that new wood gets. Right now they seem to prefer it to the algae on the plants, rotting plant pieces, blanched green beans & zucchini, Hikari Algae Wafers...go, little guys! Clean off that detestable nightmare slime!

This tank has been unchanged for about 5 years now (I change tanks around too much). Since the Kerri never seem to stop spawning their tank gets left alone minus trimming the dwarf sag 😁

Old ones too. 🙂 I overstock almost all of my tanks, but I also have the plants and maintenance schedule to support it. So is it still technically "overstocked" at that point?

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