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Not sure if this is allowed, but just wanted to share that aquariums are on sale at Petco. Since ACO doesn't sell aquariums online so I hope it's ok to share. I've been waiting on this for weeks.

@Scaperoot thanks again. I picked up my tank and talked to them. They honored the half off and fixed it even though I paid online. I would normally grab everything and go never being aware they were on sale 🤗

Bubbles like that form for a multitude of reasons. Industrial residue is something I would not be terribly concerned with. Sometimes grease will come off a new motor but the grease they use is aquarium safe and generally hydrophobic. It usually forms an ‘oil slick’ on the surface before dispersing If I had to guess the bubbles are oxygen that gets trapped on the surface by the layer of viscous fatty acids. It’s a layer that forms naturally by certain biological processes. It’s been a long time since I took my water chemistry course so hopefully I used the right name for these processes 😅

I noticed the "Green Leaf Algae Eating Shrimp" in this Dan's Fish video. They beat out amano shrimp and Florida flag fish in an algae eating contest. Has anyone kept these before? Does ACO sell them or plan to sell them? Thanks for any info! 🙂 Edited: the only other reference I found was: https://www.interaquaristik.de/green-leaf-zwerggarnele-caridina-sp-green-leaf/a-101250

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzEPJ3AIg8o/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

So this Sunday is my clubs big fall auction. " Cue the dramatic music" I'm hoping to find another group of pygmys to put with my first set to get them better numbers to see some better activity. The danios are doing well and getting nice and plump and getting even more color now. They still like to mostly troll along the back of the tank and chase each other back and forth. A club friend is bringing me more jaca moss to the auction so I can get some more moss rocks made for them to have lots over spots to scatter there eggs in. I feel like the danios may be the first ones I actually take more of an on hands approach to breeding. The same club friend bringing the moss is who I got the danios from. So if I have time to pick his brain on breeding them at the auction I will Another fishy friend that I attend meetings with wants the last 3 of my lemon pleco juviniles. So they will be going home with her soon. Something I had just noticed a couple of days ago is moonbeam (the only pleco baby) that I kept from lemony and lunas first fry only has one eye. How I didn't see it before but it's true. Crazy part is that where her other eye should be it's very smooth and you can't really see an (eye socket) if you will. So I'm not sure if she was born without it or maybe when I had one of the apisto girls in there maybe she nipped at it when moonbeam was very tiny. But none the less she is doing well and it does not seem to effect her in any way. She is getting nice and thicc😆 Ps @Guppysnail Is patiently waiting for emerald dwarf danio babies. 😆

Was a week ahead of myself on the date for the fall auction. It's actually this Sunday Nov 5th. No really the only thing I have an abundance of is guppy grass and some hornwort. Most folks around hee dont look for it that often. I just love going for the adrenaline rush of the auction itself lol. I know when it comes to shrimp everyone around here jacks the prices up crazy high. The two big auctions we have a year are the fall and spring time. They usually last 4-6 hours. So be ready with plenty to drink.

Sorry to hear that at least to you did everything you could keep a very close eye on your remaining fish any symptoms start to treat straight away with kanaplex and jungal fungus clear fizz tabs

I want a 250 gallon for everything that's currently in the 135, plus another 100-200 cardinal tetras. Then I can set up the 135 as a nano tank. Nothing larger than 2" fully grown, but over 100 in some of the schools. I'm currently doing that in a 55 with up to 50 of each school (chili rasboras, pygmy cories, CPDs & emerald dwarf rasboras), plus a colony of neocaridina shrimp.

Found this little cutie (panda Cory) that some how made it without incubation. Nature finds a way.

@Lennie Nope that was for a juvenile. Albinos are much more rare in these fish. I will say it is by far the prettiest in that aquarium.

and the flagfish didn't eat any of it, which is wild to me because I feed mine clumps of hair algae and they go nuts for it. I really respect Dan and his entire business model and I 100% support him, but it's just a singular trial and results will definitely vary depending on what they're eating on a daily basis. They will always prefer leftover food and fill up on that before attacking algae, at least in my experience.

I just had a conversation with Jonny from Dan's Fish, they believe that they breed similarly to standard amano shrimp and won't breed in freshwater, so that is rather disappointing. Will that stop me from ordering them? Probably not lol. I am getting some other fish anyway, so I might as well.

Folks have shared the info of when petco has their half off sale before. I see no harm in alerting everyone. It helped me. I’m on my way to pick up a tank I ordered full price 2 days ago. I had no idea they were on sale. 😡

I just received a 4-pack of these.

Interesting is where you find it. I like to watch the MTS rise up out of the gravel at night, moving a piece of grave that is bigger than they are. My Nerites, in addition to having great patterns have been proven to be very acrobatic on occasion, stretching between two different plants, or climbing to the tip of a piece of Vallisneria and riding it down to the substrate. The Bladder snails weren't very interesting until they donned algae green fright wigs in time for Halloween.

Sure was! And a 20 gallon would work just fine. They are ready for breakfast! The other tetras are black neons and head-and-taillight tetras. I got those by mistake. I was trying to buy more pristellas but LFS just got their shipment and everyone was pale. In QT they developed their color and I was like ummmm… these are not pristellas! But I kept them anyway and they fit in with the group just fine and school with them.

Well.. I made a cookie graveyard

German blue ram eyes in eggs way to many apisto caucatoides babies

Set up a spawning tank for my Glowlights - hopefully this time I’ll be able to get fry. 🤞

The danio / pygmy cory tank is looking so good and lush! I'm working on setting up a 10 gallon pygmy tank as well and I'm pretty excited for it.

Hi all, if you’ve been following my journal you’ll have noticed that I’ve recently attempted to breed neon & glowlight tetras. However, I was unsuccessful in the first attempt, before the arrival of a bag of peat from my local gardening store. 😈 After I added a light dusting of peat to the bottom of the tank; I added a heater, craft mesh, and some live terrestrial moss collected from the woods near my house. I added a trio of 1M 2F (as far as I could tell) to the tank, and the morning after they spawned! I'd be really grateful if an experienced tetra breeder could chime in on how to feed them, seeing as I’m a complete newbie at this. 😅

I would do everything possible to avoid "making" your own water with buffers. And unless your water is terrible or your specific types of fish are extremely sensitive outside of specific parameters, I don't think it's necessary. Yes to crushed coral, if you kh and/or ph start to get low. But that's all. Devil's advocate, what problems are you experiencing with plain unmodified tap water? A lot of fish stores will get you hooked on buffers without it actually being required/necessary. Sad but true.

Carbonate salts. I think seachem alkaline buffer has this but you can find them readily at any major pet store if you don’t have it on hand

I think maybe the answer here is something like 60% soft water and 40% hard/well water. Switching between the two is easy for water changes. So maybe my HG is around 180-200 ppm which should be fine for angels and plants. And I get some Ca back with a lot less sodium.

They hatched and started leaving the cave, so my homemade Dean style fry tray.

Looks like 1/2 tap 1/2 ro is a safe bet! Definitely brought your gh into more manageable territory for certain plants and animals. I would just start using 1/2 ro 1/2 tap in your water changes, your kh might need some buffering but I have similar parameters to yours and my plants are thriving, so just monitor kh and adjust if test strip shows yellow close to water change time

I had some that was expired for about 6-8 months. Kept in a Rubbermaid container at room temp. It set up a bit different and seemed to dry a bit more rather than set in that gel consistency. It fell apart after a short time in the tank and caused an ammonia spike. I had several types mixed. Make it and if it forms correctly put a small piece in tank water and a specimen cup. Let it hang in the tank to make sure it does not disintegrate like mine did. If it holds up I say it’s ok. I say try because there is no guarantee I had my water hot enough when I made it. It would not be the first time I messed it up.

Might be, I have an HOB too, I'll clean the filter and the media to see if that works because that thing does get pretty dirty.

Yeah, that is about what I found too. Thank you. I know a lot of people find them to be "pests", but I am more than happy to have more, lol.

@Khole new fish I combined your topics again. You placed your reply as a whole new topic. You do not need to make a new topic each time you reply. It’s confusing an no one understands what you are replying to. At the bottom of the thread you will see a reply box. That way you can continue speaking about the same issue or fish or topic and it makes sense to others because they can read the whole thing.

This looks like the fossil of an African dwarf frog. 🙂

Tiny fry are not afraid in the Endler's tank. 🙂

Here is my first batch of fry I ever hatched around the 4th of October. I have my male fanning another batch.

@Elodie Rose wanted to rehome her CPD last week of September so I adopted them. Last night I saw a handful of fry scooting about. Appear to be a few weeks old 🥰

A Glowlight trio has been added (sexed to the best of my abilities)…with some luck they’ll spawn 🤞

A grand total of 2 have been spotted.

Take a look at that video. It's only a single data point, but a pretty strong one. 🙂

@Galabar I don't know if I believe that just yet, in my experience shrimp don't eat a ton of algae, they mainly eat the biofilm on the surface of the algae, or consume decaying algae. I still put my faith in my Flagfish buddies. They do some pretty incredible work in my tanks.

For anyone who's interested, the bridge between keeping aquariums/fish and keeping darts is really manageable. A lot of the acquired knowledge is very transferrable. Terrariums require similar shelf space and "infrastructure" (eg lights, cords, meters), and growing plants in a terrarium isn't that dissimilar to an aquarium. A misting system is an added investment (not small), but it's expandable. A lot of the "extras" in keeping fish translates well to keeping and breeding dart frogs. Live foods (wingless fruit flies), clean up crew (springtails and isopods), leaf litter and botanicals (the same leaves go in both habitats). If you get to breeding and are graced with tadpoles, you have to deal with (very rare) water changes, and the tads love live foods like daphnia and bbs, and java moss is universally appreciated. I've managed to find a couple local pet stores that sell both fish and herps, and I'm able to trade fish/shrimp that I breed for darts (they're expensive, so it takes a lot of fish to get started) and terrarium equipment. Dart babies take around 6 months to get to sellable or trade-able size, but the babies fetch almost as much as adults. Here in Canada, they retail for $100-$200 each, or around half that on the private market. In short, if you have a fish room, or fish closet, or multiple tanks, you're probably putting in time every day as it is, and adding a dart frog terrarium would be easy peasy.

Bumblebee dart frogs, Dentrobates leucomelas. These guys are tiny, if they tuck in their legs they could fit on a dime with room to spare. But very active, out and about all day. They'll maybe triple in size by the time they're adults, ie over the next year. Still small though.

Welp! Time to make the bed!

Well, it's not a fish. 🙂

This is Stella Blue our Portuguese Water Dog/Poodle mix. This is her happy place on the Oregon Coast. They are joking about this water dog stuff. At 9 weeks she jumped into my sons bath. She now knows she has to wait for them to get out of the bathtub before she can jump in. Probably one of the easiest dogs to train that I’ve had.

This is Maya. She is precious. She is 14? She is a menace. I am fairly certain we are her pets...

Oh my goodness, so many lovely furry and scaly friends. The facial expression on Guppysnail's beardie just kills me. Perfection! And those rats! And the perfect black and white spotted cowboy horse! Over many decades we've had mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, house rabbits, birds, a box tortoise, our own dogs and cats and about a million foster cats/kittens/dogs/ferrets/bunnies. I'm now out of the fostering rotation due to too many hours at work, but my heart will always be in it and I hope to return when I semi-retire 🙂 Here is my best bud:

Rats make great pets, although for far to short a time! I had them when I was younger and my wife had them when I met her. Now we have 2 dogs, 4 cats, a horse and a cow. I can't imagine a life without all these great animals. Frog Bubba Wink (The one-eyed cat. That's how he came to us) Cochise Rosie

My sweetest, most affectionate and funny girl... Will always be remembered and deeply missed.❤️💔❤️ These two whiskered faces greet me every morning hoping for treats and tickles. It's amazing how different their personalities are, rats truly are like people in this respect. Love them both to pieces... ❤️

Rats were my favorite pet- but after I lost my last girl who I was especially attached to, I couldn't do it anymore. All my girls knew their names, came when called- played games- and were the best companions anyone could have. This was my most favorite of all, Story:

I like cats, in other peoples houses. We have dogs. Currently 2, but as many as 4 at one point.