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Hello, Friends! Just your Weird Old Uncle Kenny here. I was an avid aquarist for almost 3 decades, but that was back in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, when I was a much younger lad! I'm retired and disabled with heart issues now, but this year I got back into it as a source of relaxation, and to relieve the boredom of living alone. It started slowly, rather strangely, and it's a long story I will likely get around to telling, eventually, cuz there's some educational, as well as entertainment value. But this is just the introduction, so, gonna keep it pretty short and sweet. Started with a 10 gallon tank, betta, a few guppies, and a few kuhli loaches. Now I have (2) 5.5 gallon, (3) 10, a 40 breeder, a 30 show, plus a 29 tall which is just waiting for its stand to arrive on Friday, and I'm picking up the 75 gallon tank that goes on top of it, tomorrow. I currently have plans for a total of 12 tanks plus a 100 gallon "pond" coffee table, all in the front room of my 1 bedroom apartment! My main thing is breeding guppies, which I NEVER would have guessed would bring me so much joy, but it sure has! Aquarium Co-op, and especially Cory's videos, were and still are a major source of my inspiration. While lifting a bucket full of water has become rather difficult for me, the rest of aquarium care knowledge, information availability, and products has VASTLY improved over the years. While I was very successful with many challenging and exotic "fin-babies" back in the day, the stuff and methods of care I swore by back then are just so-so (or less) compared to what's available today. Oh, but it certainly does cost a whole lot more now for fishies! Anywho, I can't wait to read your stories and tell some of my own! Fishy Holidays!! -Kenny

S. repens is doing a lot better since I moved the light and increased intensity. New growth is coming in MUCH faster and the old leaves are dying MUCH slower. I'm getting a little bit of algae on the front glass but it seems very manageable. I should have listed to Roy originally when he said it looked like I needed more light. That seems like it was definitely my main issue. I am noticing some of the new growth is quite pale compared to others though. Does that seem like iron deficiency.

Worming medication such as levamisole and praziquantel metronidazole are effective in food and dosing the water column. praziquantel in food doesn't show increased elimination rates verse dosing the water column. metronidazole is effective in food as it's adsorbed by the intestinal tract. most fish can survive with a low parasite burden for a long period of time it's only when periods of stress effect the immune system that the fish can become overwhelmed and succumb. as long as you treat for the appropriate amount of time do repeated treatments and do though gravel vac to remove as many expelled parasites and eggs from the substrate. Treat once every week for 4 weeks with levamisole. praziquantel once every two weeks for 4 full treatment. metronidazole in food for 3 weeks it will be possible eliminate parasites in your tank. there's always vector for reinfection if your feeding live foods adding new fish or plants that's where having a quarantine tank has its benefits two monitor new fish for a minimum of 4 weeks

A couple sourdough loaves this morning. Overnight ferment. Normal loaf with bread flour 50/50 whole wheat/bread flour Anyone else bake?

Hi @Supermassive, I'm seeing some improvement on the new growth. Have you been monitoring your nitrate levels? Faster growth may cause the NO3 levels to drop. Continue to dose the Seachem Iron once a week. Let me know what the NO3 ppm test at and we discuss a next step. -Roy

It's probably changing because your fish have grown up and are producing more waste.

👆 Bolbitis Heteroclita

Most likely a flatworm, although it truly looks like a piece of detritus to me 😅 maybe that’s the point

A pleasant surprise: I sold these two young pairs of Fundulopanchax scheeli to a CARE Forum member just a couple weeks ago… Now, all these fry are hatching out of the java moss in their tank… I love fish babies!!!

Somewhere in the first few pages of my journal I show making repashy on a stick. I use long flat food grade bamboo sticks I stick the bottom in the substrate or use suction cup clips to secure it to the side. Mid and upper water fish get their time and it adheres well to the stick. In this video you can see the sticks. These are pointed down for pleco but you can point them up and towards tank center.

The reason is that 5 gallons of water is a small amount of water. Water changes will swing the parameters wildly as there just isnt a high enough volume to buffer said changes. I am trying to be as succinct as possible. I don’t recommend anything under 10 gallons for keeping fish for that reason as most fish produce waste quickly enough to change water parameters overnight. Smaller fish species such as rasbora and some killifish don’t produce nearly as much waste. The other thing that can also help buffer is plants. They will pull nitrate and nitrite out of the water. I would say your best bet is buy a 10-20 gallon tank on sale, they are cheap this time of year, and build that out for the fish. You will have a much easier time with your current stock. Then you would also be able to increase your danio stock to 6 as they are a schooling fish and will be stressed as a pair

New kid, settling into quarantine. Has a hide, mopani, and some yellow squash. Has white tipped fins! I learned the parents do too. Too young for the bristles! Can’t wait to see them later. (Hide added after video taken)

Hey friends, I'm here to help provide some insight. The reason we switched to UPS is because we were having reliability issues with USPS that were bad enough that we had to stop shipping any product with a lithium ion battery for a while. This was frustrating for us as a business, having inventory taking up space in the warehouse that we could not sell, and frustrating for customers that were waiting for these items to become available again. Additionally, there were some customers that were struggling to receive any orders from us at all, and the overall customer experience was degrading enough that we had to do something and USPS wasn't willing to work through the issues with us. We unfortunately do not have the warehouse space to support more than one shipping service's bins, so when we made the decision to switch to UPS, that meant that all orders had to be shipped with UPS, there are no other options. We have had to increase prices to maintain the level of product/plant quality and customer support that our customers expect from us here at Aquarium Co-Op. We want to assure all of you that we did not make these decisions lightly, and we are still within the same shipping time frame and overall cost that our competitors are. If your plant order happens to be delayed and your plants arrive in poor condition as a result, you can always reach out to us at shipping@aquariumcoop.com and we will take care of you. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have further questions.

PH 7.6 Nitrates 25 PPM No nitrite Temp 75 I was just admiring my cute little corydoras while they snacked on some frozen blood worms and noticed a spot behind this guy's eye. Could be just a pattern, but wanted to get another perspective. Thanks!

Hi @Supermassive, No, Prime will not will not effect the availability of nitrates to the plants. It is very good at 'locking up' ammonia but has not effect on nitrates one way or the other. When dealing with high nitrates I usually increase my water changes. When you have recovered your nitrogen cycle and the NO3 ppm level is back to normal we can discuss other possible changes. -Roy

Yes! That's awesome.

There was another thread where someone didn't have the opportunity or choice to move the tank and the advice was to throw towels over everything and tarp it as best you can and try to cover it. Even if you remove everything, I might STILL recommend that as well to protect the tank itself from contamination. It's going to be a nightmare and it's a tough situation. I'm sorry for what you're going through!

The pleco found their way to the surface where the catappa leaf is floating and latched onto the bottom of it. Hehe tree done bonus Aquashella ornament the tree smells amazing

Thanks!

Update: The black guppy did not make it but the white one is doing 10 times better. Thank you everyone

Thank you! Do you think it is OK to leave the live plants in the tank? It would be sealed to prevent any toxic gases from entering.

More fish photos 29g "Arcanis" the gold ram "Derp" the angelfish 75g Roseline sharks Siamese algae eater "Arrie" the rainbow shark Baby reticulated hillstream loach Platies "Jed" the electric blue acara "Opal" and "Buttercup" the threespot gourami Empire gudegeon 40g "Marmaduke" the dwarf araguia acara Brackish Ghost shrimp My 10g when its overgrown

depends on how much medication, how much carbon, how much water flow thru the carbon, and how much water in total. imo best to do a water change, and add carbon, then in a few days repeat. that will typically remove the vast majority of any kind of medication.

After breaking down the old tank last night, I picked up the old stand to move it. The stand fell apart immediately. My cat had a temporary cat tower thing.

Sooooo after making multiple messes with the canister filter and trying a Aquatop internal nano UV filter, I put my Seachem Tidal on the tank. The UV filter has too much flow but I plan on keeping it to deal with algae issues. The fish should be fine to run the filter for a few our with the UV light on if necessary.

Hello Friends. I also noticed that Aquarium Co-op switched to UPS, a couple of orders ago. The difference for me, in rural Oregon? With USPS, it took about a week. Now, with UPS, it arrives NEXT DAY. I'm sorry to hear that it's not the same for everyone, because it's pretty good for me

Because my personal business required shipping… The cost to the seller of shipping is not just carrier fee. You pay labor to pack, 3+ boxes instead of 1 larger box, more packing material and tape, printer ink and labels. Other companies increase product price or shipping & Handling fees to accommodate this vs just setting a minimum order to offset those extra costs. Especially in this terrible economy I appreciate lower prices and reasonable shipping cost.

Orange Flash, Triple Red, Double Red are line-bred color variants of Apistogramma Cacatuodies. You can find the same number of (and perhaps more) color variants with fancy names for Agassizii as well and McMasteri, and some others I'm probably forgetting.

The CCY meeting and auction was a lot of fun, though I regretted taking the pandas. I was so, so close to buying them back. The projector was broken, which didn’t help with that, kind of a bummer. But what a fun get together! Really enjoyed the casual nature of it, and the games that were completely voluntary, and several of which I chose not to participate in. Cute games, too. Fooood omg. Beautiful spread. The cookie contest was delicious, too. I haven’t been happy with the Panda tank in quite a while, and I’m not enjoying them as much as I thought I would. So their tank is getting a re-do, and they’ve been moved to a tub while I work on it. The Assassin snails also got a re-do, with some sand for them to bury in and hunt in, since that has been mentioned in multiple places that they like that. They’ll still get all the same snail food, though heavier on the meat pellets than the spirulina ones. Blue Snails have been put in a similar windowsill container, maybe 8 or 10 with pretty blue or blue-white shells. I also added two of the very beautifully striped trumpet snails that I’ve been seeing. It makes sense that there are different species of MTS, I want to look into some of the different colorations. Water change day. So many. Filled up the tub, and WOW, thank you GuppySnail, that is a heck of a lot easier than filling individual buckets! The Green Dragons are getting 50% water changes every day or every other day this week. Whatever is happening there needs to change. Maybe the entire tank needs to be changed out for them. The water hasn’t cleared up with the sand, so, Father Fish was wrong on that point, in this instance. Might break out two of the tubs for mutt guppies and koi guppies. They’re just 20 gallon tubs, not too heavy to sit in a corner. Piano snails got a new 10, need to upload the pictures of building it to the piano snail journal. Tiger Tower snabies are in the tank!!!! I counted 6, they look just like tiny baby piano snails, but even that small, I can see the difference in color and striping. Omg. Pretty sure I danced the happy-snaiby jig, lol. They’re kind of hard to come by, so having confirmation that I have at least a male and a female among the 5 (originally 6), is FANTASTIC!!! I had removed one Green Dragon male a few weeks ago, to see if isolating him would help him to grow out his fins and bring out his coloring. I had put him, and three of the Green Dragon females, in with the Tigers, and they are photo bombing like nobody’s business. I don’t think it’s big enough for them to colony breed in there, but I just had to have some kind of a backup, if I can’t get the water in Emeric’s tank healthy again. Haven’t seen White Wizard babies yet, but they seem to be doing well, they are in with a few mixed green and purple moscows. I wish I hadn’t added the purple ones, they don’t actually look like proper moscows. Actually there ARE a couple little babies in there, which is great! The purple moscows have been removed back to the White Cloud tub, leaving the greens and the blue-green. It sounds like March/April/May are better guppy months at auction, so I might concentrate on CARES species and on growing out the guppy fry I have, for the next 2-3 months. Back to water changes, now that I’ve had some sit down time. Snaaaaaaaibies!!! 😄

@AllFishNoBrakes Thanks and I love your Angelfish!!!

I kept a banana worm culture for about a year before I got tired of it, but it wasn't *difficult*, just kind of tedious. I didn't have the number of tanks required to make it that worthwhile in the end. Starter came from Aquabid. I went with the cheapo oatmeal + cut up deli container method, pretty easy, you just have to be diligent about making new cultures when they start to really climb up the sides of the container. The fish really loved it, for what it's worth (at that time I had honey gouramis, lambchop rasboras, pygmy corys and shrimp + snails). I do still have a BBS hatching dish and I'll do that once in a while but all I've got is a little 8gal nano now. I freeze leftover BBS and treat it like a frozen food for a while. Most live cultures produce too much food for my situation.

I wouldn't do water changes with RO. Top ups, yes. Changes, no. Unless I was remineralizing it and for me, that is more than I want to do when my water is fairly decent out of the tap (also well).

What is this plant called? It looks like shrimp heaven!

@quikv6 honestly, I would never have put that much mental effort into this. If you’re willing to pay for actual shipping which costs more then why not just order more goods to meet the $19.99 minimum, it just seems like a “6 in one hand, half dozen in the other” scenario. Obviously you can do whatever makes you happy, just remember this really gross inflation impacts everything. Good luck to you

Maintenance day. Had to clean the clown killifish tank filter sponge since June if I am not mistaken 🙂 ah well One of the clown kilifish fry is a male, it has a distinct tail pattern now. Kind of soon after only three months but hey, I have one male one female fry. All the other tanks are ok, I did maintenance on all except indostomus one ( once a month, but I did top it off) and luminatus tank ( i do so mondays/tuesdays) We have heavy snowfall and one of my dogs love it. The other wishes to go home :))

I suspect # 1 is female and #2 is male.

Maybe you could set it around a string, then hold or clamp the string so the repashy is sitting where you want it? Ive found that if i put whole cubes of tubifex worms in my repashy i can get it to float.

They have essentially 3-4 models of substance. I'll use the term "course mesh" but they way they brand their products you have a finer and a course mesh. Course mesh: 2 sides and 3 sides Fine mesh: 2 sides The co-op one in stock is the 3 sided version with the courser mesh panels. Are you able to get the fine mesh one through your club?

That's awesome! It's one of my favorite species of anubias. Give some to all your friends!

Had a similar experience withy my crypt tropica and wendeti green, after a year or so they were breaching the surface of my 20g and 10g - now they are my background plants in my 100g, and gave me off shoots so now I have more crypts! Gotta love the plants.

I'm wondering if I'm not cleaning out my egg hatching boxes well enough and causing problems that way. I'm far from experienced, but to my eyes the eggs from subsequent spawns seem to look fertile and then the embryos seem to die when they're very small (and still inside the egg). I think that's what is happening, once I got my CPD spawning setup tweaked a bit, I got a huge flush of eggs. Something like 60 or 80. They looked like they had the fertile look and then typically they just end up looking melty or maybe even disintegrating. When I clean the boxes I get them in the sink and with lots of hot water scrub it out with my nylon brush. I'm wondering if there's not some bacterial/fungal carry over (even with methylene blue) that wipes out the next batch before they can hatch. And I also wonder how much that might be because of my relatively high pH (8.2-8.3) being more apt to allow for rampant bacterial growth. I think today is the day that this next batch of sterbai eggs should hatch. I glanced at them this morning and a few looked viable still. I'm thinking that I'll probably find that none of them look good tonight. So I'll tear down that box. I might even clean it with dilute bleach soak and then rinse the snot out of it. I cannot for the life of me come up with another reason that a first spawn will be good, but the subsequent spawns are total losses with no viable fry whatsoever.

I am so excited for customers to start getting their hands on these! I have one in my 40B and it is honestly the best upgrade for a sponge filter ever! I don't need enough for a full order yet, but as soon as I'm done water testing my freshly built tank, I will be kitting it out with some brand new easy flow sponge filters 😁

I like these. More compact. Their plug is flat. They have 4 usb spots and you can get 8 or 12 outlet. They hang on the wall easily with double sided tape.

Will do thank you I am not sure but I've only have had these 2 guppies since Friday my other 2 guppies are good.

Not much of an update, just cool morning lighting:

I have spoken.

Got enough interested buyers of these that I’m going to start “mopping” again, albeit from inside the 33-gal. colony. Daily checks seem to somehow trigger spawning activity. I’ve reset the 2.5 gal. for hatching out fry as before. Single “nurse-droid-neocaridina” added to purify the eggs, and defend against storm troopers. Bring in on! This is the way…

If the Amano have been shipped, I would just temperature acclimate without opening the bag, then as soon as you open the bag, drain the water and put them in the tank. If you purchased at LFS, then you can drip acclimate since the bag will not be a toxic bomb at that point.