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Sorry to take so long to answer but it’s been crazy busy at work. I don’t have an answer regarding snails or shrimp specifically but I will answer an “in general” way. I have very mixed feelings about garlic because there just aren’t enough studies on what is, or isn’t, an appropriate dosage. Garlic is proven to have anti-oxidant, some very mild anti-parasitic effects (not enough to be worth using), and some appetite stimulant effects among others. The biggest problem is that it can also have some hemolytic effects that can cause anemia. At high enough doses it causes the hemoglobin (the oxygen carrying molecule in red blood cells) to denature (clump) and become non-functional. It can clump so much it distorts the shape of the red blood cell and trigger the immune system to destroy and remove the non-functional, defective red blood cell. How much does it take for this to happen in fish? I don’t know and neither does anybody else because the studies haven’t been done. Not on any fish let alone on all the different species in our tanks. Is there a completely safe dose? I don’t know that either, again, because the studies just haven’t been done. I can find doses that cause this in dogs and cats, but not in fish. There was one study where garlic caused liver failure in one species. Again, it’s been too long since I did that lit search so I don’t remember the species or dose that caused the problem. There are studies on doses of garlic that are enough to stimulate the appetite in 3-4 different species of food fish - tilapia, I think a couple species in the trout family, and was there one on flounder? I can’t remember, it’s been a bit since I did the literature search. There was at least 1 study I found on apparent immune stimulus from garlic in fish but I don’t remember the species and certainly don’t remember the dose. The other problem is the variability of the “active ingredients” in garlic. We don’t even know for certain what all ingredients are active, we presume it’s the allicin but there could be other ingredients coming into play. Again, we don’t have the studies to support or deny this. I typically say “Use with caution” because we simply don’t know enough to make a blanket statement across all species, or even across groups of species. It might help, but overuse could definitely hurt. Because of the potential bad effects in some species, it’s not typically something I recommend. It isn’t something I use in my own tanks. I won’t tell you to never use it, but use it very carefully and judiciously if you chose to do so.

I would/ do for tanks 40+. It’s also a failsafe if one quits heating.

I worked 22 years in the restaurant industry, starting when I was 15 washing dishes working my way up to being a chef, running the kitchen and eventually managing the back of the house in two different restaurants. I have always enjoyed baking, and with it being the Christmas season, I am baking a lot now. I started last weekend, and I am hoping to be done baking this next weekend, and when I am done I will have made 16-18 different cookies totaling close to 150 dozen cookies. Sprinkle in some fudge, chocolates and other candies, there will be a lot of sweets in my house, 95% of them will be given away, we make plates and trays up for neighbors, friends, co-workers and others.

I noticed some rambunctious behavior in my 40g around 11:45am yesterday morning and quickly realized it was my Corys spawning! The first time I witnessed a spawning from these fish I was able to collect about 30 eggs if memory serves. The second time I was only able to collect about 20. To my amazement, the largest albino female continuously spawned from 11:45am (at least that's when I joined the show) all the way till 1:25pm! I was able to collect well over 100 eggs and it seems like most are fertilized! From what I could tell, many of the bronze males attempted to fertilize her eggs, but only one of them was able to keep her attention. As you can hopefully see from the pictures, the aforementioned male would swim in front of the female, arch his body effectively blocking her path, and deposit his stuff. Her once erratic swimming suddenly calmed as if hypnotized. Almost immediately afterword, eggs would start to drop and she held them with her fins. She began depositing the eggs on the leaf of a large Amazon Sword plant and immediately attempted to eat them so I shooed her away. The leaves weren't looking so good so I just trimmed them with eggs attached and dropped them, leaf and all, into a breeder basket. I ended up cutting off 4 sword leaves and she transitioned to spawning directly on the glass where I collected all of the eggs with my insurance services card. There was one albino male who made several attempts to fertilize her eggs, and while I was rooting for him, he couldn't seem to get the technique quite right and she quickly lost interest. After all that work, the large albino female was noticeably exhausted and bumping into things so I decided to feed an o-nip tab. I wish I had a comparison shot of her belly before to emphasize just how sunken in her eggs satchel became! I will return when the fry have grown large enough to see in pictures. I hope you all have the chance to experience this at least once. There's really nothing quite like it. For those of you who like to see parameters, here are a few: Water: 40 gallons Temperature: comfortable Fish: yes

It does look like an injury. Since goldfish can act like they’re in an Aussie rules football scrum when going after food, they need to have decor that’s as smooth as possible. Goldfish like a bit of salt in the water, so I would add at least 1 tablespoon per 5 gallons all the time. Since you don’t have live plants, for now, do 1 tablespoon per 2 gallons until the wound(s) heal. Once healed, go back to 1 tablespoon per 5 gallons so you can grow some emerse plants like pothos or lucky bamboo. They will help your nitrate issue a lot, but you’ll have to protect their roots. I’ve gotten the tall lucky bamboo and planted the base in pots and you can support the top with various things. I’ve used kitchen sponge holders with holes drilled in the bottom. Others have used lighting egg crate grid. There are various 3-D printed gizmos you can find online, etc. You can put the base of the pothos into a sponge packed HOB filter so the goldfish can’t get to them at all, or use the sink sponge caddy. Check my signature link for my 75 G Jack Dempsey tank for a bit more info on emerse growing plants. There’s lots of other info on the forum on emerse growing a wide variety of plants. Someone (I can’t remember who) used a perforated, floating container to grow either frogbit or dwarf water lettuce that the fish would chase around and play with (probably trying to get to the plants/roots) but it still worked for removing nitrates from their water as they would harvest the plants when they got too dense in the container.

Aw ❤️ Cute little dude having a nap in his hide.

just got mine, im impressed. Im getting crazy amounts of flow now which my flow-loving fish are loving, and im getting better suction through my sponge filter now. Ill definitely get some for my other sponge filters in the future.

Just me or do you see the resemblance?

Just saw that I said my FISH got into and ate a jar of fish food when I meant my CAT did. 😆🤣 I thought this was a picture I had posted and I was only seeing the bottom half. Saw that duckweed under the lotus leaf and thought I was going to have to go home and burn down my house. You scared me a bit.

I'm no authority. But I don't even look at my crypts anymore for fear they will melt back the last inch of their height. I haven't killed a lot of them, but they get to a nice three leaf plant and then sit there for two years.

Aquarium salt aids Gill function and adds essential electrolytes it's won't have a negative interaction with levamisole or praziquantel so it fine to use the to together I would just add a small amount of aquarium salt 1 table spoon for 5 gallons

When i go out for the day and then come home; i get greated: What did i manage to count there: 11 clown loaches 3 zebra loaches (they almost never come out) 5 festum 4 angels and a bunch of other stuff 😉

In my foray into keeping North American Native fish in home aquaria, I came upon the stunning Fireyblack Shiner (Cyprinella pyrrhomelas). In the wild, they look like this… Obviously, they handle high flow very well! I made a visit to Knoxville, met the guy who posted this footage, and he gave me juveniles (F1) he had raised in captivity. As the year has gone on, and they have matured, I found that I have two males and a half dozen females. I cannot stop photographing them… Here, you can see how full this female is with roe. So today, I decided it was high time to try breeding them. For me, there are only two species of freshwater fish I am Ok with keeping but NOT breeding: (1) Goldfish (2) Discus. Both are ornamentally satisfying enough for my taste to keep without breeding. Everything else must breed to keep me happy 😅 Here are a series of short describing the process of setting up a love nest for my Fireyblack Shiners. I began with plans to modify / divide the 55 gal. tank space… 1. Set up plan… 2. Initial Set up… 3. Observations… 4. Adaptation… After this was filmed, I moved the bio-wheel back into the corner and turned down the intensity of the air-stone.

Worked well. The vast majority of the eggs were under the grate. If I can get these to hatch I will feel fairly comfortable saying the issue was my cleanliness. And that opens a host of thoughts, honestly. The first batch is doing very well, I think I have only noticeablely lost one or two fry. They all seem to get bellies from the fry food. They will bite BBS but cannot get pieces off yet. Have SF strain in a hatcher should be ready tomorrow evening, hopefully. Even if they can only get a nibble it will be worth it.

Methylene blue is also fine to use as a spot treatment for saprolegniasa

This is different, but similar. This is a piece of driftwood that I had in an aquarium for about 5 months. It was covered in several types of algae. I removed it and set it in an open empty bucket for several weeks and forgot about it.... It eventually dried and turned an odd purple like color!! Is this odd or what? Anyway, I'm planning on putting it back is some water, maybe just fill the bucket and add an airstone to see what happens.

You never know when a cory fry is going to pop out of the ‘woodwork”. I have plenty of egg eaters in my nanofish 100G and still get just enough young cories to keep the population steady to slowly growing. I can get many, many more if I collect eggs, but right now I’m happy to just let them do their thing.

Tuning in much earlier than usual! I think this is for a couple of reasons. I started maintenance about 9:30 this morning. Typically I get started a little later. That being said, I water changed everything in under 3 hours today! Typically it’s 4-5 hours depending on what I have to do, so to get under 3 hours felt huge. I think part of this is because I did a “water change” on the baby Angel tank by just adding a gallon of water to it, so I saved the time of taking out multiple gallons and then putting them back in. Also, I didn’t have to mess with a single air stone! Man, it felt so good to not have to mess with airline tubing/air stones/sponge filters. I’m curious to see how much time it takes me next week. Was this a fluke, or is this the new normal? We’ll see. Things are moving right along. Still fighting some algae in the Pea Puffer tank, but the Nerites are still alive. I may add a few more if it continues to go well. We have our employee appreciation party this evening, and then just a couple more work days until I take some time off. Definitely looking forward to that! Cheers, friends. Hope all is well in your world.

A group of 4-5 panda garras would be super fun. They are colorful, personable, active, algae-eating, and peaceful.

Sounds great to have your own babies join the community. Congrats on the accidental breeding 🥳 If I were you I would consider adding some algae eaters that would enjoy those temps and setup. Also, if you are like me, besides their algae eating benefits, they are just as fun as keeping other fish! I really enjoy keeping my SAEs. Besides being an algae eater they are just fun to watch. I wouldn't keep a group less than 3, they are weird creatures, love to play around and chase each other but noone else in my experience. Keeping two would result in too much chasing between individuals, number three allows mine to get distracted between each other. Maybe 4 would be even better? Your tank is BIG! Other than that, you can also add some hillsteam loach/borneo sucker, I think. To me, they are very unique and fun too! I have no idea about hillstream loach tolarance for hard water but my borneo sucker and SAEs seem to tolarate harder waters and higher ph up to 8 in my experience. @Guppysnail Gup did you mix RO for your hillstream tanks or do they just do fine in your liquid rock tap?

When you have large festums ( Mesonauta mirificus "Festivum"); that will eat anything that will fit in their mouth you have to have larger schoolers - at least larger than cardinals and serpae: These guys are constantly moving so i suppose i should take a video of them at some point; i'm pretty sure the festums ate the few smaller ones so now i only have large ones left; something like 22 of them - during the day they scatter around the aquarium but at night they bunch up pretty tight in the angels corner; the angels corner is an esp appealing location since the angels will snap at the festums who wonder in their corner at night 😉

That sounds really good already. I like the variety and think they would play well together for the most part. I personally wouldn't add any more but you could always build out with more danios or white clouds for larger schools.

in the middle of Two Towers right now. Ive read the Lord Of the Rings trilogy multiple times now, its fun to reread.

Thanks all. I will trim dodgy leaves and let the rest be.

I put in less food over the last week and surprise, surprise, there's less of them.

I had wondered about that. I thought maybe it was a joke I didn't quite get. My cat has been trying to eat fish food lately too. I've been putting it in a plastic bin with a lid.

Nothing to high tech. Just added a Nano Nermy Sponge Filter to a 10 gal. . Now there is one original and a new and improved one in the tank... I figured I'll let them battle it out!!

Salt at the dose I recommended will be fine as long as you have got plenty of surface agitation

I would never trim crypts down to the roots. I have some that are so dense that fish can barely navigate between them, and they still look great. I may pull them up and spread them out (and sell the excess), but I can't imagine any reason to cut them off.

saprolegniasas does have a high mortality rate even with the appropriate treatment it's a good that it looks smaller that means it's responding to the treatment fingers crossed for a good out come

Looks marginally better this morning, the fuzz spot seemed smaller and maybe less fuzzy. Agree that a dip might put him over the edge. Will see what it's like this afternoon.

@Chick-In-Of-TheSea I add salt whenever I have to treat with meds. It helps gill function in some way making it easier for their system to absorb oxygen or something like that. I’m not good at explaining the how it works. I’m sure @Colu can explain the actual How and why much better than my clumsy attempt as well as if salt will affect the efficacy of the meds you are using if you add salt.

After several months there is most likely an entire new ecosystem that has evolved to that damp dark environment. I would love to see some under a microscope. Nothing to worry over. Buy a few bottles of hydrogen peroxide at the grocery and pour it over everything. A brush or toothbrush to scrub stubborn spots and rinse in hot water and allow to dry and you will be good to go. Air breathing organisms can rarely survive being submerged. However you do not want to kill it by just dropping it in your tank. Some things produce toxins on death that in large quantities would not be good. Also the rotting matter can add to ammonia levels and such in your tank. I hope you journal your set up and tank.

The white spots and beige lines are two different things. Can't say much about id of the white mold, but the beige one appears to be a slime mold. The internet is full of cool info about them. They can solve mazes. 😮 Neither would be acutely harmful to your fish/aquarium in the short term (I think), but they're not awesome. We want wood in tanks to be solid and not rotten. The fungus/mold you have WILL be digesting the wood, eventually making it soft and punky. And what you see on the surface will be a fraction of what's growing inside the wood where you can't see it. The fungus/mold will result in the wood breaking down faster in your tank, ie more mulm and detritus. I honestly don't know if it being rotten or punky would make it more or less desirable to xylivores like bn plecos and etc.

They're all free swimming. I can see their bellies a bit better from above against the white.

I found and extracted two minuscule baby Reticulated Hillstream Loaches from the sump of my 90-gallon tank. Standing on my head in the cupboard to try to catch these zippy 5-mm-long suckers while elbow deep in fish poop and sump detritus while my kids held the flashlights was…um…a challenge. There’s a third one in the intake chamber of my main tank that looks impossible to extract—it may turn into an experiment on whether the intake box makes a good grow-out tank! My 3 hillstream loach adults must include a m and f! I’m assuming most of the fry or eggs turned into munchies for the other tank denizens…or got accidentally tossed in previous sump cleaning… I’ve never raised any fry before-this should be interesting!

It is all seemingly surface

I have thought so many of these were dead only to have them go zipping off when I poof on them with a pipette. How can they be this small...

Well today i made the mistake of looking at my aquarium; as it can be quite frightening when this happens: Mind you they weren't really moving much just sitting there - the one that is flat on the substrate far right is around 6 inches the other a bit smaller but the one behind her (you can't really see him) is a tad longer but skinner. Why they all collected right next to my desk i have no clue they normally run away from me - probably wanted to thank me for adding some fun current to play in (i added TWO 500gph power heads).

Thanks for the vibes! Looks like the majority of them have hatched.

Sounds like a plan. I will add aquarium salt and ich-x and will report back.

Twice a day

Malachite green the active ingredient in ick X is effective at treating saprolegniasas or you could do a methylene blue bath or spot treat him in his weaken state the stress of capturing him to do baths might push him over the edge

Nice female! I unfortunately got mostly males, and some very young possible females. I'll go back sometime and see if I can't get a few females, but gotta wait for a pair of waders because though it is NC, it's in the foothills of the Blue Ridge and is coooooolllddd!!!! Hope you have success with the Fieryblacks! (p.s: Have you had any success with Greenheads recently? I've been extraordinarily busy recently so haven't been on the forum much)

I assume that it's already in there, but I just wanted to mention it given everything going on and the stress you're seeing. Do you have an "extra" air stone running for the sake of meds in the water? (not filtration, but filtration + 1) I don't think I've ever seen a fish do the behavior you mentioned with the swimming erratically, but hopefully he can de-stress, recover, and start to heal. Pulling for you little spike!

Looking at some pictures, it does look quite a bit like that. Can I spot treat with methylene blue? Or do a dip? I would guess IchX might be effective against it, but didn't see any improvement after 24 hours with that in the tank. I'll go add some more salt for the night and see how things look in the AM. Thanks, Colu!

And the hillstream loaches also like hikari crab cuisine.

Gill inflammation could be caused by the parasite damaging his Gills or ammonia. your reading is zero so that's less likely unless you had a spike and missed it. all medication are stressful to some degree. i would still keep going with the treatment protocol. you could try adding a small amount of seachems garlic guard to his food to try and stimulate his appetite see if that helps

I can only imagine.... the wonderful things you made with that. Man I am hungry for some italian food all of a sudden. 😂 I read the thread and had to giggle a little, my mom's side of the family, they are the Baker's. (Literally) It's one of those things where I absolutely have the skill, but not the patience to bake. If I needed to knock out a pie or desert or whatever it was, totally can, but I much prefer the free form style of just cooking some good food. Nothing beats homemade pie, chocolate chip cookies, and some of the winter holiday foods. I am going to have to make some gingerbread soon after seeing @Chick-In-Of-TheSea cookies. Kind of looking forward to it!

Pretty much 🤷🏼‍♀️