Leaderboard

Two years ago, I returned to fish keeping after a 30 year hiatus, and quickly became enamored with the idea of raising live foods. I had daydreamed about them I was 12 or 13 and read about exotica like “daphnia” and “scuds”. I had no idea how to acquire, much less raise, them. Now, with the internet and a grown up’s pay check, those and many other live foods are within reach. In the past two years I have tried my hand at a bunch of different live foods. At times I’ve been more excited about the live foods than the fish I was feeding them too and have frequently found myself with more live food that fish to feed them to. I even bought a microscope (ok, maybe two microscopes) so I could see what was going on. I thought I would share my experience, impressions, and especially useful tips I found or discovered along the way. Here they are in roughly the order I tried them: Vinegar Eels These were my first. So easy. Apple cider vinegar and apples in a bottle on the shelf. Tip: The method usually given for harvesting them (with the filter floss and fresh water in narrow-mouthed bottle) is overly complex. I just sucked some vinegar out into a brine shrimp net, rinsed them a bit, and dumped them in the tank. Infusoria Infusoria are a great science project: It’s good fun watching a jar of weak vegetable broth process from clear to cloudy with bacteria to clear with tiny paramecium motes of food swimming around. I had great fun looking at infusoria under my microscope. But it can be an unpredictable and smelly hassle, too. Sometimes the cultures go bad, and it can be hard to start cultures at the right moment so you have infusoria ready when your fry need it. Still, it’s cheap and readily available. Tip: Don't use cabbage or brussels sprouts to start your infusoria, or it will be extra stinky. Moina — Round 1 These guys caught my eye from the start, since they are small, I keep mostly small fish, and you can order the eggs from Geenwater Farms on Amazon. The eggs worked, and pretty soon I had a nice little colony of them growing in two 2.5-gallon drink dispensers. It was a hit-and-miss process that you can read about here: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/31271-any-ideas-to-refine-this-moinadaphnia-culture-approach/ I tried all sort of things: Co-culturing with snails and/or black worms. Feeding the snails vegetable and watermelon scraps. Growing aquaponic strawberries with them. Adding corn husks to increase surface area which some articles suggested would be useful. Blasting them with grow lights 20 hours a day. I also tried and tried to grow some green water, but to no avail. Well, almost no avail: I could grow green water (https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/29405-crashed-moina-cultures-converted-to-accidental-green-water/), but my moina wouldn’t eat whatever variety of algae it was. In the end, it worked ok, but the cultures would crash every 6 weeks or so, which was annoying. Eventually, the drink dispensers developed cracks, I got frustrated, and I gave up (for a time…). Black Worms I tried black worms at about the same time as moina — first keeping them in a bowl with an air stone and then graduating to bigger and bigger containers. These would crash on me too — all of sudden they would all just disappear. I thought maybe they had escaped en-masse, but I never found any evidence of that. They just vanished. I did some experiments about how to prevent this: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/31877-suggestions-including-salt-to-prevent-blackworm-culture-crashes/. My main conclusion is that building a self-sustaining culture of black worms is pretty hard. They don’t grow that fast, so you'd need a very large population to generate enough biomass to be self-sustaining. But it is pretty easy to keep them alive for months (and get some growth). This has two advantages: 1) I can buy them in larger quantities and 2) I can weather the occasional shortage (There was a really bad/long national shortage last winter). Most useful resource: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/20459-big-bad-blackworm-tower-%E2%80%93-culture-journal/ Tips: Black worms are a widely-used model organism in biology, so there are 100s of research papers written about them. Unfortunately, very few provide practical advice about raising them. Instead, most suggest the “paper towel method” which is a completely useless mess. Just use some gravel and a sponge filter. Tips: According to one source, black worms often come infested with external parasites, which can cause cultures to crash. The solution is to soak the worms in a 5-6% salt solution for 20 minutes. Since I’ve been doing this, I’ve had no more crashes. Interesting fact: Black worms eat head down. So, when you see them sticking out of the substrate, that’s their rear end and gills. Grindal Worms I was excited about these — small, supposedly easy to culture, and definitely easy to purchase at my LFS. The only draw back is that you have to feed them every day, which is a hassle. I just fed mine cat food, and they’d do great… for a while. Then something would go wrong: Mites, fruit flies, mold, nematodes (https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/34442-whats-going-on-in-my-grindal-worm-culture/), god knowns what, and the culture would fail. It was super frustrating, because it seemed like it should be so easy. They just would never multiply enough. Maybe I harvested too much too early. Overall, very discouraging, especially since they are great size for many of the fish I keep. Tip: My LFS sold cultures with an unsalted (and preferably raw) peanut in it. It would keep the cultures going if they didn’t feed them for a day or two. I’ve never seen this tip anywhere else, and it is really helpful. Paramecium (photo credit: Wikipedia) Trying to avoid the hassle of infusoria, I ordered a pure culture of paramecium from a biological supply company. The idea is paramecium are bigger, more nutritious, and more reliable than infusoria. I didn’t really find this to be the case. Mostly I found that it was really hard to keep my paramecium culture from being contaminated and then overrun by other, smaller ciliates (which is basically what’s in infusoria), which sort of defeats the purpose. Tips: Like black worms, paramecium have been studied ad infinitum by scientists. Also, like black worms the guidance for culturing them is annoying. There are two standard methods frequently cited in the scientific literature. The first involves making a tea of timothy hay (whatever that is). The second suggests boiling a precise number of wheat berries in a volume of water. Both of these methods are needlessly fussy. For the first, I have no idea where to buy timothy hay. For the second, wheat berries, while cheap on a per-ounce basis, can be hard to find in small quantities. (Pro tip: you can buy “farrow” in the bulk food section of grocery stores. It's just wheat berries). A better solution is to just throw in a piece of dried, uncooked pasta. Snails I had a pea puffer tank for an almost a year and raised rams horn and bladder snails for them. Nothing could really be easier. You can feed them anything and they breed like mad. Mine seemed to like watermelon rind alot. Scuds (aka Gammarus) I got the scuds for the pea puffers too. They take a while to get established because their breeding cycle is about 90 days, but once they are going, they can’t be stopped. I mean they really can’t be stopped, even if you wanted to stop them. They are like cockroaches. Every tank I have is now infested with them. My conclusion is that scuds are fine if you have enough fish to keep their population in check, but this can take a significant number of fish. Also, they grow to be pretty large, so you need pretty big fish to keep them under control. For instance, my nine pea puffers in a 20-long did fine, but when I replaced the puffers with two female bettas and a 6 guppies the scuds got out of hand. When they are out of control they will eat everything. For me, they have eaten: The leaves on all my java moss Many of my stem plants (starting at the roots) Some of by Anubis Most of my crypts. Some of my java ferns. A bunch of black worms when they got into my blackwork culture (I have video of this somewhere. Scuds are savage) Corydoras eggs The breeding colony of assassin snails in one of my tanks. They also have a big downside compared to moina or daphnia: They spend most of their time hiding rather than being out one the water column where fish can easily find them. For complicated life reasons, I’m going to have to shut down all my tanks in a few months, which I think will be my only chance of getting rid of them. I don’t plan on inviting them back. They are too hard to control. Tip: To harvest I would float a piece of zucchini in the tank. After a couple hours it would be covered with scuds and I’d lift it out with a brine shrimp net. Tip: In the picture you can see a blue scud that showed up in one of my tanks. Anyone want to selectively breed the next colorful crustacean sensation? These could be the next cherry shrimp! Brine Shrimp I came late to brine shrimp, since the daily grind harvesting and hatching seemed a bit intimidating, and I really wanted moina to work. But I started breeding fish and moina couldn't keep up. Overall, it’s very clear why brine shrimp are so popular — They are no less work than all the other kinds of live food (and maybe more), but they are much, much more reliable. At first, I used those black flying saucer hatcheries, which work great for small quantities. Then (unwilling to pay for the Ziss) I moved on to a hanging beverage bottle setup. After some experimentation, I developed what I think is a reasonably nice setup and routine for hatching and harvesting. Tip: You can do much better than 3/16 airline tubing to drain your hatchery. My system uses 3/8" push-fit tubing (like RODI system fittings, but bigger) and a 3D-printed adapter to inject air. It can drain my 1-liter hatchery in 21 seconds (vs. 63 seconds for the 3/16 airline tubing based system). Take that, Ziss! Tip: There is actually difference between different brands of brine shrimp eggs. I spent too much time investigating. You can read about that here: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/34636-investigating-differences-in-brine-shrimp-eggs/. Easy Infusoria During one of my fish breeding adventures, I was using the some ultra-fine fry food. I was probably over-feeding because a lot of fell to bottom of the small enclosure I had the fry in. I noticed that over a couple days the food gave rise to whitish layer on floor of the container. Out of curiosity, I stuck some under my microscope and found it to be teaming with ciliates and other infusoria-like critters. So, that’s how I make infusoria now: I sprinkle in some food when the fry are out of their eggs and wait for the white stuff to develop. The fry can eat the food or the critters. I found that my Live Food Food (see below) works fine for this too. Green Water I did eventually get green water going, but by accident. I had an idle 20-long grow out tank that I neglected after selling the fry and low-and-behold it turned emerald green. And this time it was the chlorella -- the good kind of green water. I didn't really know what to do with it, though. I used some to start a new moina culture (see below -- it worked fine) and gave a way some at the local fish club, but it doesn't seem to be needed to keep the moina alive, so I ended up dumping most of it. Moina — Round 2 (w/ Daphnia) After all of the above frustration, I found myself day-dreaming about moina again. This time around I bought two, 2.5 gallon aquariums and set them up with heaters, air-lift tubes for circulation, and permanent siphons and with a valve so I could harvest them easily. My eggs had apparently gone stale and wouldn’t hatch, so I ended up buy a mixed culture of moina and daphnia at my local fish club auction. I’m keeping it simple this time: No intentional co-culturing — just the moina and the daphnia. And all I feed them my Live Food Food (recipe below). Shifting from drink dispensers to aquariums was a huge win since I can actually clearly see what’s going on inside. So far, so good. It’s been two months and nothing has crashed. The moina and daphnia seem to coexist just fine. The main difference with my approach this time is based on a detail in this excellent article (https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FA024) that I had overlooked: They don’t suggest raising moina as a long-term, self-sustaining culture. They suggest doing it as a batch culture. So, this time, I’m expecting them to crash and I’m prepared to strip the tank and start again (which is why I have two cultures going). By accident, these cultures also produce significant quantities of dero worms and seed shrimp. Tip: Only feed moina and daphnia when the water is crystal clear. This prevents fouling. Tip: Bending acrylic tubing is fun! The overflows are made from 3/4" acrylic tubing that I heated and bent with a heat gun. Then I epoxied a drip irrigation valve to one end. The air valve at the top lets me draw water up to get it into siphon. Then I can dispense at will! I also built the airlifts by bending and drilling smaller acrylic tubing. Live Food Food Finally, I thought I’d share my recipe for my Live Food Food. It’s a tweaked version a recipe from Aqarimax Pets ( https://www.aquarimax.com/). They suggest mixing it with water which is a hassle, but I just keep in a plastic jar with holes drilled in the top and sprinkle it into my tanks. This is what I feed daphnia, moina, and black worms. I also use it to create infusoria too. Ingredients: 1 part garbanzo bean flour 1 part pea protein 1 part brown rice flour 2 parts spirulina powder Instructions: Combine. Mix. Feed. Notes The first three ingredients are available in the bulk food or specialty flour section and are super cheap. Spirulina powder is a little more expensive and available from Amazon. Here’s a rough nutritional analysis: Protein — 40.55% Carbohydrate — 40.76% Fat — 6.13% Fiber — 5.22% It's roughly similar to some commercial fish foods I looked up. The Future As I mentioned above, I have to shut down my all my tanks in a few months, but I should be back in business (scud-free) next summer. I think my first big project is going to be to build some 5-gallon moina/daphnia cultures into a sump+refugium+auto-feeding setup to simplify the feeding of micro-predators like scarlet badis, indostomus paradoxus, and freshwater pipefish. I have a forty-gallon tank that would be perfect for it.

I was reading through your journal cause I missed out on a lot and got excited that you got Snoopy a partner. Then got sad as I reached the last page. I'm really sorry for your loss. 😞 I just want to add another way for sexing bolivian rams and this has been true with all the rams I kept. If the breeding tube isn't out, the pelvic fins and anal fin are a good way to determine sex. This applies to adults or young adults only, when their fins are more grown or bigger. With males, the pelvic fins will touch the anal fin when folded. It will never touch for females no matter how grown they are. I currently have 4 females and they're around 3" or maybe a bit bigger and their pelvic fins never touches the anal fin. Hopefully it helps if you decide to buy another male for Snoopy.

I think keeping them in small containers is no help. I have a single plastic container which around 60 liter. Bigger is better Spirulina can cause ammonia spike quite fast. Usually uneaten sera micron start causing 0.5ppm ammonia reading in a fry container around 30-45 mins or so and it is %51 spirulina. Probably you are having issues with parameters and how small the 1/2g is so it is very hard to control the parameters I feed mine a mixture of active yeast and spirulina but tiny amount of both. I prepare it fresh for every feeding. I feed my culture once every 2-3 days, and other days they snack around the algae growth around. If you have access to green water that would be great. I tried to culture mine at home with fertilizer and long lighting but didnt work for me

On New Years Eve. this year, the local gardening columnist decided to do a weather review for the year. On 12-22-22 Southwest Ohio was hit by a "BOMB CYCLONE!"😱 We had a 52 degree temperature drop in 12 hours. 20-30 degree swings aren't unusual, but +44 down to -8 was too much. That explains what happened to my Bonsai. The rest of the year we had a mild spring, dry July, and a wet August. I was still picking vine ripened tomatoes the week before Christmas this year, so I'm not complaining too much.

Unfortunately white sand just doesn't stay clean very long My tan pool sand was cleaned 3 days ago and its already collecting debris. When cleaning the sand, I use only the siphon hose (no tube). Cutting the tip at about 45 degrees allows more water to flow in from the side, pulling more debris and less sand with it. Whatever sand you do pick up can be rinsed clean in a shallow bowl and returned to the aquarium.

I've done saltwater for about 6-7 years now. I think Cory put it best in a recent live stream - "I could keep like, two reefs, or my entire fishroom." I love saltwater fish and all the variety you can have, but I've found most of my reef tanks to be too needy. I get a bit burnt out, spending so much time on one tank. So, for me, I decided to tackle it a bit more like my freshwater tanks. Add water, fish, plants (Macroalgae coming soon) and skip the coral and advanced filtration. I think it'll work well, but we'll see. The plan is to keep a breeding pair of Banggais and a breeding pair of clowns in simple Fowlr setups. I'll add sand and a bit of live rock after QT, and the angel will move to a display tank in the living room. I'll probably keep a powerhead in each tank and remove the sponge filters once they're properly cycled with rock, and add in some green macros to help with nutrient export. I'm going to get a brute trash can for water storage, and just pump the water from the can to the tanks (already heated and at the correct salinity) so that, operationally, they'll be the same as the freshwater tanks. That's the plan, anyway. Not sure if it'll work out or not!

Mark's shrimp tanks uses it to collect duckweed for making shrimp food! Awesome work. I've gotten rid of it twice. Don't fear the duckweed! I used a specimen container and 2-3 buckets. I would pick through it manually and remove it by hand. Dip it in the container to remove the duckweed and then just put the "cleaned" plants in the bucket of water. Repeat that about 5-15 times and you'll feel like you got most of it. Cross your fingers and find out.

I like this one

Sorry to revive a dead post but this popped up when I was trying to see pothos vs potato information and I figured I should update this. the monstera definitely won, by a mile, the pothos is growing very strong and is as thick in the stem as my finger, but the monstera is fruiting, has 32 inch leaves (no sunlight) and has roots that span 6 feet by 3 feet, definitely the winner for large tanks but I would not recommend it for anything shy of 200+ gallons just because the roots will take over you tank, I can add way more photos if there is interest, there is very heavy plant load in this tank with the monstera but even when jam packed with goldfish the plants keep nitrates to basically 0, it got so strong I had to add close to 30 pounds of crushed coral just to keep the KH from crashing and it’s really done amazing keeping the water “clean”.

Hi everyone! This forum has been so helpful in my new fish keeping journey so far but I am a notorious over doer and I want to make sure I’m doing the right things. I am brand new to this so please dumb down any advice you have for me. 😄I have a new 10 gallon tank. It is planted with easy plants, I also have a hang on back filter that came with the tank with a pre filter sponge, a heater set to 76, an air stone and I used Fritz 7 (the bacteria stuff) and Fritz complete. I am also using easy green fertilizer and root tabs which I added at the beginning but I haven’t added again. It was set up and running for about 2 weeks, my plants were all showing growth, and I got 6 glow tetras. The fish were doing fine for the first few days. I was checking the the water twice a day with the aquarium co op strips and doing water changes as needed. According to the strips I had no ammonia, my nitrates fluctuated, and my nitrites seemed to go up to one and back down after a water change. A few days ago I lost a fish, the next day another fish. After that I decided to go and get the API water test. After I tested with that it looks like my ammonia is .5 and my nitrites are 1. I promptly did a water change but when I tested again a few hours later the tests were still reading the same so I did another 25% change. Also with changes I use the Fritz complete and a little bacteria. Then a few hours later I lost another fish. He was hanging out on the top almost gasping and then slowly died. I feel so bad, like I’m a fish murderer! Any suggestions would be so appreciated. Do I just have to wait this out? Am I doing too many water changes, should I be doing more? Also for reference my ph is 7.2 kh 120 and gh is off the chart high, like 300. Thank you to anyone who read this whole thing and has any advice. I really appreciate it.

Hi folks, My fish collection consists of danios, rasboras, Cory's and tetras. All of which are nano species plus cherry shrimp. I feed live BBS, daphnia, micro worms and vinegar eels. Various frozen foods, bug bites and vibra bites. I also sprinkle a bit of spirulina for the shrimp Other than ease of use is there any dietary need to feed prepared dry food?

So I have an Aquaclear HOB 50 filter, this morning I found one of my peppered cories stuck to the filter intake. I turned off the intake and he seemed pretty lethargic...but no fins seemed ripped. He's acting ok now tonight...but should he be ok? He seemed just stuck to the filter for awhile. He was breathing fast at first but it's slowed down.

I bought two daphnia magna cultures from Carolina just short of a month ago. I started them in two separate 1/2 gallon deli containers and have been feeding them mostly spirulina powder every few days. Sometimes I'll mix up spirulina with yeast and/or brown rice flour and feed that. Everything seemed to be going well and 4-5 days ago I started a 3rd culture by netting out some and putting them into a gallon pickle jar. All three cultures have air lines with slow aeration, big bubbles, no air stones. One of them has almost no daphnia left, a few days ago I poured the cultures into clean containers because the ones they were in were growing goop and I couldn't see them. The decrease in daphnia in this one culture in particular did not coincide with me doing the cleaning. It seems to have been declining. I never noticed anything drastically growing in population, but they were increasing for awhile with obvious new young dapnia making up the vast majority of the population. I've not tested the water, so perhaps there's a lot of ammonia... the bubbles cluster up a lot on top, but I assumed that was due to the general scum in the container. I've been topping them off with the same water I started the cultures with which were "spring water" from the grocery store. I've fed a handful (like 20 total) adults to my apistos and they are wild about them. I'd like to get these to take off, but I'm missing something. Wondering if I'm not feeding them the right stuff... or not keeping the water clean enough... or maybe a combination of things. Attached is a little thing I saw darting around in the culture that seems devoid of daphnia now. I think is this a copepod of some sort? What I'm wondering is if they could be causing the issue? I haven't noticed them in the other cultures, but that absolutely doesn't mean they're not there.

Can you snap a few photos? or upload a YouTube video? I'm interested in seeing what the rock-work you've constructed looks like for them. Very excited for you!

Well, I have one male ready to go! He's been guarding a spot between 2 rocks for a bit, pursuing too young and unready females that venture near.

That's really unfortunate, I'm sorry. Keep an eye on the little one and try to get a prefilter on the intake if you can. I've never seen one in an intake like that, but they do LOVE flow. For the sake of it, what is the stocking on the tank and what is the temp of the tank right now? They might be chasing flow / oxygenation if it's a bit hot. (which would just mean to try to add an airstone if you can at minimum)

I've mostly only had nano fish (though I do have a few koi outside). I would say color is more important. Don't care so much between slow or fast moving since I love watching the honey gourami as much as the CPDs. I want some larger fish for the big tank. They don't have to be huge, but I was thinking in the 6-8" range? Would love to have plants but if I find some fish I love that aren't plant compatible, I could be convinced. Yea, good call, the metal racks I've looked at are 2500lbs per shelf, and it'll be in our basement on concrete. Those rainbow sharks and Mascara barbs look pretty cool. I looked into SAE for the current setup but heard they can get a little aggressive as they get older, so I decided to pass for now.

Our house is set at 58, but the basement is actually a bit warmer. Probably 60-62.

All this is why, even though I got 2 tanks for free, I am only going to set up the one 14 gal. It will be primarily corals and that's it...like I said before, might get a couple fish, but I just want it for the coral honestly. Macroalgae tanks fascinate me though. Been watching a lot on them.

Little ones up close this evening…

Hi @Felicia welcome to the forum. In a 5 gallon tank there are not many fish that will thrive. Having several types is not advisable in a 5 gallon tank. Some ideas would be a trio of Heterandria formosa -least killifish. Like guppies they give birth to live young. OR Banded panchax- rocket/clown killifish OR Boraras merah- phoenix rasbora OR Boraras brigittae-chili rasbora To make it more community feel you could add neocaridina shrimp with any 1 of these and a nerite snail to keep the windows clean after the tank is well established

Those are copepods. They cohabitate well with daphnia. No issues. They do make fabulous Tank inhabitants for fish you are encouraging to spawn.

This time of year most folks keep their house warm. Mine sat in front of a central air conditioner vent and did great. I noticed when my hubby kicked the heat on that comes out if that same vent my adults perished.

I can’t move the tanks but I could tip them over. And a toddler climbing up the side could potentially knock over a top heavy item. I’ll look into the earthquake straps that might be the best option.

Look what you made me do 😂 I was suppose to try just one but I also needed dry food and then I saw that they have a floating one for the betta. Then I saw they have one for goldfish. I don’t have goldfish but I wanted to mix all three before feeding them to my fish. I have a problem with buying fish food. I can never just buy one 😭

Will try this for sure. It's on sale at petco right now and I might be able to stop by after work 🙂 I'll try just the nano pellets in that case. My fish are a bit picky and NLS is a bit dense that northfin and I noticed that my cichlids would spit out NLS and then try again, then repeat the same cycle. They have never done this to Northfin. Have you tried the Fluval Bug Bites Spirulina flakes and the Color flakes? It does have fish in it tho. Just wanted to see what you think of the food.

I switched from xtreme towards northfin. Of the xtreme, I use the spirulina / krill flake. The pellets, my fish couldn't chew on and they didn't sink for me. the nano pellets might be better than the ones I had (1.5mm semi-floating) I am talking 4-5 days later and they'd still be floating at the surface in the corners of the tank. It got to the point where I ran some tests just to verify what on earth I was experiencing. Simlar issue with the shrimp food where it was so dense and so hard that the shrimp couldn't actually break it apart. Soaking it didn't help much either and it would take ~3 days for the shrimp to eat some food as opposed to 6-24 hours for other stuff I've tried. In terms of the bug pro and things like that I will mention is oft because the food is that good. Aqueon Nutrinsect is fish free and there's an advantage to that when it comes towards something like shark conservation (personally something I care about). The food itself, apart from all of that has really solid ingredients from everything I can tell, but most importantly.... the texture of the food is spot on. It's like a firm squish. The fish can get in there and break it apart, but it's not going to leave a mess on you at all. Pellet size if good enough that it works on any smaller mouth fish. I have used 2 northfin foods so far, the krill pro pellet (1mm size) and the cichlid veggie pellet (1mm size). I use that in replacement of flake just because I only have corydoras and shrimp right now. High flow, that stuff sinks extremely quickly. With less flow, it is semi-floating. It's not too hard that you can't break it up, and it's got good stuff in there. I like the addition of things like rosemary on the ingredients list. I was not a fan at all of the algae wafers, which is pretty much the exact same recipe as the cichlid veggie pellets. NLS I haven't, but want to try the algaemaxx stuff when I have some fish in the upper regions of the tank. Omega one, I've used before, but it didn't last long once I just decided to get food online. But yeah, to your question at the end there.... crave flake is a mix of the krill and spirulina. It's a good one to have on hand if you have upper dwelling fish.

Sorry to hear you lost your fish 😞 Do you have a heater in your tank? When you say that this happened last winter as well, I assume it was the same fish? My general thoughts on parasites is that they are ALWAYS present in aquariums, but typically not able to overpower an otherwise healthy fish. But if they're hit with a stressor like shipping or maybe a heater goes out and instead of being at 80 degrees and happy it drifts down to 68 (or maybe even lower) and that's enough to suddenly allow the parasites to start overpowering the host. She starts eating less so if the worms were consuming half of her calories before but now suddenly she's only eating half as much, she will start to dwindle. A year old fish might be able to take it, but a two year old one might not. I personally think two years is pretty good for a betta, I've not kept a ton of them, but I have never had good luck personally.

I've been doing some searching and my current thought is too much green in the light spectrum so my next experiment is for the next 30 days to turn off the green channel in my light; tank doesn't look as nice but we will see if that helps.

This is such an intriguing option! I tried it, but it never worked. The worms would just sort of slowly dwindle away. I think maybe my scrubbers had some kind of cleaning agent on them. Maybe I'll give it another go later in the year.

Welcome to the forum. I don't doubt that they're doing fine now, but I'd be very surprised if that continues as they get older and approach sexual maturity. It's risky keeping just one, since they will sometimes attack any other fish in the tank, but additional dwarf gouramis is really asking for trouble. They are also notoriously susceptible to illness (usually fatal), so with those two strikes against them the best option would probably be to take them back to the store. I know they're beautiful fish, but I would never recommend them to a new fish keeper. Other gourami species, like pearl gouramis and honey gouramis, rarely have those issues if you're looking for an alternative.

I’m guessing male and female showing off to each other for possible courting.Telling sex in the d is about the dorsal spots. I don’t remember the entire explanation but girls have more pronounced black and white. Left is girl right is boy my girl my boy

I embrace the Duckweed and then it disappears. At the the LFS this weekend, I asked when they were going to get floating plants. They said I would have to wait until spring unless I wanted Duckweed. I told them I use only wild caught organic Duckweed. It just doesn't grow in my aquariums. When they told me I should stick to plastic plants, I held up the plants I had just purchased and asked them if they wanted them back. This got me to thinking about whether all Duckweed is created equal. Is it possible that the Duckweed passed around in the hobby has adapted, or have I just managed to avoid this problem?

Oh I also made videos of my 360liter tank /that feels too empty to me/ and of my asian tank https://youtu.be/72Phhl9U3dw https://youtu.be/5A7eoJuGUhg funny how I notice the glass and the algae AFTER I take the pictures/videos...

I searched many online places and found they all were selling c that were not actually c. I totally lucked out that my Lfs had 1 true c and their supplier had 2 more available that were tank raised. The c are much more aggressive and reclusive and down right male bully to his girl as well as just less personality than the d. I prefer the d hands down. They are so animated, friendly and their constant flirting and never bickering makes them such a joy. The d also just live to show off their fins. The c never changed color much but my d when going through mating rituals will change color and pattern 3-4 times in 15 minutes. They are awesome so consider it a very lucky mislabel

Can’t wait to see them and thanks for the advice!

Yeah my opinion of that guy's information has changed over the last year. He seems to have pretty extreme views.

I'm not saying this isn't correct. But I've used a few of these products and most of them are showing measurable nitrites after 24 hours or less. I'd like to see his raw data, honestly. I've seen a lot of stuff from that guys' website that seems to fly in the face of a ton of my own observations.

Not bad! I’ve only got the Murphy one which I’ve put on my ski helmet. 😅

i have quite the collection... On the laptop im typing on right now i have the Betta, Odessa Barb, Goldfish, Killifish, Nermy, Cardinal Tetra, and Cherry shrimp.

Good times… 🥹 My Xmas present from my grandparents came! It’s a 47 liter aquarium (10 ish gal) meant for saltwater or fresh…it’s got a more aesthetic feel to it, so I’m tempted to use it for marine… what are your thoughts?!

Well getting cuvies right now will be difficult; i have t in one aquarium; a in another aquarium and i guess d in a third. To get c i'll have to setup another aquarium since i can't put them with the cupido or with t/a/d since they will cross breed. Darn wholesalers - actually i'm not sure i'm unhappy with the d's they are colouring up nicely and so far they have been quite polite without being pigs (the t and a are royal pigs; the a has bitten my fingers a few times when i feed them).

I’m slowly getting into saltwater….how has it worked for you @Chris?

My stuff isn't brown (diatom?) or bba; definitely deep green. Also the tank is fairly new (3 1/2 months) with extremely light stocking. I did get the python into the open areas where there were no plants and other than fine dust from the substrate itself there wasn't much. I know what you are talking about because i've had simlar issue on several year old eco complete substrate in an aquarium with medium to heavy stocking. This is definitely something else but i'm not sure what - yet.

A couple of things come to mind localized inflammation of the tissue due to an infection or injury possible growth what are your water parameters ammonia nitrite nitrate pH KH GH temperature @Tropicalfishkeeping201

I don't think the poop is very noticeable in these photos. The aquasoil mixing with the sand is more of the issue, but that's harder to fix.

I would not personally be concerned about either unless they are on a stand where the bottom could potentially be compromised (ex: those metal Imagitarium stands). Adding weight at the bottom of the stand (cinderblocks are great for this) to stabilize would be what I do. Aquariums tend to weight roughly 10x their capacity, as in a 39g will weigh around 390lbs before you think about the stand. That alone helps it to stay in place.

Good luck! If I had to bet though, I'd put money on Duckweed in the long haul. It just takes one... 🤣 🌱

It's looks like it's got weight loss what I would do is treat with levamisole active ingredient in expel p

Welcome to the forum! That tank is going to look great. Please post pics when your plants come in. On a five gallon, go for some snails and shrimp. A mystery snail and some Amano shrimp will help with cleaning and shouldn't bother your betta. And depending on the betta's disposition, a small group of nano fish like ember tetras, chili rasboras, or endlers might work. I'm a fan of kuhli loaches too, but they like community so fitting 3 or more in a 5 gallon probably is too crowded an environment for them to really thrive.