tolstoy21

Water conditioner typically does not affect the hardness and/or Ph of the water. With a Kh as high as yours, I doubt there is any reasonable amount of drift wood or leaves you could use to significantly drop those numbers. Hard to say if tetras will do well in your water because I can't tell what your Ph/KH reading are other than they hit the maximum that the test strip can read. Neon's should be fine up to a Ph or 8. Higher than that, maybe? Honestly, I think all of us just starting this hobby tend to stress over water params only to find that, over time, many typical, pet store fish will acclimate to a wider range of parameters than the internet would have us believe. In my experience, trying to change your water's makeup can be a frustrating and usually unsuccessful effort. There are products you can use to lower the Ph/Kh of your aquarium, but these tend to make your parameters bounce. It's best to just stay the course with what you have. What fish appreciate the most is stable parameters over perfect parameters. Good luck and stay with the hobby even if you don't succeed with your first tank. (Alas, many of us don't. I know I didn't). And ask any question you want. Many knowledgable people here to help you on the journey.

Make sure the bottom pane is not tempered before drilling or else it will shatter into a million bits. This is easy to check with a pair of polarized sun glasses. Many tutorials online show how to do this.

I use a dollar-a-gallon 29g. This was a bunch of years back, but I don't remember the 2 glass dividers being super expensive. But, yeah use anything that will hold water, is easy to work with and inexpensive.

Agree 100% on the filter socks. I wished I had planned them into my sump design.

I followed the below video for as a simple design. Plumbing the sump and adjusting flow rates is a different topic not covered here and will depend on how you plan to feed water to and from the sump. You will need a install a PVC gate valve to tweak the flow rate for the return line to the sump. Additionally there are a number of options on for how you can configure the overflow/return -- https://www.bulkreefsupply.com/content/post/md-2017-08-durso-herbie-bean-animal-overflow#:~:text=Durso%2C Herbie%2C and BeanAnimal refer,see used on an aquarium.

If this fish s truly constipated, epsom salt and a little bit if smushed peas can help relieve it. https://be.chewy.com/aquarium-fish-constipation/ Epsom salt can also be attempted as a possible cure for dropsy --

Ah, Ok I see what you're up against now. Just drill the clear parts. 😛 😉🤪🤣

Keeping the fry in the tank runs the risk of 2 things: 1) The mother killing other fish in your aquarium while protecting the fry 2) The fry being eaten by other fish I use a turkey baster on fry all the time. If you're gentle with the fry, they'll be fine.

Feed them! Find foods small enough for them to eat. Frozen baby brine shrimp are easy to find in many pet stores. I would move the mother back to the tank. She'll be unhappy in the breeder box and won't really be able to care for the fry in a meaningful way in the box. I wouldn't put the fry back into the community tank if you want them all to survive. The magic of nature! Sometimes fish will just do their thing without you knowing or doing anything. Other times, you really have to usher along the process. The conditions were just right. But the size of 'just right' is not a tiny, hard-to-hit bullseye. A lot of times its a more forgiving range or parameters. My guess is they will breed again. Hard to say. In regards to LFSs, I've gotten everything from 'Go Away!', to 'well take em off your hands for free', to store credit or $10 a piece. In terms of cash or trade-in value, it would be roughly 1/4 what the store would sell them for. For apistos, typically you sell them in male/female pairs. Good luck raising them and have fun!

It feels like just yesterday that they were in diapers and eating paramecium.

Not in my experience. I haven't seen that in any of my fish. I guess it could be normal, just haven't seen it myself. Attaching pics of my male and female.

I'd put them in like every 3 months. if it's a new plant, just bury three or four tabs in the substrate underneath it. As swords grow, they can create quite extensive root systems so you'll want to increase the number of tabs at that point, and position them all around the plant, not directly under it.

And they will work fine without the hassle of harvesting from nature.

Agreed. Make sure you have bits rated for steel, otherwise they will either burn out or break before you get through the stand. It also helps to have a drill with decent RPMs.

Try conditioning them without live foods and see if that works. Mine spawn a few times a week just eating things like Hikari Vibra Bites, black worm pellets, freeze dried tubifex worms, Northfin Bug Pro, etc. I make a mix in out of this and feed it 2x a day. I think the key is quality foods, not necessarily live. But yeah, you can't go wring with live foods. I feed the fry BBS and, as they get a little bigger, grindal worms, eventually switching them to flake. So, no real recommendations on what is good that can be harvested from nature. But a good, quality flake food, crushed up, will work as well.

Ignore the high-range Ph test. It's only applicable if your Ph is above the level that's readable by the regular Ph test. The high-range test is more applicable to African cichlid or reef/saltwater aquariums. On your water it's just giving bogus readings cause your Ph is not super alkaline. Looking at your readings, I'd take an educated guess that your Ph drops over time as a result of buffers being eaten up by botanicals, or whatever you have in there that acidifies the water (fish waste itself can have this effect too). Try the fluval pellets and see if they can help lessen the impact of your water changes. Let us know how it goes. If you stage your water in a bucket, you can mix in some Seachem acid buffer to eat up some of the available Kh and reduce the overall Ph before adding it to the tank. (A few drops of muriatic also works, but you'd have to do a little bit of testing and tweaking to get the dosage right).

Yup that's the stuff.

Hmmm. Not sure. I honestly don't put a lot of thought into it. My well water runs at a Gh of 9 and a Kh of 0. I will typically cut this with some RO water, but I've never measured how much. Maybe I do a 50-75% WC with straight RO to drop the Gh. But I've never proven to myself that this is even necessary. I do separate the males and females a week and fatten them up, before adding them to the breeding tank. I'll leave them in the breeding tank maybe 3 -4 days and then pull them.

1. Depends on where your softener is plumbed into your system. Typically there are the first item in any chain so bypassing it will bypass anything upstream of it, like a hot water heater. Having the hot water heater before the softener seems antithetical to its purpose. 2. What are you looking to avoid that's in the softened water? I would imagine you'd clear the existing water from the pipes in a minute or two, tops. Yup. If all you are looking to do is boost GH, then add some Seachem equilibrium. Softened water itself won't harm fish.

I've used both regular peat from a garden store and Fluval's peat pellets. I prefer the Fluval pellets over regular peat because they take zero preparation and don't stain the water. I'm not against the 'blackwater' look at all, but when I used regular peat, the water turned so dark I could not see the fish in it. I guess I needed to soak and rinse the peat more or something, which is why I went back to Fluval's product, because they have done all the hard work for you. In the instances where I have used it, I was using it in straight RO water with no Kh present. In your case, I'm curious if peat will react fast enough against the addition of buffers to counteract the sudden presence of Kh. In my experience, water will react to the presence of Kh much faster (driving Ph up) than it does to presence of botanicals (which gradually drives Ph down). Do you know how much does a water change swing your Ph? It might not be enough to be of any concern at all.

I'd not bother taking a Ph reading of RO water, as it the result will have no real meaning if the TDS is the resulting water is truly zero. Any buffers or acidifiers will have a pretty fast effect on RODI water. I don't have any experience with Hongsoi, but most of the apistos I've bred have been in a TDS of between 30 - 150. The only apoistogramma I have bred in close to zero TDS is Abacaxis, with require a Ph around 4.5 to spawn. I typically focus more on the Ph than TDS when I breed. However, some species do appreciate mineral-poor water when breeding, but that's more a factor of Gh than Kh (I think; I could be wrong). For these fish I'll make RODI water and mix in some of the Seachem American Cichlid Salt to get an approximate TSD (usually between 30 - 100 for most species I keep). I don't have a target TDS in mind, just something substantially lower than my well water (TDS 300). The moment I see fry in the aquarium, I turn my water change system back on for that aquarium, and raise them the fry in my well water, not RODI water. I had the same problem you are currently having with Zebra Acara, but never got down to the root cause of the issue. I was going to run a UV steralizer in their aquarium, as I've seen people suggest for that species, but my female passed away before I got a chance to try. Wished I could be more helpful.

I don't keep a lot of neocaridina shrimp, and have naturally acidic water, but that Ph sounds pretty high for neos. I don't trust Ph meters unless they are from a known good company and can be calibrated by the user. But given the closeness of the Ph shown on your TDS pen, compared to your other testing methods, it's probably somewhat in-the-ball-park accurate. I would google around and see if you can find any advice for keeping shrimp in a high Ph.

It's possible that the population has come to a size where it has stabilized itself, meaning there too may adults for babies to survive. I have a bunch of caridina tanks, and the one that has a few hundred shrimp in it did the same, the adults stopped producing fry. I see berried females every now and again, but never any fry. I still maintain that tank, and if I move juvenile shrimp into it that had previously bred, they too stop breeding. The smaller aquariums that I maintain for selective breeding have a much more reasonable number number of shrimp and produce babies all the time. Even the grow outs I move their shrimplets into eventually start producing babies if I don't relocate the inhabitants to the 'sterile' tank soon enough. All of these shrimp are from the same line, which I've maintained for about 7 years now, so there is a lot of inbreeding, which is typical when selectively breeding caridina shrimp. The only time I've seen massive die off is when I've had a build up of organics and a plummet in Ph one of my aquariums. In this aquarium, I had a matten filter hit critical mass. The Gh appears at an optimal level, but what Ph do you read as a result of your KH levels?

You might want to try keeping your Kh near or at zero to get the Ph below 7. When I mix water for apisto spawning (those that wont spawn in my tapwater), I use Seachem's American Cichlid Salt. Straight RO water theoretically has no Ph, so when measured it will appear to have a Ph of 7 (exactly neutral) until acted upon by something that moves the dial towards acidic or alkaline. An easy way to get the Ph lower somewhat naturally is to remineralize the RO water with something that adds no Kh or buffer. This can be supplemented with the introduction of tannins form leaves or blackwater extract.

@jwcarlson Yeah, they start to color up early on. The german breeder I watched on youtube (which I very poorly translated using you tube's closed captioning) also mentioned that as well. They redden up very early. I'm eager to see how many I get to adulthood as I want to put a decent sized school in my 125.