tolstoy21

That should be totally fine.

Im not sure for neocaridina. I know with my caridina, I shoot for 1 scoop per 5 gallons of water. Where does this get me in terms of water params, I'm really not sure. I forgot a long time ago. For caridina shrimp, I measure more by TDS than Gh/Kh. TDS doesn't tell me that's in the water, but gives me an idea of if I mixed the proportions correctly. My neocaridina just get my tap/well water (dKh 0 / dGh 9 / TDS 300+). The Salty Shrimp Gh/Kh+ instructions indicate using one level scoop with the provided scooper per approx 2.5g of water (10 liters).

I find that this is somewhat true. At times, you can expect to lose a small percentage of the new shrimp you add, especially if they are adults. But the deaths should not be excessive. I find that shrimp from US breeders acclimate much better than imported/aquarium-store shrimp. I usually don't lose many shrimp when I buy them from good breeders online. Shrimp is the one aquatic species I highly recommend getting through your aquarium club or online, over purchasing them from a local fish store (unless it's a really good one that sources from US breeders). Looking at your params, you water does seem a tad on the hard and alkaline side. Unfortunately I don't have experience keeping neocaridina shrimp in a Gh/Kh that high to offer advice. If you do switch to RO water I would recommend using Salty Shrimp Kh/Gh+, and not mixing in your tap water (but this is just because I find it's easier to get the same results with each bucket of RO you create/mix). A 5 gallon bucket typically takes a single scoop of the product. Mixing in your tap water would also work perfectly fine. Salty Shrimp is just my preference. As for water changes, just perform a 25% change every few days over the course of a week or so. That should be sufficient in my experience. If anything shocks shrimp, it's typically sudden, large changes in temperature more than changes in hardness (avoiding extremes of course). Shrimp can handle a large jump or dip in temperatures if it happens over the course of a day -- going from like 78F to 55F. Sudden changes however can force them into premature molt.

@cmo1922 Believe it or not my caridina shrimp are pretty hardy in a wide range of water params (I've had them in tanks with a 9dGH and 300+ TDS). Likewise, I've had my neocaridina in my caridina tanks. The common factor for all these tanks is the Ph, which sits around 6.4 out of my tap, and also when I make RO and use a buffering substrate. My neocaridina are rock solid in that environment. The only problem with the above is that my CRS never ever breed in my tap water, even though that are as content as can be living in it. In general, all shrimp (caridina and neos) need a dGH between 6 - 9. That's another commonality amongst the types. Of course, my shrimp have been in my water params for many many generations, so it's highly probable they have grown very tolerant of it over time. More unsolicited shrimpy pics! (I know, I've posted these to the forum before. I need to take more/newer pics!)

Nope. I've been keeping a line of crystal reds for a bunch of years now and have spawned literally thousands of them. I feed them the following -- Canned green beans (their main food) Stuff my plecos don't finish (zucchini, sweet potato, cucumber, etc) Left over spirulina flake (food my fish don't like) Decomposing oak leaves from some of my blackwater tanks (I get these from my yard during autumn raking) Dirty plants from other tanks covered in algae and gunk (best cleaning service there is) BacterAE (the only commercial food I use because I wanted a powdered food) All of this is to say that you don't really need to go out of your way with special foods or supplements if you don't want to. There is nothing wrong with commercial products, but a lot of vegetables contain enough calcium to keep your shrimp healthy if you don't want to pay for that. Link to list of veggies high in calcium Shrimp are scavengers and opportunists are heart. They would eat pizza crust if I dropped it in the tank (not recommended!) Unsolicited picture of one of my little garbage eaters below. 🙂

Sometimes mine do, sometimes they don't. I find my larger AC's will self prime, but my smaller ones won't. Not sure why.

Yeah, a cannister filter will outperform a HOB any day of the week. But that comes at cost and complexity, not that I have anything against canister filters. But it's like comparing a bulldozer to a bunch of guys with shovels. Totally agree. This is why product reviews are good, evening knowing that every reviewer experiences and interacts with thew product differently.

My way of approaching the Tidal is to do away with the sponge and just put a bag of ceramic media in the bottom 50%, then fill the top 50% with Polyfill. The action of the media chamber filling with water and emptying out does seem to pull water through that media, even if it does not routew to go directly through it. If you look at how the AquaClear basket fits into an AquaClear, and where the openings/grate sit, the flow principal seems the same. The water gets directed inot the media chamber closer to the top and does not go directly through the sponge in the filter either (see pic). However, the AC's work great and all evidence suggests a good deal of water still circulates through the media in the bottom. In fact, I have found in both filters that when the bottom sponge gunks up completely, it has a tendency to then push the top most media up out of the water. The ACs are worse at this as they sometimes push their whole basket upward, whereas the Tidals have that blue button to indicate, Hey man you might want to take a look at this and do some cleaning! Experience and opinions vary from person to person, but this has been mine with both filters which I recommend equally, but for different reasons.

Totally agree on cories being great at getting mulm into the water column. In my experience with HOBs, they won't get all the mulm and detritus up, even with a supplemental powerhead in the aquarium, but they do tend to push it all to one or two places where it can be easily removed with a siphon. I tend to rely on this in my messier tanks, and arrange things so it all ends up in the easiest corner of the aquarium to remove it. As for cories, if you have a bunch, their movements are so randomized (cause they have minds of their own!) they do a great job at kicking everything up in a way that it doesn't find an eddy or calm spot to settle in as easily. Plus they are super fun to watch! No matter how hard you try, pumps and filters tend to create that one slack zone where everything collects, but this isn't such a bad thing as it makes maint easier.

Same here, except once, when I added Flourite sand to my tank without pre-rinsing, and the pump forever forward sounded like a dying goose (even after an impeller replacement). But this an outlier. I have a few other AquaClears that run nice and silent and are workhorses. In general, I love the AQ's but wished they were self priming. I also love the Tidal, but wished it didn't have the skimmer. This is specifically in regards to tanks that have shrimp and smaller fish. Even if I turn down the skimmer flow, shrimp still go in their out of curiosity!) Honestly, those are the two considerations that I would think about when choosing one over the other. Do you have small fish or shrimp? No. Then I'd favor The tidal. Yes. I'd favor the AquaClear. Both are great choices. --- Oh, have to add the following . . . AquaClears are waaaay easier to fully disassemble and clean, if you need to. The Tidal parts are fit together pretty tight and I'm always scared I'll break them when taking them apart to get at the pump, etc. They are obviously meant to be snapped apart for maintenance, but I find you have to put some muscle into it.

The Tidal has been mentioned, but I'll add a vote for that as well. I find it pretty silent. More silent that an AquaClear, maybe by a little. The only thing that makes noise on the tidal is the skimmer section, which can gurgle a bit if the aquarium is low on water. The AquaClear, on the other hand, with its motor out of water, can sometimes get noisy if the impeller is off-kilter or has some sand or something in it.

Can the felts simply be cleaned? Mine seem to be all plugged up.

Does anyone know if they sell the replacement felts separately, and if so, where one can acquire some?

The main difference between the cherry and orange lemon is that all the fins on the cherry are vibrant red.

I read that also. But in all honestly, if there is a difference in body and fin size, it's subtle. The one difference I do notice is that there appear to be two groups of fish amongst my tetras. One is larger (on average) and more reddish-orange in color. The other is much more red, with no hints of orange coloration, and smaller (on average). I have the groups in separate 10g tanks right now and will fatten them up over the course of the week. At the end of this, I'll see which one looks more 'swollen' with eggs. Now, if my hunch that coloration indicates gender difference, then I should be able (hopefully) to be able to sex them in the future. If coloration is not a differentiator, then everything is out the window and body and fin size is irrelevant. If what I really have are two different species of tetra, then the same holds true -- there is no real difference in body and fin size. If I think I'm coming closer to an answer on their gender difference, I'll post here.

Awesome . . . what water params did I use? 🙂 To be honest, I'm not sure if they came from plants in my breeding tank, or from the tank containing the adults. I'm trying another round of breeding today. If I made one error during the last attempt, I think it might have been declaring defeat too early. The fry might have still been too small to see, or just hiding very well in the java moss.

I have been trying to breed wild-caught red cherry tetras (Hyphessobrycon sp. MZUEL 17771) for a over a half year now. I don't really know how to sex these, nor do I know anything about their preferred breeding environment, etc. The only detailed video I could find about how to breed them was in German and You Tube is a poor translator, so I got half an idea (a half baked one) about maybe how to approach the subject. I paid a pretty penny for these fish, so after four failed attempts, I felt kind of discouraged. Then something happened -- PFM, as we say in the IT industry when something fixes itself and no one knows how (PFM stands for Pure F*in Magic). And this was a true PFM moment . . . I went to check on my blue dream shrimp (got these recently) and guess who is in there? Yeah, cherry tetra fry! No idea what they hitched a ride in on -- java moss, java fern, alder cone, worm hole, teleportation or something else to do with advanced particle physics -- but there they are, enjoying tasty blue shrimplets! So, at least I know now that I can raise the fry in my tap water. But the linger questions remains -- how the heck do I intentionally breed them?

They are in my fish room! I probably have 50-75 females right now. 😉 When I first bought these a while back, I got them online and they were only being sold in pairs. You probably don't see females as often because they are solid grey and nowhere near as attractive as the males. I'm guessing sellers have a harder time moving the females. I'm not sure if exporters/importers offer females or not. However, I have found that the males are much more vibrant and active when you have roughly an equal number of females with them. These fish are daily breeders, so they are always chasing the females, and rival males, in and out of plants and what not, but never to the extent that they stress or harm their schoolmates or tankmates.

Sawbwa Resplendens (a.k.a Rummy-nose Rasbora, Sawbwa Barb. etc.) are a fantastic, hardy nano fish that does well, and actually prefers, water temps down into the low 70's (they are fine up to 78F) and tolerate a wide range of water parameters. Ph 6.0 - 8.0, Gh from something like 3 - 20+. I keep and breed them at 9 dGh / 6.5 Ph, and hatch and raise the fry in 22-25 dGh. Super great, small, peaceful and awesome looking fish .

Here it my setup, which I posted to the forum a while back. As you can see, they cohabitate well with tetra species. Although every now and then the tetras have been known to get a bit 'dorsal nippy'. They should be AOk with white clouds, but your mileage may vary.

Personally, I'd stock it with a Mako Shark or two. You can occasionally find them in the Buy/Sell/Trade section of this forum. I think some crazy person even gave one away last year! 🤪 😉

If you already have some sponge filters in the tank. I would empty that box filter out, put just enough ceramic media in to keep it keep it from floating, and then fill the rest of the space loosely with Poly-fil (was actually just recommending Poly-fil in another post). The other sponge filters in the aquarium will handle the bio-filtration and the box filter will handle the mechanical via the Poly-fil. In my opinion, and this is just an opinion, if you have a well-cycled tank and keep up with water changes and routine cleaning, that's all one needs in a box filter--something to keep it from floating and some floss filling. It's a tried and true K.I.S.S. methodology that aquarists have been doing forever and that absolutely works. And it's less expensive than special things like ammonia pads or carbon, which really is not required at all unless you are aiming to use them temporarily to fix a known problem.

I agree that the best solution is to pack the HOB with course sponge blocks. This will probably cost similar to buying a single sponge filter. But it will keep the filtration out of the tank itself, which looks somewhat nicer, and is easier to maintain, so you don't need to worry about lifting the sponge out of the tank and spewing gunk everywhere. If you want to do some water polishing, go to a craft store and get a big bag of Poly-fil. Leave room in top of the HOB compartment and stuff that with a loose clump of Polyfil It really does help keep the water clear, is easy to change, and very inexpensive. All my HOBs have a bag of inexpensive ceramic media in the bottom, the rest is packed to a medium density with Poly-fil (you don't want to over stuff it or it clogs up quickly). This has worked for me for quite some time. Course sponge on the bottom, rather then ceramic media, also works well for bio filtration, if not better. But it can clog up quicker than ceramic media and slow the flow rate. For one or two aquariums, no big deal; you'll probably have to rinse the sponge out infrequently. But if you have a lot of HOBs, it's a bit easier to maintain. I cannot sing the praises of Poly-fil enough. And this is where I think HOBs shine. You can have more than just sponge in them.

I'll keep my answer short -- Yes. 🙂

This song . . . ? Good song. Better video!