tolstoy21

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

Agreed.

In my experience, not all fry make it for one reason or another. In nature, predators and competition would quickly remove these from the gene pool. However, it is always prudent to take precautions. As @Colu suggested, I would isolate this one out to another tank or container, if you have one available, observe it for a bit and try treatment. However, more than save this one fry (which is a noble goal), you don't want to risk spreading whatever is going on to the others, if it is something infectious. Additionally, you might want to make sure that that one fry isn't the proverbial 'canary in a coal mine', indicating water conditions that would eventually cause the other fry to start manifesting problems as well. On the other hand, this cold just be an injury. I personally find it hard to diagnose fish (I'm sure I'm not alone in this one). Sometimes the issue is just an isolated incident manifesting in a weaker specimen; other times, it starts with one fry and, soon afterwards, you start seeing die off. Anyway, these are the things that go through my mind whenever I start seeing sick fry. Hoping the best for this little one.

Any plant will work. I use exclusively java fern in my fish room, but only because it grows like mad for me, is easy to move to a new tank when I need to, and kind of takes care of itself.

These are pretty bad shots, and as you can see, I don't really scape my breeding tanks. So, they aren't the most attractive setups. But these setups -- to me at least -- balance sparseness (to keep them clean and make them easy to service) and have enough structures to make the fish feel safe and secure. My display tank in my home office is much nicer, but I don't have any apistos in it.

I'll take a quick snap when I'm in the fish room later this evening.

Care is pretty simple. Water temps mid to upper 70s. Not overly hard water (I keep mine about 9dGH because this is my tap water's hardness water). Ph mid-6's to mid 7's. 6.5 - 7.0 is the best Ph range, but it's ok to keep the Ph a tad higher if that's the water you have. My personal feeling is anything over 7.6 is pushing it, but honestly, they are probably fine up to 8ph, but I have no real experience with water that alkaline. Apistos like to hang out near the bottom of an aquarium. So, as long as you don't have other overly territorial fish at the bottom, you'll be fine. Keep some plants for shelter. Too many plants and you'll never see the fish, too few and it's stressful for the fish. I tend to keep my breeding pairs in 20g tanks with a piece of driftwood propped up so they can hang out underneath it, but still be seen by me, and one or two decently bushy java ferns. An 'apisto hut' isn't necessary for a single male, but they do like something to go under. As for food, mine never like flakes, and prefer small sinking pellets. Hikari vibra bites are my personal go-to food for apistos, but it's not all that I feed them. I typically use a mixture of vibra bites, Fluval bug bites, Xtreme nano pellets, small blackwork pellets, ground up freeze dried white works and tubifex worms (I use a spice mill to break these up into bite sized pieces). You don't need to go to such an extreme as to make a mixture, but that is the staple mix for the majority of the fish in my fish room as it's easy,. varied and quick to feed. The basic gist is small, slowly sinking pellet foods. An apisto's preference is to pick stuff from the bottom at their own leisure. They won't rush out for food like some other greedy eaters unless there is a ton of competition for food. If there is competition, they will come to the top to snag a morsel, but that's not their preferred way of eating. Hope this helps. Again, these fish are on the easy end of the care spectrum.

I agree with the below. However, if you were to use a product, I would have to vote for Salty Shrimp, as its the easiest to use. But, if you do have buffering substrate, yeah you'll be fighting a losing battle. Most of my plants grow pretty well in a Ph between 6 and 6.5 and a dKh of 0. My hardness is on the high side, 9gGH, and I think this is what keeps mine thriving.

A drop of 8.2 to the low 7s is a pretty big shift to accomplish. However, believe it or not, muriatic acid (which is a weaker form of hydrochloric acid) can be very effective in dropping ph, but you have to do it a few drops at a time (depending on tank volume) and then wait a day or two and measure your Ph. Then add more drops if needed, measure again -- rinse, repeat -- until you know how much acid it take to lower your Ph to tyour desired target. I know people will gasp at this concept, but it's pretty safe so long as you do the work to figure the proper amount needed to swing your water to the Ph you's like before doing this with fish in the tank. However, this could get tedious as you'll need to measure PH on a periodic basis and re-dose to lower it again. My guess is that this is more or less similar to using something like API's Ph down, whose main ingredient is sulfuric acid.

@jo1414 I sell fire red males whenever I have more males than females. I'm in the process of trying to spawn more now. If you don't find one in the next few months, PM me and I'll send one your way.

How do they wink at their mates before spawning?

I would just let it change naturally after adjusting your heater. That will be gradual enough in my experience.

Typically the shrimp just pop out of their shells when molting in the way @xXInkedPhoenixX described. I have never noticed it being a gradual thing, nor have I ever seen a shell partially detached in any way.

I move my cory eggs into a 2 gallon with an air stone. I don't use tank water, but the water I put into that small 'hatchery' comes from the same source as the breeder's tank, so the basic params are the same. I put a few elder cones in the tank with the eggs as an anti-fungal agent. I don't put any plants or anything at all in there so as to not create or gather detritus or mulm. As soon as the eggs hatch, I wait until their yolk sacks are absorbed then siphon the young out and put them into a hang-on-the-sided breeder box hanging on the side of the grow-out (a 40 breeder). I put a few neocaridina shrimp in that breeder box to keep it clean and eat any uneaten food or gunk. Once the fry are big enough to not get eaten by the other cories, I dump them unto the 40g. Rinse, repeat. Other fish species, I spawn/hatch differently and don't use breeder boxes.

@Fish Folk Here's a panoramic of the whole scape. It's the same 125g I've had for years. But it has a recent-ish make over. Still a few more plants and fish to add. But taking my time. Needs a bunch more small clusters of anubias petite and small java ferns. I'd like to have a giant school of cardinal tetras in here, but have to get some and breed them first. I had about 10 discus in here originally, but let's just say "I'm not so good at the discus thing" and leave it at that!

Been absent from the forum for a little bit cause, well, life can get busy. A half a year or so back, I acquired half a dozen sterbai and they have been breeding like mad for me since. This video is of my personal tank where I probably have about 30 or so Sterbs. I maybe have another 50 in my fish room. First time I've had a large number of corydoras. Man, love these little guys!

In my experience, this is typical behavior in some, but not all, apisto couples. Some are just more aggressive than others and will the chase females, etc. I've had both quarrelsome pairs, as well as peaceful ones. It is possible the behavior will subside, but then again, I can also go in the other direction.

Neocaridina shrimp (aka Cherry Shrimp) should be a good choice. However, your mileage may vary. Cherry shrimp are also much prettier than amanos. I currently have neos (orange rilis) in a discus tank and believe it or not, both them and the tetras ignore the shrimp. In other instances, I've seen nano fish pick at shrimp and kill them with a death by a thousand cuts. If you have some kind of moss in the tank or something like a rock pile, this will give the newborn shrimplets a fighting chance to not get gobbled up by your fish.

Back in the 70s my dad operated a small-time shrimp boat to catch live bait for my grandfather's bait shop. We used to catch pipefish by the ga-jillions in the shrimp nets (which we would promptly put back into the water). No idea what species they were (they were in the eel grass flats of a saltwater bay in NJ -- northern pipefish maybe?). Either way, long story short, the pictures of these fish bring me waaaaaay back on the nostalgia train. Thanks for sharing! Good luck breeding them. Looking forward to more posts!

@Fish Folk Unfortunately, I don't really have any experience or knowledge to share on the topic of apistogramma and nitrates. I honestly don't measure my tanks for nitrates but I also change so much water my nitrates are probably always close to zero.

Is that your room in the video? If so, it's niiiiiiiiice . . . . 🙂

Re-using discharge water totally depends on the TDS of the input water, as well as what's actually in the water. Keep in mind that the discharge water will be in 2x more concentrated form than the input water. So whatever is in your specific water will be in a concentrated form in the discharge water. For me, that would mean water with 0-1 dKh, 20+ dGh, and nitrates between 80ppm. TDS would be well above 600ppm. I run the discharge water from my RO membrane through a second RO membrane (they are double stacked). This reduces the total amount of discharge water by 1/2 and cuts down the time it takes to make RO water, but the discharge is super-duper hard and filled with nitrates. If the water one is using as their source has a low TDS to begin with, and nothing in it that would overly harmful to fish in high concentrations, then reusing the discharge water is an awesome idea. However, like all water sources, everyone's situation will be entirely different. It's best to treat the discharge water like any other water source you'd use for your fish and test it first to see if it's usable.

Ok revising what I said after I realized Google image search did me wrong. The pic I added is not a Hongsoi, but is Apistogramma eunotus, just as @DallasCowboys16 stated. So yeah, I'm agreeing with Dallas on his fantastic fish ID.

I was leaning male Cacatuoides for the first, and female Cacatuoides for the second. CHANGED MY MIND ON THIS ID; SEE ADDITIONAL THREAD -- "Not 100% sure of the others, but maybe Hongsloi? See second pic (one I grabbed off the www)." This is a pic of my wild caught A. Cacatuoides. You can see that the three leading black dorsal spines are followed by a red-tipped one, similar to the fish you have in pic #1. A Hongsloi male -- the markings on this are more dramatic than in your pics, but they look similar. Note the leading black dorsal spines, and the red patch behind the gill, as well as the one right before the tail.

Here is some info on UV sterilizers from BRS. Much of what they discuss is geared to larger UV setups, but some of it should be applicable in theory. https://www.bulkreefsupply.com/content/post/5-minute-saltwater-aquarium-guide-uv-sterilizer-plumbing#:~:text=The most common rate of,GPH through the UV sterilizer.