tolstoy21

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.

Jut snapped a few pics of my setup . These are meant to show how simple this can all be in theory. This first picture shows how small my waste water container is. The sump + float valve keeps up with my usage fine. A bigger waste water container would help if the flow of water into this tote exceeded its ability. In fact, I had a much large container there but realized that I was only using a small portion of its total capacity, so I downsized in order to squeeze another 10g into the room. The sump is connected to a simple garden hose that runs up 7 feet and across my basement, about 25", discharging into a slop sink. This second pics is of a simple DIY siphon hook for use when emptying tanks that are not hooked up to the auto-water-change system. These tanks typically have caridina shrimp or blackwater species who wont breed in my tap water. All my grow outs get tap water via drip lines on a timer. Waste water for the auto wc tanks flows out 1/2" bulkheads at the back of all the tanks. This discharges into ABS pipe. This is the black pipe the siphon is dumping water into. The ABS leads to the tote/sump.

I also use the Superior Pump. They are a great choice and available at most big box hardware stores. It's the perfect choice if you're just using it to discharge waste water, but I don't know what's its resilience to saltwater is. It's mostly plastic, so as long as it's not sitting in saltwater for weeks on end, and gets an occasional rinse with freshwater, it will probably be fine. I hook my sump pump up to a garden hose and not PVC (garden hose is waaaaaaay easier). The flow rate on even the smallest sump pump is massive and the head pressure is substantial. It ill move water through a garden hose faster than you can drain it from an aquarium (unless you're draining many, many at the same time). People commonly use these to drain pools and just hook them up to regular hoses. I drain mine into a very small tote and it keeps up with draining maybe 2 or 3 tanks simultaneously without overflowing the tote. If you have the sump in a larger container, like a brute can, you'll be fine.

I would also run it 24/7. As @Galabar, the bulb has a limited lifespan, and running it with the aquarium lite cycle helps extend the bulb's life. The 12-hour cycle works well for clearing water and killing free floating algae but it's not as useful for killing off bacteria. I have used the green killing machine in the past and it works well keeping the water clear, but I cannot attest to how well it works against water-born bacteria. My bulb lasted maybe a year at most. I also run a pretty serious UV sterilizer on my larger display tank and I replace the bulb on that every year. According to the interwebs: "Typically, an Ultraviolet or UV lamp lasts 12 months or about 9000 hours of use. The light stays lit longer than 12 months but after one year of use it's ability to kill bacteria will slowly diminish and it will no longer kill bacteria." My UV documentation also mentions the same. With bacteria you need a slower flow rate through the sterilizer to maximize the water's exposure time to the bulb. The more expensive sterilizers list the appropriate flow rates in their documentation. I am not sure if the more affordable ones have this kind of information available. Either way, in the end, it's definitely worth trying.

Agree. It doesn't look serious enough to cause a leak. As @lefty o said, it just looks like the defect is in the area where the silicon is feathered out to make the seam look neat (the smear happens when the silicon is pushed into into the seam with either a finger or tool). That defect is of no structural concern. If it's not leaking now, I doubt it will leak later. Silicon has an insanely strong bond to glass.

A water softener will reduce the mineral hardness of water, but won't affect alkalinity. If it did have an affect (large or small), that affect would be to lower the Ph not raise it as it doesn't contribute minerals or carbonates to the water. Typically the impact a water softener will have on household water is to add sodium in negligible amounts. However, if you do have a household calcite filter like this --> example calcite filter <-- it can boost your Ph pretty high for a duration (that's its intended purpose). As others have suggested, the best way to lower your Ph is to use rain, RO or distilled water. In my experience, botanicals will only get you so far and won't put a meaningful dent in a Ph above 8. Believe it or not you can also lower Ph pretty easily with muriatic acid (which is just a slightly weaker form of hydrochloric acid), but you do have to really understated the dosage before attempting to use it (who would have thunk it, acid will acidify water!). But honestly, in the end, the net effect of that is probably the same as using Ph down.

Apistogramma tend to darken in response to their environment. If things are dimly lit and you have dark substrate or a dark background, their colors will be darker. The opposite is true if they are in a light environment with light substrate, etc. Generally when I see an apisto laying on its side and being lethargic, it's not a good sign. I find that curing fish is one of the harder aspects of this hobby and my success rate is low. I was reading through Romer's Cichlid Atlas and he mentions that only in rare cases are apistogramma curable of fungal or bacterial infections in the home aquarium. Perhaps this isn't really a truism and he's just as bad a veterinarian as I am, but this made me feel a little better and that I wasn't alone in this experience. However, I still feel terrible when I cannot rescue a sick fish. Wished I had more advice to give you. I think the general treatments you're attempting are the way to go, not knowing what is really going on. But, keep in mind that sometimes the attempted remedy can be worse than the disease.

Orange Flash, Triple Red, Double Red are line-bred color variants of Apistogramma Cacatuodies. You can find the same number of (and perhaps more) color variants with fancy names for Agassizii as well and McMasteri, and some others I'm probably forgetting.

I have a light cycle about the same as that, 6am - 8:30pm. Like @jwcarlson, I run this schedule mostly because it works for the hours I'm typically free to care for and enjoy my fish -- I have free time at 6am, and then again after 7pm. I don't set my the light go off mid-day as that feels like an unnatural light cycle to me. But I have no evidence to back up that feeling. I run very subdued lighting on a number of my tanks, mostly apistos and tetras. The ambient light from the room and other tanks does little to impact the dimness of these aquariums. Other tanks, shrimp and plecos, get much higher lighting, but they manage to keep algae at bay.

I've been keeping L397s for about three years now and last year, when they finally came of breeding age, they spawned over a 100 fry. Unfortunately, I really don't have much new advice that can't already be found on the www, but I can provide you with a general idea of my setup. I keep their water very clean. The Ph is about 6.4 - 6.6, but my hardness and TDS are quite high -- 9dGh, TDS around 330. I have the tank on auto water change, so there is a good deal of clean water going into their system on a regular basis. If I had one suggestion it would be this-- if you have more than a couple fish, go bare bottom and keep minimal decorations in the aquarium. I have wood and caves and nothing else. I have about a dozen adults in my colony and they can make quite a mess of their tank (they are real poop factories). My aquarium is 60 breeder with and Aquaclear 110 running full blast. A lot of the fish waste winds up in one corner of the tank as a result of the flow and I siphon it out every morning (this takes maybe a minute). I also keep a number of L183s with them. So I probably have about 20 fish total in that 60g, so like I said, it gets messy quick. I originally had these fish on a sand substrate, but cleaning that was a real pain.

I don't know much about keeping amano shrimp, but I can attest that both caridina and neocaridina shrimp do fine in a Ph down to 6.0. My caridina handle a Ph down into the 5s. So acidic conditions and lack of Kh apparently have no affect on their shells. In fact, caridina are not very happy in anything 7.0 or above. I also have ramshorn snails that do fine in the mid-6 Ph range. In fact, if they are not kept in check, they completely overrun some of my shrimp tanks. I don't see them start to die off until I push the Ph down below 6. However, I do have a hard time keeping mystery and nerite snails in my water, which is pretty acidic.

@jwcarlson Thanks for the reply. After a little bit of research, if its not a wound, it looks a lot like lymphocystis disease. There is actually a patch of this on the other side of the fish as well. It dosen't look as bad as the pics in a google image search, but it does look like it. It's hard for me to tell at this moment if this patch is a puncture or tear, or if it's a growth more like a tumor bulging out from underneath the scales. Either way, it's isolated for the time being sitting in a tank with some Maracyn. Not sure if that's the correct treatment since I don't know what the patch is, but I figured if it is an infection of some sort this will hopefully head that off.