tolstoy21

Good luck! I find once the fry spawn, the female can get very nasty with the male so it's good to have a place to relocate him to if needed. If I think the female is guarding eggs, I'll also start feeding something like vinegar eels or BBS in small amounts in case they emerge from the cave and I miss the event. My main challenge recently has been trying to spawn a trio only to find out that the two females i had in the tank were both sneaker males. What luck! Man, watching a sneaker male transform into a fully colored male is fascinating. It's not just their coloration that changes. I'm finding that their fins also start to elongate and change shape. I think I need to get better at ID'ing sneaker males earlier in the process.

What is the fluval flex filter like? Sorry but I’m not familiar with them, but if the filter is filled with sponge, then you really don’t need to do much I would think, as long as the flow isn’t a jillion gallons a minute that would trap and hold the baby shrimp in the sponge material. (Probably not the case). Otherwise, they’ll probably just go in there and eat bio film and whatnot trapped and growing on it. As long as there is no way for them to get sucked into a pump impeller, they should be fine. As for food, they’ll eat bio film, algae, or whatever is available, the same stuff as the adults. They don’t require anything special. Powered foods like bacter AE is good for them if the colony is large and competition for food is scarce. Powered food will drift towards them where’ve they are hiding. Snowflake pellet food is good as well if your tank doesn’t have a ton of algae and bio film if you have fish in that tank, then your gonna need java moss, fully grass or piles of loose stones they babies can hide in. Inevitably some of them will get picked off.

Are you in jersey too? We must have the same water!

I'll start with the TLDR version of my response . . . . Don't over think it. Put a small media bag of crushed coral in your HOB and replace it when needed. If your fish look happy, don't worry about routinely measuring things like Kh, Gh, Ph, etc. If the tanks seems off, take some measurements. Feed your crustaceans food with calcium in it (zucchini, hikari crab cuisine, mineral junkie, etc. stuff like that) and they will be fine. Do a couple "test" bulk water changes, and see what the Ph looks like before and after, and watch your fish. Try to keep things as simple. Ok, now for the longer response (I like being wordy). . . . Crushed coral is dissolved by acidic water, so once your Ph rises and the water is no longer acidic, it stops dissolving. In my experience, it equalizes the water to about 7.4-ish Ph, then stops raising it any further. The amount has no bearing on how high the Ph raises, it only affects how often you have to put more in. But to be honest, I have had about 2 pounds in a sump 150 gallon system for over a year and its still in there. I change a lot of water a little at a time, as I have most of my systems on auto-water change drip system. (A lot of my tanks are grow outs and very over-stocked). If I need to do a bulk water change, I have water staged in a barrel that has crushed coral in a bag in it. So any bulk changes tend to match the water already in the tank. The only reason I stage water is because I can't use my "tap" water. The Ph of my water straight from my well is 5! This is pretty corrosive on my home's pipes, so we have a filter that boosts the Ph for our drinking and bathing water. The Ph from this filter can be anywhere from 7 to 9, depending on when I've last added media. Not to mention our water softener strips out all the Gh, so I bypass both of these and get "raw" well water for my aquariums. In general, my aquariums all run between 6.6 and 7.0 with an average Kh of 1. With my frequency of water changes, the coral never has a chance to boost the Kh anything higher than 1. I know this is a long response, and it sounds like i chase numbers. But the truth is, I really don't think about this stuff any more or at all, except when addressing it in posts. My only real goal is to have some Kh in the water, anything more than zero. I keep a lot of barbs, apistos, tetras, rasporas, corys, etc. and they seem happy and healthy. My auto-water change system drips very low Ph (5), and very cold water into my tanks all day. It just comes straight from the ground and goes right into the tanks. But this is at a slow-ish rate and has minimal impact on the system as a whole.

I have similar water but even less KH. It’s 0.5 dKH and 8 dGH. I’m on a well and this is what I have to work with Most of my tanks average about 6.6 to 7.0 Ph. I don’t keep fish that require a high Ph except those in dedicated tanks where I add aragonite sand substrate and other KH boosters. All my other tanks have some, but not a ton of, crushed coral in their filters. Everything does AOk.

My favorite food? Thanks for asking. It's Pepperoni Pizza! If you're asking about what the shrimp like, not sure I (or they) have a favorite. But I do feed the following -- Repashy Soilent Green, snow flake food, Mineral Junkie, Bacter AE and Indian almond leaves. I just sort of rotate through that mix, feeding maybe every other day or so. The Indian almond leaves and some other botanicals are always present in the tank for shrimp to munch on. My shrimp go berserk when I drop food in the dish. But I think they must smell it because otherwise the dish is just something else to randomly crawl on.

Sumps just use gravity to get the water from the main display tank to the sump. The water in the tank basically “overflows” via an aptly named overflow. This drains down into the sump, then a return pump pumps the water back up into the display tanks. Typically you’d want to be able to adjust the flow rate both out of the tank and back into the tank. For water draining out of an aquarium, flow rate is adjusted with the use of either a ball valve or gate valve. For the water going back in, flow rate is adjusted at the pump itself. if I were you, I’d watch a lot of YouTube videos about saltwater sump setups. There are a jillion out there. Saltwater folks are sump masters. And a sump is a sump. The basic design/concepts will mostly be the same for freshwater, minus all the fancy saltwater equipment.

Oh, some other notes: A product called "No-Planaria" works well but will also wipe out snails. The feeding dish is your friend! Any food that can disintegrate and make it down into the substrate where shrimp can't reach it is then food for detritus worms and other things. I use a standard fine sponge filter in my tank for mechanical filtration. The shrimp love to graze on everything stuck on its surface and babies won't get into it like they could with coarser sponge material. However, fine sponge does clog quickly, so I wring mine out every water change or so.

Knowing how much to feed is a little trial and error at first. I think most people leave food in the dish for a few hours and then remove whatever is uneaten. Just be careful because sometimes when you go to remove the dish from the tank, the left over stuff can scatter everywhere on the water current! After a while, you'll get good at knowing how much to feed so you won't really need to remove any food at all. Just one of those 'experience' things. But that doesn't take too long to figure out. When you first start out, 12 juvenile shrimp or so don't eat much at all, and it is very easy to overfeed. But once the population explodes, you don't have to worry as much about planaria and detritus worms, because unless you're grossly overfeeding, everything gets gobbled up by the ravenous horde of crustaceans. Here's my little guys eating snowflake right now.

Yeah, I get that especially with spiderwood. The 'white fuzz'! I get it even if the wood has been in a tank for years, gets removed and dried out, then put in another tank . . . the white fuzz comes back! I used to get in there and scrapes the wood in an attempt to remove it all. But now I just let it go away on its own. It's ugly as heck for a couple weeks, then clears on its own (and cause critters nibble at it).

I would wonder how much actual salt has migrated into the wood that has also not been removed from years of rain and weather. I'd also wonder that -- if there is residual salt inside the wood itself that can't be removed by a surface wash with a garden hose -- how long would that actually take to migrate of the wood, and in what actual quantity, so as to be harmful to freshwater fish? I doubt that would be as much salt as one would use when trying to cure fish illness with aquarium salt. Water takes a long time to penetrate wood to an appreciable depth. I'd imagine any bleach soak you did years back would not have penetrated enough to not be easily washed away by a full year of rain. Obviously, better always to take some precautions, rather than throwing precaution to the wind. But it were me, I would not go too far in terms of treating the wood. I would just give it a reasonable rinse/soak with fresh water, scrub it down a little, and then let it dry in the sun.

Fish currently breeding/ have fry growing out: Odessa Barbs, Apisto Cacs, Multis, Crystal Red Shrimp Fish I have and either waiting until larger or trying to spawn: Super Blue Emperor Tetras

I’m over run with crystal reds now. I typically sell them on Craigslist locally and when someone pays for like 10 shrimp, I’ll show up with 20 and they are happy as can be! But its boom of bust with CL I find. Some months I suddenly have a flurry of sales, others nothing.

I don’t think you can feed it too often, but you can definitely feed too much at a time. I feed it almost exclusively to small fry that will take it, until they are large enough and willing to eat crushed flake and nano pellets. Then I feed it along with that food. If I don’t have a ton of fry, I’ll hatch 1/4 to 1/2 tsp a day. Anything left over I’ll feed to adults in other tanks.

Check out the bulk reef supply you tube channel. More good information than you could ever possibly consume.

I also have a hard time with the brown and orange range colors on the high Ph test chart. 7.4 through 8.0 certainly look different on the chart, but then I put the vial up to the chart and the liquid looks like it could be any of the colors in that range.

Alligator snapping turtles! I don’t remember the tank size. Maybe 10 gallons. This was back in the late 70s. I used to catch the babies from a freshwater lagoon near my house that fed into a brackish wetland. Tons of snapping turtles! I’d get a few quarter-sized ones and feed them dried tubifex cubes and live killifish or frogs I’d also catch near the wetlands. When they got about silver-dollar-sized, I’d let them go and catch more!

In my short experience -- this being the third spawn I've had of these fish -- about 50% of the males come out with the nice orange coloration in the ventral fins. The rest are true 'triple reds' with uncolored ventral fins, but the rest of their fins being richly colored. I'd like to see if I can get that percentage higher in successive generations. To be honest, they color up magnificently against dark substrate, but appear more pale over all (but still nice) against lighter substrates.

Yeah, to be honest, not sure what to do with this number of fry. I haven't been selling or trading fish long enough to know how long it takes to offload this number of apistos. I guess I'm about to find out. Everything in life is an experiment/experience!

I had an Apisto Cacatuoides spawn on 3/4/21. I knew it was large, but I never tried to take an actual count. Just did my best to get a semi-accurate count today and the total is about 200. Totally shocked me. I would have guessed 50 fish tops. I had multiple females in there originally, but I thought I pulled the extra females out the moment I recognized free swimmers. Are apisto spawns typically this large or is it more likely that more than one female had fry? Time to get another, or larger, grow out tank!

20 ppm sounds totally fine. Keep in mind that that measure represents the 'excess' nitrates not currently being utilized by plants. Healthy water lettuce will suck that up, so your nitrate levels should drop. I would simply watch the plants to determine their health. If your tank measures few nitrates and your water lettuce is growing healthy it's because it is happily consuming everything it needs, keeping the excess nitrates low. I don't fertilize the tank in the below pictures at all, and currently the nitrates measure <10ppm. I almost never measure them cause the rate at which my floating plants grow never stops and they appear healthy. Personally, in my experience rose gardening for many many many years, trust what your plants are visually telling you about their health by how they grow and how healthy their leaves appear in coloration, size, etc. Only take measurements as a means to understand what's out of balance when the plants are showing you they aren't happy. Either way, you should be fine based on what you've posted thus far. Water lettuce is not demanding at all. Expect your nitrates to drop unless you increase your fish or food load. Only fertilize if the plants show deficiencies. If they don't they are getting everything they need to be happy and healthy. However, keep in mind that your water lettuce could out compete the other plants growing underneath it. Like I said, haven't ever fertilized the tank below. However, the Java fern in there is suffering a little due to the lack of light cause by the water lettuce/duckweed. But the anubias and buce love the shade!

Water with no KH (or low KH) can (and I think will) equalize at a neutral Ph of 7.0, especially when aerated with an air stone or agitated with a powerhead (or anything that promotes surface gas exchange). Water straight from my well has a Ph of 5.5 and zero (or slightly above zero) Kh. When I let is sit in a barrel for a day with a running air stone the Ph equalizes at 7.0. The problem with having little to no buffer in water (low Kh) is that anything can suddenly swing the PH down in your aquarium (Co2, fish waste, decaying matter) causing the Ph to plummet. The idea of 'buffering' is that this helps stabilize those swings. The Kh, in essence, keeps your Ph from suddenly being influenced by some other factor and acidifying the water. The Ph you want to target really depends on the species of fish you're keeping. I would guess most 'community' planted aquariums run, on average, somewhere between 6.5 and 7.6. But this is just a guess. African Cichlid tanks run higher to accommodate for the preference of those species. Ph and Kh typically don't cause algae. However, a lack of GH can cause mineral deficiencies in aquatic plants. What you want to achieve in regards to Ph is stability (the presence of some KH helps with that stability), and not a specific number, so long as you're somewhere in the general ballpark of what your fish 'prefer', and avoid extremes.

. . . but much easier to deal with than duckweed. In my experience, the melting is to be expected when transferred to a new environment. So is some drop off of roots. If you have nitrates in the tank for it to thrive on and it's still not doing well, try increasing the lights a bit. Mine enjoy being very close to my lights at a medium-high-ish setting. If your's aren't close to the lights, maybe increase your light intensity. As they grow in and thicken they will give shade and cover to the plants below (which can be good or bad depending on what other plants are growing in the tank). My water lettuce also grows like mad and I remove a bunch every water change (maybe every two weeks). I dry it out, crumble it up into a powder and save it to make infusoria. Unfortunately, my water lettuce is co-mingled with duck weed which is near impossible to eradicate in my tank for this reason. But, these two certainly keep the nitrates very low which my shrimp appreciate!

Trimming is always good as it encourages branching and thickening, as new shoots should come out of the nodes forming at the base of leaf pairs. For aquatic stem plants, you can also replant the healthy tips you've pruned to also increase the mass of plants into a nice dense hedge (kind of a double bang for the buck situation). Many plants (aquatic and terrestrial) want to grow tall rather than 'shrub' out. You can encourage a fuller look through pruning back your plants regularly at points where you want them to branch out depending on the look you're going for. As others have suggested, removing damaged leaves also helps the plants expend their energy on newer growth rather than using it to cope with damage.