Jump to content

Fonske

Members
  • Posts

    582
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Feedback

    0%

Everything posted by Fonske

  1. @FLFishChik If nothing time-restricted (like a sale) is pressing you to decide right now, my advice is just wait. Focus on something else for a while and decision will come naturally :)
  2. Ahhh...Congos got me into the hobby, lol.. I saw a tank full of them in a pet market and was smitten, in love at the first sight! Thought they were the most elegant and beautiful fish in the entire (huge) market, better then discus and bettas even. I'm not sure why people call congo females drab, by the way... all congos I've seen were very pretty (but it's possible they only sell immature males here). Sure, mature males get the fancy tails and more iridescence, but even without it, the species is striking, imo. If you're not looking for fish with some personality, go for congos :) Add: they come in albino too, super-ethereal ))
  3. If there is no clear winner, maybe wait until you fall in love with something else :)
  4. How about adding some Golds or Silvertips as well? 😄 Just kidding, diamonds will look fabulous on their own
  5. Haha :) I'm not into tetras in general, but I'd say congos are the prettiest of them all. They school tight too, unlike diamonds. Congos are also very peaceful, never bother another species, but sometimes males chase each other. Another advantage is they photograph well, again, unlike diamonds which are almost mirror- reflective. I also think both species look their best in a very dark tank, like mine here had both black background and black substrate and the colors really shined.
  6. I had both, the size ratio on mine was about 2.5 (congos) to 1 (diamonds). Congos are BIG! And absolutely stunning-looking. Both species coexisted fine although I moved diamonds to another tank because they look a bit too similar, silver and shiny all the way.. Also despite being much larger, my congos were a lot more shy. Diamonds were far more assertive.
  7. I keep a solo female angel. She seems fine and content alone in the tank and was ok with various tank-mates of other species in the past too. Here she is with her recent attempt of solo reproduction ) Update: she is laying on the filter again right now as I'm typing this :)
  8. Yes, they've got such unusual body shape, gorgeous pattern, and a funny/elegant way of movement! I particularly love that the pattern extends to the tail and the fins too. This is mine when it was a lot younger and smaller (it's about 5" now, I think)
  9. After several years of fish-keeping I narrowed my preferences down to "fish with some brain cells", which is apparently more important than looks for me :) Currently this category includes a trio of blood parrots, an angel, and a leopard bushfish.
  10. I see my attempt to help sounded more serious than intended :) It's all good, I hope OP and their SO find a way to compromise/cooperate and the fish gets a roomier home too )
  11. Consider the reversed situation. Would you like them to talk/trick you into something you really don't want? Repeatedly? To get them on board, try bargaining. There must be something they want (and you most likely don't). Offer (and deliver, of course) that in return for your new tank.
  12. She is the only fish in the tank. She's busy fanning the eggs and being super-protective (against humans) but some of the eggs are turning white already.
  13. I haven't done much today but one of my blood parrots did. Lots of eggs on her filter! ..too bad she is alone in her tank.
  14. Depends on the shrimp and the betta... My super-aggressive spade-tail male lives in a heavily planted 5g with lots of ghost shrimp (and various pest snails) and they are all cohabiting just fine. Never seen the shrimp attacking the fish or vice versa. The shrimp were the first in the tank though and they had a lot of time to make it their home and multiply like crazy before the betta was introduced.
  15. It always helps me to consider the reversed situation...what would your SO have to do to convince you to have something in the house that he wants and you absolutely don't? If "nothing, I love my partner and want to see him happy no matter how it impacts me", then there is no problem, one tank it is. But assuming the answer is "it depends", then just talking about "another aquarium won't impact anything" is unlikely to work, I think. What might work is giving your SO something *he* wants in exchange. Make the deal sweet for him and the second tank might happen (or not 😉).
  16. Yes you are... be prepared to ask "do you really want another tank?!?" repeatedly and get a very definitive "YES!" every time. (10 times in case of our household).
  17. Yes, snail leech or similar. Had those in my tanks. My apple snails were not happy with them. At this size the leech has probably multiplied already, keep an eye for tiny leeches (1-2mm or so) on the glass. Pretty hard to get rid of (even nuking the entire tank+roasting the substrate in an oven didn't help in my case), unless you remove the big one manually and some fish eats all the babies (my bettas and guppies did).
  18. Both? 😄 Why not have fun if the main goal is a bunch of colorful males and the parent lines are not hard to source. I'm not a fan of male guppies... much prefer colorful guppy ladies. I made a mistake of crossing my purebred yellow females (with blue-tail male endlers) just once...the male offsprings' appearance didn't change, but the hybrid females lost their pretty colors. I got these yellow guppies by an accident and never saw them available again... oh well, the not-so-pretty guppes are still healthy and thriving :)
  19. Lights can be adjusted in unexpected ways...My tank below used to look like yours for a long time (or worse, everything covered in ugly brown and green algae, the plants struggling) until I added the piece of semi-translucent packaging foam on the lid (to keep the air warm there for the pearl gourami during the cold month). In a week or so, all the algae was magically gone and never returned ever since. The anubias got green and perky, the bacopa is poking through the lid all the time and the tiny crypts are still there despite not being root-fed for a long time. The foam worked on its twin-tank too. Was the effect due to the lower overall light intensity or because the foam cut off some algae-preferred part of the spectrum, I don't know, but I now treasure my foam :) On the other hand, my amazon sword (same/similar narrow-leaf one as yours) used to "travel" from its place towards the sunlit part of the tank and was growing like crazy when the tank was getting a ton of fish food and poop. These days the same sword is doing ok semi-floating (roots just pinned to the floor by a stone) in a bare-bottom, poorly-lit tank with larger fishes...so my guess yours might be happier in a brighter tank with lots of fertilizer. Does your cabomba grow well in the snail tank? I never managed to have it pretty and gave up after reading that it prefers soft water (mine is hard too).
  20. Frankly, if the tank is densely planted (and has at least some healthy fast-growing plants in each section) I think there is little need for any filter. My impression is that bettas are the happiest in tanks with no flow at all. Again, if the tanks have a lot of thriving live plants and good water quality. (Out of habit, I still clean sponges in my tiny filters in the betta tanks, but they are never dirty anyways and there is no bacterial mass there, so the filtration is primarily done by the plants, the tank walls and the substrate.)
  21. I kept two male bettas in a divided ~10 gallon for about a year or so. Used two tiny internal filters, one filter for each side. Two tiny heaters as well, one for each side; two lids. The setup worked fine for everything except I hated the way divided tank looked. For the filtration, as long as the flow is very gentle and the intake is betta-safe, I think any filter would be fine. My advice would be to make absolutely sure that the bettas can't go into each other's part of the tank, by swimming, jumping, or any other way. My divider was just a large piece of sponge and once during a water change I moved it a bit and one of the males went to visit his tankmate. He got his dorsal and caudal fins ripped all the way to the body, caused some damage to the other male too, but luckily both quickly and completely recovered.
  22. Just observations from my tanks that might or not be helpful... I got better growth on many "easy" plants and got rid of ugly algae by reducing light (I have the cheapest non-plant growing lights and even those were too bright, apparently) and fertilizing daily. I also find that plants are healthier in heavily planted and heavily stocked tanks (when I had an emergency and had to put ~4"of fish per liter in one tank for a while - the plants went bananas in there, one amazon sword had to be pruned repeatedly to keep it in check). Many plants don't like water movement. And I always find better growth in tanks with shrimp (and snails), not sure why.
  23. Nice set-up! I hope your little seedlings will grow into big and healthy plants. I tried many times but never got herbs (especially dill, duh!) to grow inside, the conditions were never good enough for them. Which doesn't prevent me from still tossing random fruit stones, beans, and seeds into the pots just to see what happens. It's surprising and exciting to see how many things meant to be eaten can sprout and grow for a while :)
  24. I keep just one. Wish I could have a tank large enough for a group but with ctenopoma's adult size of ~8" it's difficult to have enough room.
  25. Well I did... some years ago. I fell in love with its beautiful rosettes in a pond and decided to see how it would do in an aquarium. It did ok, but I got rid of it after couple of months or so. Because - the underwater part (long fuzzy stem root with many side roots) didn't look very nice to me - the root grew very fast, became looped, and moved the rosette all around the tank - the outer leaves were always yellow and falling off (due to lack of nutrients, I guess) - other plants were not happy with the nutrient and light hog in the tank. I would absolutely plant it in a pond though, if I had a pond.
×
×
  • Create New...