flyingcow

Well she already ok'd replacing the 36 with a 55. Baby steps!

Oh I'm working on the 6' tank in the living room. That has yet to secure consensus.

...happy to oblige. I may have procured a few things for it...

Yeah, I've had pothos in a breeder box for over a year and settled right in around 10 as well. I was on travel for work for 6 months, so that limited my time to take care of the tank and also limited my time to fertilize (hence the BBA). It'll be interesting to see how the tank behaves now that I have it out for a while!

Ok now I've started reading. I never realized it was calcium oxalate a.k.a. beer stone! In a brewery, we use an acid rinse step to get rid of it. It forms on the hot side of the brewery.

Thank you! I was already planning on pulling them temporarily in order to simplify my system while solving my bba problem, but I'll look forward to puttin em back in!

Is there information on this being toxic to fish? Never heard of this before! Not trying to question you, but I have been having an issue with fish death that I'm 99% sure is parasitic, and a parasitic treatment has stopped the fish death for 6 weeks so far, but now I want to understand this better.

It's a 20 long. I started it in a 10 gallon, but the pygmys HATED IT and would freak out and hit the glass any time I moved. They are much happier with some space.

P.S. You know you live in New England when your 20 gallon tank needs 200 Watts of heaters to stay warm in the winter... Still cheaper than oil.

So I haven't posted anything here in a while! The pygmys and embers are all doing well. Somewhere along the way, I lost one ember, and who knows how many pygmy's I have. At yesterday's water change I saw 9, but they have made a cave under a rock and I left it be. Crafty lil buggers. I was away 5 days a week for work for about 6 months. That meant the tanks were getting enough work to stay alive and not much more. And since this tank was stable compared to the 36 gallon parasitic auto-da-fé in my living room, it suffered a bit. Fishies are healthy and well, but the plants are suffering a bit, and the hair algae is getting annoying. Time for a good cleaning or three, some root tabs, and actually remembering to fertilize! I tested iron, and it was basically zero. Gonna see if the tabs and easy green give me enough before dosing iron.

A quick update. I finished the 6 weeks of treatment a few weeks ago. I did lose the guy in the quarantine tank. He improved, but I couldn't get him to eat. Everyone else is doing fine and showing no symptoms. Now the goal is to take on the Blackbeard algae problem and keep this tank clean! Thank you all so much for the help, and hopefully I get to put this behind me for a while.

Bolivian Rams can be tricky if you have two males. I had this issue, and sadly the one who was bullied stopped eating and passed away before I could get a quarantine tank running. My lesson learned (which won't help you at this point) was get the dither fish first, and add cichlids in groups of three or more. My remaining ram is happy as a lark, but I'm not gonna introduce any more until he's gone.

So two and a half weeks in to this (I had to start late due to travel). Everybody is looking good. 2 big water changes a week forced me to find a corner of my tank under some rocks that was NASTY, so I'm sure that didn't hurt. The little guy in the Quarantine tank is looking a little better. No longer going upside down, but still very thin and struggling. Here's hoping he hangs on. Thanks so much for your help on this!

I'm assuming I should do this in both the main tank and the hospital tank, correct?

Very much so erratic swimming. Every now and then they spit out food. No sunken belly or lethargy. No one is really hanging out at the surface much either. I did a round of expel p with no change in his symptoms.