PluckyD

@beastie I love the beautiful yellow on yours. I got some longfins from aquahuna a couple months ago and I love them, but the thing that intrigued me about the Linni is that their body actually seems more gold/yellow than silver/grey, which appeals to me. I put the longfins in with some goldens and I notice they don’t seem to behave quite the same, as if they were different species. Also, I noticed they got very “chesty” very quickly with heavy feeding even though my goldens did not. I put them in an outside pond for now so can’t take pics easily unfortunately.

For pond snails and the mini ramshorns, I just squish them against the glass with my finger. For my discus, I just do a quick squish and he gobbles up the whole thing. For little fish, I like to squish them thoroughly so their shell bits are very fine and can be consumed by fish or shrimp. Generally, I only have too many snails if I've been feeding too heavily, so I will squish a bunch in place of feeding for a few meals. This usually happens when I haven't yet established a strong shrimp colony in the tank, Frankly, the snails are helpful to have during that time to eat the excess food. At some point though, I start squishing the snails for the shrimp to shift the population from the former to the latter. I think it's also a good way to know if your calcium levels in the tank are depleting. When they are too low, the snail shells with be very soft, but when they are high, the shells can be very hard, in which case, be extra careful so as not to cut yourself. Never squish a shell from the opening side because that can cut your finger. If I were to try with the larger sized ramshorns, I would personally try a plastic spoon or something to protect my finger, but honestly, I like those little guys and have never tried to squish one.

I have this same problem and haven’t found an adapter solution. My workaround has been to fill up a tub by the sink and use a powerhead to pump the water into the tank. Unfortunately, the powerhead doesn’t work on a long hose due to too much back pressure so this only works if your tanks are relatively close by.

Does anyone own the “Linni” variety from Aquarium Glaser, or at least seen them? I am quite curious how their colors differ from the classic variety. I could only find the beautiful pictures of them from Aquarium Glaser themselves and a head-on picture from dansfish, but I can’t tell what the body *really* looks like.

In my experience, *all* fish will eat snails. Some just might need a little assistance from you 👆(<—- snail meal preparation device)

Another update to show that Pod continues to thrive since his deworming treatment. He has gotten even plumper since last month and seems like a normal discus fish shape now? I’ve had him just over a year and he’s right around 5+ inches, which is on the smaller end of the spectrum, but I believe still healthy. It’s possible he is a she and could be smaller for that reason too. He still has the faintest hint of a dimple in his center which I have read different accounts about for discus, but I hope it rounds out as he continues to put on more weight. He gets 2-4 frozen cubes of something or other (bloodworms, brine shrimp, spirulina, etc) every day along with a dry pellet on auto feeder 4 times a day. He used to be very picky but I’ve gotten him to eat most things with a staged introduction. I am now closer to water changing every 3-4 weeks or even longer, but that’s already more frequent than all my other tanks. Nitrates stay around 20-40 with dosing fertilizer and heavy feeding. He has shown no ill effects, again, since his deworming, (I.e. no hiding, weird poop, pimples, slime coat shedding, etc). I dropped his tank down from 86 to 82 degrees for now and may have to cut down on some feeding if he shows a noticeable drop in hangryness. At this point, I think this is a case closed situation so will not bother updating anymore, but just wanted to share a success story around treating discus, and thank you to this forum and those who helped.

Thanks for additional ideas, but I am basically following the directions as I have done for the hundreds of Aquarium Coop strips I've used before my current bottle. The bottle is less than a month old. I am mostly curious if anyone else has had a problem with strips they've received in the past month or two.

@mynameisnobody Yes, I have them lying flat per the instructions.

I have been using Aquarium Coop test strips for a while now and recently started my third or fourth container of the 200 pack, and I notice both the packaging and the strips are slightly different. For example, you can see in one of the pictures comparing the strip to the bottle, the 6.4 and 6.8 boxes for pH don't have the black outline. That's a minor thing of course, but I also notice these strips seem to "bleed" for lack of a better term a lot more. I don't have this problem every single time I test, so I don't know if it's some condition of my water or just duds in the package. Any idea what it is and how I should interpret the results? For context, the picture showing multiple strips are for new outdoor tubs I am setting up that are still cycling, but the other two are from tanks that are mature (~1-2+ years old). ETA: In case you're wondering, at least one these pictures was taken at the 1 minute mark, the other two possibly 2 or even 3 minutes. However, my previous test strips often stayed consistent in color up to the point of drying.

Ah yes, I plan to keep it at 86 while it’s still cold weather wise, but will actually unplug the heaters once it warms up. We usually keep our house around 78-80 in the summer, so that will be the “cool” season for the tank 😜

Good timing @jwcarlson, I had just been considering posting an update and am making the time now due to your prompting 🙂 I venture to say, Pod seems to be doing well these days. Looking back at pictures from since I got Pod last year in April, I can now see how he had grown but gotten slowly slimmer until I asked about him in October. He then rapidly declined, degenerating to the condition of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree of a fish tree in January (unfortunately, I was unable to care for my tanks beyond feeding during those months). I did do another round of the Absolute Dewormer at your prompting, but that was the last round. He hasn't had a hiding episode in several weeks now. More promisingly, he had slowly gotten back to the proportions he had been when I first got him, and now I think he's even plumped a bit beyond that while also being larger in size. He is a very personable fish and exhibits no hiding behavior. I've also managed to get him onto several different dry pellet foods. I will be honest that I am not taking care of him the way some discus keepers might, but he is a member of the community tank which I keep like most of my other planted tanks. I water change every other week on average. The Bloody Mary neos and the sterbai cories have both reproduced. I also replaced the the nerites with some otocinculus that seem to be thriving as well. I do keep the tank at 86 for Pod's comfort though. Thanks for checking in and I hope this is helpful to anyone else who might have similar issues.

The only common denominator is the tubs themselves. I agree this seems to be happening. My only concern is that whatever is leaching might not be chlorine but it’s still causing damage to the inhabitants. I suppose the only hobbyist way to find out is to put creatures in anyway?

Unfortunately, all 4 are! So I cannot just chalk it up to the new plastic. I kept guppies in the one I had last year but they tend to be so hardy. I’m not sure if they just toughed it out, and maybe another more delicate species might not fare as well.

I wasn't sure if I should revive this thread or start another, but I am experiencing something similar with my outdoor tub ponds. I started 3 tubs this year and have 1 that is over a year old, so 4 in total. I am using the HDX 27 gallon tubs from Home Depot. I never tested for chlorine before, but am now using the Aquarium Coop test strips which include it. After half-filling the ponds and letting them stew for a week, I was quite surprised to find chlorine was still around 2.0. I thought perhaps my dechlorinator had gone bad (I had transferred some Prime into a repurposed Easy Green bottle), and it no longer smelled stinky fresh, so I ended up opening a new bottle of Fritz Complete. Another week and *over half a bottle of Fritz complete later*, the chlorine still reads high. Perhaps the plastic is leaching something? I did successfully breed a lot of fish in the first tote last year so I hope it's just weird readings, but it would still be nice to know what is going on.

Thanks, although I know he still has a lot of fattening up to go, and I do wonder if he will ever be round and plumpy like yours or if he's stunted already. He seems to have grown in size more instead of just fattening up, so maybe when he's done getting bigger, he will plumpen more. I was planning to do another round in a couple of weeks to give it a full month after the last round. Do you think it is better to do it sooner?

Fattening up and pooping like a champ, thanks for asking 🙂 I was going to wait another few weeks to see if we have another tummy ache episode since he never went longer than 6 weeks or so without having at least one, and he *does* seem suspiciously dark right now, so I'm not ready to call it cured, but I'm hopeful.

In case anyone was following along at home, I just wanted to give an update that I ordered 5 grams of Absolute Wormer+ (available on Amazon, and yes, is flubendazole with a little bit of calcium carbonate added) as suggested by @jwcarlson and treated Pod with it a little over two weeks ago. I found some information saying one dose is typically sufficient and 2 doses is only required for severe cases. Given that Pod has been like this for 8 or so months now, I didn't want to take any chances and treated him again 5 days after the first treatment. A few days after the second treatment, he had another "episode" (loss of appetite, etc.) but it went by much quicker than normal (lasting only about 2 days). Also, I happened to catch him poop a pretty normal looking 2 mm poop, which was promising. At this point, I am giving into his picky discus ways and feeding him his favorite frozen food and blood worms several times a day in the hopes of fattening him up. He is still quite skinny but no longer looks emaciated. I may treat him again in a month as some people seem to do with discus. As an aside, I decided to treat my community tank as well. Over the past couple of years, I've had some unexplained deaths and/or illness, *possibly* symptomatic of hole-in-the-head or other disease I couldn't quite pinpoint, and I've noticed recently that my pearl gouramis just seemed a bit "off" and I was worried were going to get sicker. The tank and inhabitants have also gone through the med trio + PraziPro + Expel-P/levamisole before, so I figured whatever ails/ailed Pod might also by in my other tanks. Since treatment, I do believe my pearl gouramis are back to normal health. Alas, since the flubendazole did not harm the shrimp in Pod's tank and there were still pond snails in his tank as well, I ended up taking no additional precautions for my community tank...to the peril of my nerite snails. I see now that lots of people have already reported flubendazole is harmful to nerites, so I am just sharing another data point. My experience is that it doesn't kill the nerites but paralyzes them (which I think I feel worse about as they are still alive over a week later, and presumed slowly starving to death 😞). This is the same effect that "No Planaria" had (which is supposedly made from betel nut extract). I also have a freshwater clam in the tank which may be affected as well -- after pulling it out to check on it, I find it's not able to burrow back into the sand.

@jwcarlsonThank you for the confirmation; in retrospect, continued parasites makes a lot of sense and just really aligns with all the symptoms. Also, seeing your beautiful "chubby" fish really puts his thinness in perspective 😱 I just took for granted that *surely* he'd be clean(ish) of parasites by now after all the treatments he's been through. Regarding his diet, his favorite food remains Ocean Nutrition Frozen Formula One and freshly squished snails. He will also eat Vibrabites, but only after he's confirmed there's nothing better and I've walked away and he will pick at them around the tank. I actually rarely feed frozen bloodworms and only recently bought my second pack since I've had him. My LFS sells SF Bay brand, so that's what I got.

So one additional “symptom” about Pod that I have been curious about is his overall anatomy. I’ve only ever seen tiny discus at my LFS and only a couple of specimens at that, so I don’t have much point of comparison. But based on photos and videos on the internet, Pod has always seemed comparatively skinny. Again, he’s grown over an inch since I’ve had him, but never gotten wider. Here are some very poor pictures trying to capture him head on. His …belly? (area in front of pelvic fins) has always had a pinched look. Does he look “normal”? Oh, and once again, he seems better after ~3 days and is back to swimming around and begging for food…but only the good stuff, none of those yucky pellets 🙄

@jwcarlson The pimples happened only once and the shedding of the slime coat only occurred a couple times coinciding with his hiding, which also comes with the weird poop (lumpy white and looks like there's gas bubbles trapped inside). Also, I am skeptical about the need for a school for him because it's so episodic. Once the episode is over, he's truly seems like a happy camper -- follows me around, begs for food, eats from my hand, hunts around the tank, etc. The reason I got him was because at the store, he was by himself eating all around the tank and didn't seem to care about the other discus and is generally not skittish at all. Again, I don't deny the possibility, but his issues seem more physical than...psychological?

@jwcarlson No flashing, just some slime coat shedding which coincides with this hiding behavior. I also noticed some “pimples” once that went away by the next day. Thanks for sharing your experience and no worries, I appreciate all the info 🙂

I don't know if mine were monster big like yours @Shadow, but my survivors also tend to be on the larger end of the Neo size scale and I assumed were female. They are also definitely Neos because they seem to interbreed with the other colors okay -- I keep a tank of mixed colors for culls (where my remaining Goldenbacks now reside), and I end up with goldenback mutts.

Thank you @Colu and @jwcarlson. However, I have treated Pod with a total of 7 rounds of levamisole at this point and 3 times with Prazi. Basically, I had noticed a betta with camallanus and subsequently treated all my tanks with levamisole simultaneously. I realized that Pod had tons of them even though he had no visible symptoms (aside from this recurring hiding behavior). He took 4 rounds to clear, but I did 2 additional rounds of levamisole just to be sure. This last levamisole treatment I did in the QT tank was just to make sure I had indeed cleared the camallanus worms that he had several months ago. I saw no evidence of any worms in the tub after treatment. I also treated all tanks multiple times with PraziPro when I noticed a mysterious leech-esque parasite in one of my hillstream loaches. This is in addition to the med-trio routine I do for all new fish.

Hello, nice project! I just wanted to share that I’ve had similar experience with goldenbacks. I tried 4-5 times in different set ups and even in tanks that had successful colonies of other shrimp, but my goldenbacks always died off over several months, even when I saw a couple get berried. I always order from a seller who seems to have a more meyer lemon color strain (as opposed to neon yellow) and figured maybe they just don’t like my water. I have neos in all my other tanks with colonies of orange (also a mix of pumpkin and orange sakura), green (emerald, not jade), blues, and reds, but those goldenbacks elude me.

Just wanted to post an update. After moving, I did the quarantine treatment with Metroplex for a full 13 days (one extra day just in case), and also one day with Expel-P. I fed lightly about a week into the meds and I did 100% water change each day by switching between cleaned totes. After returning Pod to his tank, he seemed normal and ate as usual, etc. Alas, after about 2 weeks, he did his hiding thing yesterday and today is dark and stressed. He seems to be passing a weird poop again.