Comradovich

Here's the deal with Scarlet Badis: 1. We call them "Pretty Hate Machines" for a reason. That reason is not just because they resemble the album cover. 2. What you have in the picture is a dominant male, he's colored up to breed. The other time he colors up is right before he dies of old age, (the one last hurrah). Average life expectancy is only around 2 yrs, so you don't always know why your fish is coloring up. 3. He's going to stake out a territory usually around one big plant or marimo moss ball and then take on all comers to defend that territory. He only really colors up once he has a territory. If something else in the tank fights back, he's probably going to lose that confrontation. He's very small, and fights like a drunk Yorkshire Terrier. Imagine a Jack Demsey that only gets to a half of an inch long. Mine for some reason considered Otocinclus and pygmy cories to be a potential threat, he spent a lot of his day driving them off. 4. Females are almost impossible to find. Instead, you most likely have non-dominant males. These are identical to females. Best advice to get a female if you try to breed is to buy a few "USA bred" or "Hobbyist bred" fish. Importers are going for the most colorful fish, they often cull all of the females from a shipment. If it's an import, it's almost certainly male. Once they've worked out which one of them is dominant... the non-dominant males have an annoying tendency to start dying off. It can get expensive. 5. Best advice if you want a few... get something with a decent footprint, like a 20 L or a 40 breeder, then put plantings and rocks all around the tank, with decent sized hardscape in between to break up line of sight. You want to create a tank full of small territories that don't really face each other. It's like having cichlids, but on a much smaller scale. Look at people who keep apistogrammas for inspiration. You can feed frozen daphnia to keep them healthy, they don't just require live food. Problem is that if you take a three day vacation, you might come back to a dead fish. Did he starve? Was he at the end of his life anyway? Is there a disease I need to treat? Fattening them up seemed like a solid strategy, and yet I was still left with a weird crime scene investigation once I got back. Fascinating little fish, but jeez does it require your constant attention. I doubt I'll ever keep them again.

Before I spent money on an all-tank layer of eco complete, I'd decide whether or not I really wanted an all-over carpet of crypts or montecarlo. I mean that can look cool, but it can make it difficult to really get much out of your other plantings if there's green everywhere you look. What I'd try instead is to steal a page from MD Fishtank's book and get yourself some zippered filter media bags. Load those with your eco complete like you would a pillow or sandbag (1/2 - 3/4 full), then just place each bag where you want the plants to be in the tank and cap it with gravel. That way the plantings are contained to certain areas, and you have other areas which are either bare, or occupied by your hardscape. You don't really think about what's under your rocks and driftwood, but if it's aquasoil then that's an area where it can decompose into your water column because nothing is growing on it. You could also go gravel and root tabs, as you've said above. I just think if you're sold on the extra layer of protection that an aquasoil provides, then you might want to just adjust how you use the soil to get more out of it. I have sand over root tabs, and my growth is okay. But it's just "okay". I could probably keep dwarf hairgrass alive better if I had some dedicated plots of something under the gravel for my root feeders.

I've not tested these as fertilizer, but I do have some experience with it as a food supplement. You may want to observe how any of your shrimp, snails, or crayfish deal with the worm castings. Many years ago I kept land hermit crabs. What was their favorite treat? Worm poop. Didn't matter what else I had on offer. Fresh fruit, bit of chicken, meal worms... nothing got their attention faster than worm poop. Something about worm poop makes detrivores ravenous. Which I guess just goes to show: Even in the aquarium, "the spice must flow".

Did a little Amazon.uk diving this morning to see if I could help. I would normally suggest Hikari's prazi-pro, but it doesn't look like you can get that. I did find a link to Fritz Paracleanse: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fritz-Aquatics-ParaCleanse-Treatment-Aquarium/dp/B09F4HV8HH/ref=sr_1_12?keywords=prazipro&qid=1671722697&sr=8-12 The thing about Paracleanse and Prazipro is that they both have praziquantel in concentrations high enough to be effective. Compare that with API's "general cure", which has the drug, but from what I hear on these boards it has it in such low concentrations that it's only really useful as a quarantine tank pre-treatment. If you can find it, Levamisole hydrocloride is also potentially useful, but I don't know any brand-names for that.

I keep scuds in a small 5.5 G. I got them from two sources. First I ended up with some smallish brown ones I found in an Ebay listing for 6 breeding pairs. Cost me about 15 bucks. But then I was trying to start a blue velvet shrimp colony from Petsmart and their tanks had a small scud infestation going on. So, I got some slightly larger greyish ones. I wasn't using crushed coral in my new tank, so a PH crash took out all but one of my shrimp, (not even a blue velvet, my sole survivor was a ghost shrimp). The scuds... weathered the crash just fine and started getting busy. This tank is a bare bottom, with a cheap dual sponge filter from Ebay. There is a small bag of crushed coral near the filter. I keep them with snails, a number of ghost shrimp, and most of my excess plants. Tank right now has Süßwassertang, Bacopa, Cardinal Plant, Dwarf Water Lettuce, Salvinia minimus, Amazon Frogbit, and Red Root Floater. The scuds will nibble on everything, the ghost shrimp positively love the RRF. Into this tank I toss in an algae wafer every other day. Sometimes I sprinkle in a tropical fish flake or shrimp pellets, (the shrimp seem to love shrimp pellets). My ghost shrimp are breeding. I have a few berried females. I am not seeing what other people seem to be warning against: Namely scuds latching on to a berried female and mowing down the eggs. Either mine are not hungry or not that kind of scud. My mitigation plan if I saw that behavior is to net the female with as many scuds on her as possible and start picking them off as culls. The dwarf chain loaches in the other tank would probably love a partially crushed scud, or the pitbull plecos would, or the white clouds... etc. Scuds do not seem to be harming my ghost shrimp, (although this is why I'm testing with a cheap, easy to replace species first). They are also leaving my ramshorn snail and bladder snail colonies alone.

Seed shrimp or ostracods are little crustaceans with a clam like hinged shell in place of claws. They feed by moving through the water column, fanning their little legs through the gap in the shell. There's a range of sizes. Smallest I have seen are a bit smaller than sesame seeds, I'm culturing some in an old Kirkland Mixed Nuts jar from Costco. Vernal pool specialist organism, so they appear in puddles in your yard from time to time. Mine are from a water feature in the backyard that hasn't been working in over a decade. Largest I have seen/kept were about 1/4" long and reddish, you could really see the details on them. I'd call that size "clam shrimp", but I've seen them also called seed shrimp. I ordered those from some guy in Kansas City over Ebay. They do pretty well, but I lost all mine in a new tank PH crash when their shells dissolved. Green water and yeast are your go-to foods. Their cysts can migrate into shrimp tanks from plants/soils, and they do well on aquasoil substrates. Cyclops on the other hand are little predators. They'll actively take on things roughly their size. I have a number of some species of these that snuck in with my seed shrimp culture. They take out baby seed shrimp and any infusoria they can find. My adult cyclops are actually smaller than the seed shrimp though, so they don't seem to bother the big adults. Those little polyps on the sides of the tail are egg sacks, so they breed fairly quickly if there's food. You can find YouTube vids on both of these creatures, but the common themes seem to be how to get rid of them. Shrimp keepers seem to be convinced they'll reduce their tank yield by competing with the shrimplets. My white clouds and neons both seem to enjoy whichever of these get dropped into the main tank. They really seem to relish hunting them down if they venture into open water. I keep these as a small number of live-food projects I've got going that I'm sure I'll end up using, I just haven't quite worked out how. Safe to feed to fry depends a lot on whether the fry can swallow them whole or not. I seem to remember one of Bentley Pascoe's livestreams mentioning he's got some rainbow fish whose mouths open wider than their throats can handle. {EDIT} Remembered something else that might be of use. In one of Dan's Fish livestreams, Leo209_Aquatics asked about culturing seed shrimp. Dan apparently does them in a small aquarium, with a sponge filter. Keeps them like fish. Can't remember the exact livestream, but I'm pretty sure it was one of November's. I do mine a bit differently, as I followed the "Random Bits" channel advice on culturing mine.

@Torrey I have some good news for you, but bad news for your wallet. Dan's Fish has your #16. The bad news is he wants $20/fish. Mine are in an unheated tank right now. They're doing just fine. Pros: 1. Dan's got a 98.~% success rate with shipping fish/keeping them alive in customers' tanks after they arrive. This is less of a crap-shoot than some LFS's doing imports. 2. While they're imports, they all seem to be from the same spawn. You'll be getting juveniles that are about 1"-1.5", so you've got only about 1.5" of growth to full breeding size. If you want to see what the spawn looks like, his #3 pic is actually from my tank. If you check out the "show off your pipsqueaks" thread from General Chat, you'll see a Day 1 pic of them after I got them into the tank. You'd be buying basically the same fish as I have in the pics. 3. They've been treated with Ich-X at Dan's. According to Dan's manager who I was corresponding with, they haven't needed anything else. I hit mine with Prazi-Pro just in case, but so far no one's shown anything that concerns me. Dan's is really good at responding to emails, I've found. 4. Dan's is shooting for a 99% success rate with shipped fish, and he actually tells you how many he's lost in shipping or shortly afterward in his weekly livestreams on YouTube. So you could go watch the guy you'd be buying from before you decide whether to actually purchase. He's live every Weds night, and old livestreams are available on his channel. 5. Unlike some previous importers, these are definitely LDA25's. These look exactly like the old pictures, and not really anything like the rubberlip or bulldogs that some importers would advertise as "pitbull plecos". Cons: 1. 20 bucks is 20 bucks. No sugar-coating that price. 2. You'd need a few of these guys for a decent colony to breed with. I went with 6. 3. You're getting juveniles. While these have been babied and checked over, they'll still have some growing to do before you can use them. 4. You do still have to pay shipping. Neutral: 1. Dan's will be voluntarily shutting down for a few weeks during the holidays when the UPS/USPS systems are jammed up. While this can be good since you know your fish won't be stuck in a package sorting center for days, it can also be bad if you don't like to be rushed to make a purchase. The above was my research before/shortly after buying. I'm fairly new to the board, so I don't know the rules on linking websites. I'll just say that if you google "Dan's Fish", he should be the first result. Hopefully that's okay by the moderator staff. I've kept these previously for 6-7 years before they started to become rarer so my tips: 1. If you plan on drip acclimating, the small USPS box with styrofoam inserts almost perfectly fits one of those Kirkland plastic mixed nuts jars from Costco. Meaning you could just dump the shipping bags into the jar, then place the jar back in the package to start your drip-line. This helps shortcut Flip Aquatics' usual drip acclimation advice of keeping the fish low to the ground and in the dark for as long as possible. They're in a nice dark box and that box can go on the floor of your fish room. 2. Once they hit the darkened tank, they should start to color up within a few hours. So you'll know almost overnight whether or not any of them are struggling. Struggling fish are having difficulty matching your substrate. 3. Most of the feeding action happens after lights out. This is the best time to drop in food for them. They're really not demanding. Algae wafers, Repashi gel foods, shrimp pellets, flake that hits the substrate, fluval bug bites, mulm on your rocks and driftwood, they'll at least sample whatever they can find. They got rarer because they seem to have been left off of the Brazilian export list in ~2012. Which I'm told means that most of the infrastructure built around exporting them got shut down or repurposed. (Holding ponds, etc.) I don't know if they're becoming available again because they're back on the list, or if someone spawned a group of fish themselves. Leaning more towards the latter, as these all seem to be the same general age. 2018 ICUN survey listed them as "least concern". Parotocinclus Jumbo is a species that should not be rare in the hobby, but somehow is.

That is a really nice looking tank. Is that the one you were having issues with last month?

Trim Pothos at 45 degree angle. Place Trimming directly into the filter. Expect that it'll wilt a little before perking back up. I use my filter to start pothos cuttings that I plan to re-pot later on. It's kind of hard to kill pothos. While I'm sure it'll work if you baby those roots, I know for sure it'll work even with no roots at all.

Got mine off of Aquarigram, which has an Etsy and an Amazon storefront. One word of advice if you get it shipped in, though. Expect that it'll come in a bit beat up. Roots will have probably fallen off, leaves might look a bit browned. Put it in the tank and leave it alone anyway. It should come back on its own so long as you've got an airline corral to keep it in one place under the lamp. Little Easy Green doesn't hurt, either.

Would agree with @lefty o. Looks an awful lot like some kind of petroleum product residue. (And that would fit with being in a garage for awhile). Does it have a smell? If Dawn doesn't remove it, it may have permeated the glass. To get it out, I'd look in an auto parts store for something that removes grease stains. Not sure which products would be aquarium safe, but you're definitely looking at some kind of grease remover. I'd look at cleaning the stain first, then removing the stain remover with your vinegar and water later on. Smelling as you go, since chemical smells are a pretty good indicator of how well you're accomplishing the job.

When I redid my hardscape this year, I used a bunch of found rocks. I've got an ancient sandbar out back, so if there's an earthquake, early snowmelt, or a clumsy deer... well, I get them delivered right to the back deck. Mostly granites and shales, worth smooth and more or less critter-free unless you count lichen. What I do to treat is the old H2O2 soak for adding driftwood to the tank. I forget the exact measures, but it's pretty easy to look up how many parts of it to mix with how many other parts of water. I stayed away from the boil because my rocks have been out of water for quite some time, and I don't want to ruin any of my pots if I do have one with air pockets. The solution should get into pretty much everything and destroy whatever it lands on. I want to say the soak is a day or so... Worked great, though. No issues with ph or surprise fish sickness.

I literally started my first thread on this same species. Only my error was probably an overabundance of caution. What I got back from the community was: 1. Get it front and center in the brightest spot of the tank. (Yours seems to be in a good spot). 2. Root tabs. Where I was hesitant to remove mine from the pot and plant it, I got a few comments suggesting I go with exactly what you did. I will say that as cautious as I was with getting things started, once you do get it rooted and established, it appears to be a normal Crypt. I'm getting robust reddish leaf growth, and the green emerged leaves are semi-melting, but nothing else is. Cory's livestream where he mentioned he was concerned about the Pink Flamingo quality last year appears to have turned things around. This batch is pretty robust so far.

@BettaBabe94So, I'm looking at the 5.5 gallon next to my computer and thinking: "How would I scape this to deal with your problem?" Thankfully, the 20 G "messy jungle" planted is just on the other side of the computer. 1. Take some java fern and attach it to a few small pieces of driftwood. Pick wood you expect will hang over things a bit, like @NOLANANOsuggested above. 2. Something like a red melon sword, (smaller plant with broad leaves to hide under). Or also a sea of crypts. The leaves will let the crayfish move around the tank between covered spaces. It'll also break up the betta's line of sight. Bettas seem drawn to stem plants or taller pieces, things with leaves near the surface that let them nap. Put in something like that if you don't already have one and maybe she'll calm down. If the top water is more to her liking, maybe she'll be less possessive over the bottom. 3. Rock piles should work wonders. Dwarf Crays like tunneling under these. Plus side is that you can usually find some large enough just poking around in the yard. You don't need very large stones, just a few clustered together. Boil or H2O2 soak these.

When I first read your thread: "Oh cool, let me tell you about my pygmies!" Then I read the first comment. "Okay, EXACTLY LIKE @Guppysnail. Right down to the inactive when I'm trying to take a photo." LOL. Think that might be just the usual SOP for Pygmy Corys.

Those Copadichromis... that's the "red fin" variety. Lake Malawi. Very colorful, but you'll need to watch the water parameters. Little bit higher ph, decent water hardness. Caucatoides "Double Red" is nice. Not quite a "Super Red", but still a beautiful fish. Not super demanding. The Mikrogeophagus is a "German Blue Ram" type. These are a bit picky about water. Also, the Neolamprologus are shell dwellers. They can be very cool in a large colony if you have the setup for it. Old Escargot shells from an online supplier or local french restaurant will keep them pretty happy. Some water params to watch for. That's what sticks out to me. All these are going to look pretty cool on the screen behind the auctioneer, just do your water research before you go in.

Molt. You'll see a bunch of these once your colony is dialed in. While they look weird, the shrimp will usually return once they're hardened up and harvest the molt for calcium. Both my ghost shrimp and my amanos are constantly leaving these around. Anything they don't clean up... well, the snails like calcium, too.

Glass or Acrylic? @Coryhas a video or livestream talking about putting things under a glass tank under load, the hollow frame stands apparently exist for a reason.

While I haven't kept CPOs, I have kept C. Shufeldtii, which is the next size down. In my experience, they were reasonably fine with a community tank so long as your fish left their hiding spot alone. If a pleco also wanted that cave... well, there was an angry little crayfish marching around the rest of the tank and nipping fins. Didn't do so hot with Pygmy Corys, so I'm iffy on your pandas. The corys are smart enough to get out of the way, and the cray's not real aggressive if you feed it and the fish aren't intruding. What I'm more worried about is that your pandas get around the same size as your CPO. There's also a gang of them, and they eat small crustaceans in the wild. (Daphnia, scuds). Corys are also inquisitive and food oriented, so his territory is going to get explored constantly by hungry little fish. The dwarf crays seem to have a pretty short turn around from "I'm REAL big" to "And you're obviously here to eat me, yikes". Bottom line: I'd be less worried about him nipping their fins than them deciding on a lobster dinner and each taking a leg.

@Dean’s Fishroomalso did a video with @Bentley Pascoe a few years back on Breeding Otos. If I'm remembering correctly, the spawning trigger also involves live food. Which is counter-intuitive for an algae eater. He was mostly doing Zebra Otos, but he said the same trigger should apply to other species he's tried. Lots of potential fry food in the water, simulate a rain storm with cool, soft water change and wait to see. Back when I had pygmy corys, I accidentally triggered some breeding of my Otos by doing just enough of a water change that the pygmy's started breeding. Maybe an easy to breed cory or just the hormones from the water some are breeding in would help? Couldn't hurt, so long as the corys are out before the Otos start, or you're diligent about removing eggs before they snarf them up. Not really a "set it and forget it" solution, but might get you out of a rut.

THAT'S WHAT THAT IS! I've had some of that on my annubias barteri for weeks, and that's the only stinkin' plant in the aquarium with that. I kept wondering if I was killing just these two plants somehow. No wonder my nerite's always over there.

That's looking real good. I just thinned down my colonies with my club's bi-annual auction today. Hoping I get some good growth out of mine now that the Dwarf Water Lettuce and Frogbit are cut back enough to give them space. I envy your success!

Are they wet? If they're already in water, they've probably been prepped for the tank. If not, follow the advice for alder cones. Cholla wood isn't that different from new driftwood. A boil is mostly getting the heaviest of tannins out. Don't prep for "until the water is crystal clear", because you actually want some tannins and releases from the cones/wood. Just kind of a brief de-parasite treatment. And expect that you might seem some of that "new driftwood fungus", which the shrimp will avoid. You'll want to read up on how to clean that stuff off, several options to choose from. I've had great luck with shrimp and wood thus far, they seem to enjoy cleaning any sort of botanical. Botanicals also seem to attract the sorts of algae they enjoy grazing on.

If you like your substrate clean, (but don't necessarily want it reshaped), Malaysian Trumpet Snails are good for that. Keep the mulm down. You only really see them at night, though. They also breed well, which can mean that you need a control measure. I use Dwarf Chain Loaches and Assassin Snails. Neither of those should be big enough to take on a mystery snail. My assassins always left the "tank mastodons" well enough alone. Might be the whole, "eight times my size, I'm not trying to eat that" thing. Planted tanks do well with bladder snails, any color of ramshorn, or a nerite. Each has their downsides, but they're small and good cleaners. Both Cory and Irene have made videos on snails, (Irene mostly nerites and how to avoid egg laying).

Misread your post. I was looking at your nitrates and thinking: "Well, that's not too bad in a planted tank. They'll remove a bunch of that over the week..." And then I realized you mean the purple nitrite amount. Yeah, seems I've come down with a terminal case of "Old". Sadly there appears to be no cure. Sir Terry was correct about life being a drug. To your question, let's run down the list of what you did. First, you've got two colonies in your biological filter: You have nitrosomonas which processes Ammonia, then you've got Nitrobacter which processes nitrite. Nitrosomonas has a single flagellum and moves. Nitrobacter is sedentary. Generally, Nitrosomonas does the colonizing, and creates or expands the biofilm that Nitrobacter then lives on. If the word "biofilm" is unfamiliar, lift the lid on your toilet tank and look for a spiderwebby substance. That's biofilm, it's what composes the portion of your biological filter in whatever type of actual filter you have. Bentley Pascoe just did a YouTube video this week on filtration, which explains a bit about where your biological filter lives in the tank. (Spoiler: Everywhere). 1. You increased the bioload by adding fish. Situation normal, you just need to wait a bit until your biological filter has upcycled by breeding more bacteria to handle the increased load. In the meantime - you water change. 2. You then added gravel. One of the places your biological filter lives is the substrate. So if you removed any old substrate, you reduced the filter a bit. If not, you buried it a bit. Either way the solution is giving it time to adapt and fully colonize the new gravel. I would aggressively avoid doing any gravel vaccing while you let it settle in. Overcleaning here would be counter-productive. 3. Expel-P is an anti-parasite medication. It's hunting bigger prey than your bacteria. I'm assuming the P is standing for praziquantol, which is a pretty standard fish de-wormer. (It's in Prazi-Pro, General Cure, etc.) Maybe that'll stress the bacteria, but it shouldn't wholesale kill it off. *However* one of the steps to using Expel-P was to remove your filter cartridge. "Remove Carbon or other chemical filtration during treatment". You'll never guess what was living on that filter cartridge... yeah, a portion of the biological filter. You probably reduced it again. So you've taken three steps in a row to stress and reduce the bacteria. They're trying to breed fast enough to keep up with you, but they're only so fast. That nitrite level will trend downward, but they've gotta have time to eat and reproduce. Remedial steps would be "as you feel necessary" water changes. @PerceptivePesceis probably right about riding some of it out. If the fish aren't showing signs of additional sickness, they might be fine. Those extra water changes are also reducing the effectiveness of your Expel-P. You might want to stop for a bit on that treatment until you stabilize, or plan on having to treat a little bit longer if the parasites are that bad. Having nitrite in the tank in some quantity will probably stimulate the Nitrobacter to reproduce, there's food everywhere now. That's going to be useful in the long-run to keep up with the load from those extra fish. Now, the current health of your colonies is looking fairly good for Nitrosomonas. That's what's making all the nitrites. You'll notice your ammonia is low, so they're eating aggressively. But again, we need it to be cranking out the biofilm for your Nitrobacter colony to live on. The best thing you can do here is leave the substrate, filter, furniture, glass, and plants all *uncleaned* until the test comes back better. Keep any OCD in check during a water change and just do water in, water out. When you're stable again, then go cleaning surfaces the bacteria live on.