Lennie

Ive seen many occasions of bettas bullying or even reaching to killing phase for guppies, pygmy cories, honey gourami, endlers, apistogramma triple red male (and it was the late addition to the peaceful tank after betta and she hated him for life in a 160 liter tank) and more. I had 11 until this day, and currently have 2 females and 1m in 3 different community setups How long has it been since you have 6 bettas? I would suggest to wait and see. I wish the best of luck, but my long time betta sorority failed too hard once I lost a few and number dropped to three to four. Chaos. If you wanna try Jaws in a community tank, I would do this: Get a small second sponge filter in the Jaws’ 15g tank and start running it as soon as possible. In the following weeks, setup the new 10g tank and directly move the old sponge in and stock with a small school of fish you want Once you make sure there is no ammonia and nitrite issues in the new tank with established filter, you can get other fish you want, or try moving in Jaws there. As a result, based on the scenario, I would either move Jaws to the 10g and keep her alone (if she is a confirmed aggressive one in the first scenario) and move the schooling fish to 15g tank (as 15 is bigger and would provide a better peaceful community) or, If things go well, I would keep jaws with small schooling fish in the 10g, and stock the 15 the way you want.

Hello there, That’s a good looking tiny jungle. I like it I have to sadly say no to any fish additions. Why? Because the whole tank is Jaws’ now. It’s their territory. if you started with other fish and added Jaws last, it would be much more likely for things to go right. Adding a betta last to a tank changed the direction for me many times meanwhile it wouldnt work to add any to an establed betta only tank for a while Other option is removing the betta for a while or changing the tank design so you kinda try to reset the territory claim here. But I never tried this myself. So I can’t share personal experience on this one If you have a second plan, like, if you have an answer to “what if it doesn’t work?”, you can still try

Shrimps are usually not quarantined. If you are really worried, you can check their look for the potential problems/parasites. They are all fairly easy to notice. If you notice some parasites, then it might be a good idea to qt https://aquariumbreeder.com/understanding-dwarf-shrimp-diseases-and-parasites/ Otherwise or afterwards, you can just put them into your tank. Just don’t introduce store water to your tank.

Nothing to apologise mate. I just wanted to mention it per your question; I barely see any people succeeding such tank style for discus in the long term. Including myself. They are finicky fish. And they are nothing like any other fish Ive kept so far. And believe me, I had and have a lot of species. You will see some people reaching success by treating them like a regular fish, like Fish folk’s discus tank here. But it is a very rare occasion in general. It failed too hard on me to keep them this way, and I am a long time fishkeeper. I think I see more of problematic discus help pictures rather than sharing a nice tank in forums and fish groups. I highly recommend checking simplydiscus and see how people reach success. If you really want discus related advice, get the advice from experienced discus keepers of tens of years in a discus dedicated forum. It is not a fish that people who never kept discus can really help about them based on their normal experience. But we do have a few members here that keeps them In addition to that, I would recommend not keeping discus at all. Especially if you are fairly new to the hibby or if your experience is very limited in general. Keeping discus was personally one of the worst fishkeeping decisions for me, and turned the hobby into a labor and stress instead. That’s my experience. You can find plenty of fish to keep in such tank size. Discus are very limiting by the temp requirement, tank requirements, decors, objects, tankmates, etc. Also requires pristine tank conditions lots of water changes and maintenance and so on. And many are used to be fed heavily on a carnivore diet and beefheart, which is nothing like their natural diet. Making them accept dry food and adding algae to their diet can be PAIN. If you wanna buy discus, make sure they eat normal dry food and is not on a heavily frozencarnivore diet and sometimes even only beefheart You can create a much more fun and wayyy less needy tank by your choice of plants and substrate(many plants wont be happy in discus temps, and you cant really aquascape with discus if thats what you wany) by going for some other fish. Easy example, I enjoy my community tank with angelfish WAAAY MORE than I enjoyed my discus tank in the past.

Hello Cj, I have a friendly suggestion. I can see your excitement about your new tank. However, your last 8 topics are all connected to same tank, stocking, substrate and filtration and the water you wanna use there. In fact, you just created a substrate topic yesterday for the same tank. It might be a better idea to keep everything covered and progressed further under one topic. This way, it is avoided to have so many newly created topics, and people may help you better regarding your questions, as everyone will be aware of the past discussions/suggestions and the current situation of the tank as well as having opinion of the tank overall. Because, for example, you already has some feedback and suggestions about substrate yesterday, but anyone who didn't come across that topic may go for repetitive suggestions and stuff. You cannot combine them all together, but if they make sense to be combined for our mod team as well, then @Guppysnail may help when she has time I believe. Again, just a suggestion from me, Cheers

I wouldn't expect a shy fish to dither other shy fish. Adding bold fish with fairly high activity but not in a level to compete other slower eaters like honey gourami and pygmy cories should be a better choice. In terms of the look, I think chili rasboras are much better looking. But they wouldn't really provide the dithering you are looking in a 30g tank, especially compared to hq rasboras.

In my experience, betta being added last to a tank works much better than other fish and inverts being added to a tank later on. That being said, I have never witnessed any of my bettas actively hunting adult shrimp. They should be hunting the shrimplettes tho, as the population never bloomed ever in any betta tank. That being said, you should have an answer of one question in these type of scenarios. "What if it doesn't work?" What's your plan in case it fails? If you have an answer, you can try many things.

Feed the snail before going to bed. Snails are active at night

I wanna say crypts like wendti. Anubias grow really slow to have the expected "bush" look

Ammonia reading of 5 and dropping to 0.25 while you are reading only 10 nitrate and 2 nitrite sounds a bit... weird. I would expect much higher nitrite and/or nitrate readings when you start with that high ammonia. Are you sure you are testing correctly? Also nitrite to nitrate phase usually takes longer in my experience

German Blue rams are defintely not a fish to label as "peaceful". Not at all. I bred and raised many generations at home and given the chance, almost all are bullies, both towards each other and to other fish, starting from a very small size. I had to move my black ram to my bedroom display tank, and he basically bullied and bothered everyone. Other cichlids, corydoras, plecos, and even my betta. Every other fish lived peacefully there before the GBR addition. So don't be sure. Consuming dead fish do happen, so that is a possibility. How it died, is a hard question to answer. But as long as you don't keep short fin males like panda guppies, basically a male guppy outswimming fast enough a GBR is basically impossible. One hit even might be enough to knock it off.

Gouramis and their size as well as aggression level changes a lot. Depends on what you want. Many people keep honey gouramis in groups without any issue. Two male sparkling gouramis would surely fight in such tank size almost on a daily basis. They are fairly territorial. You can instead try to go for only one male, but it is fairly hard to distinguish sexual differences at a store so it is risky. I dont like dwarf gouramis. Tend to be full of diseases, lesions and problems. Even has an iridovirus called as "dwarf gourami disease". They also may end up being aggressive. Honey gouramis would be your best bet if you wanna keep a group I think.

I gotta mention, they like each others' company, but otos are mainly herbivores and cories do eat good amount of worms/insects/animal protein in their diet besides algae content. Therefore, keeping them together made my otos introduced to commercial foods, but I lost one to bloating. Im not sure if it was because them trying to eat what cories eat, ending up consuming high amount of animal protein as a result. You can still do such big group of pygmy cories and honey gourami, but honey gouramis also love having action going around in my experience. My honey gourami, Agave, has always been happier in a fairly crowded community tank rather than big very calm tanks. Calm tanks with tiny bit of action always lead him glass surfing and feeling stressed no matter how long he is in a tank. Directly quits such surfing behavior once introduced back to an overstocked tank. I'm not really a mid-top column schooling fish guy. I only have pseudomugils, beckfordi pencilfish, rummynoses (but actually bleheris, so some call them firehead tetra instead) and that's basically it. In my experience, both pencilfish and bleheris are hardy. I cant say the same for pseudomugils myself. I used to have rosy barbs and also have pea puffers, but they don't seem like an option for you anyway. As long as you buy a healthy batch, provide a stress free good home with good water quality and diet, pretty much all fish are hardy. The only exception to this for me was keeping discus, and that's it. I haven't kept them myself, but maybe cherry barbs can be a nice option for you. Small and colorful. Red usually pops up really good with green plants. I would do something like: 20 pygmy cories, 5m:10f cherry barbs, 1m:3f honey gouramis, 3 hillstream loach or borneo loach and neocaridinas of the color you like

You can do small to mid size cories, neon tetras and one BN. You can’t do angels as they get big, so they need a big tank. I personally wouldn’t add zebra danios too, because in a small tank, one school of big fish that uses the same swimming level is a better idea, and zebra danios are too active and I don’t think a 15g would satisfy their energy levels. Also would crowd the mid level with neons and your centerpiece fish quite a lot. As centerpiece fish, I would lean towards a betta, or honey gourami, or maybe 1m:2f sparkling gouramis. You can also do one apisto that can do in a regular tap water but not male and female together. My kribensis male is also angelic, but again, no pair. Example; the cories in the pic, one BN, one male triple red cacatuoides, 15 neons, 2 nerites, one borneo loach, and 3 amano shrimp For a scape, you can watch some videos and decide on what both you and your fish would like, and create your own style or imitate a style you like with whats available to you

Fish poop aroma pesto pasta when? I hope I'm invited for the special dinner bud

I added 19 to my 50 liter shallow tank on day 2 of setting it up with an established sponge filter moved in from another tank. And my plants were only 2 days old in the tank. Your plants have been established so they would help with water quality. Besides, 12 pygmys are TINY and 30 gallons is fairly big for these guys. Dont worry, go get your fish. Ive kept easily around 50 pygmys to this day. My fav fish in the freshwater hobby. BUT, if you ask me, don't get pygmy cories first. These guys tend to be shy and keep hiding and feel much more comfortable in the presence of other fish in the tank. In a level, I added 7 luminatus to their breeding tank, and they got more comfortable and started breeding more there by themselves. I would personally stock the tank with other fish and add them later on. Overstocked peaceful community tanks make fish feel very safe and make them super active in my experience. Speaking of which, pygmy cories are tiny as you are aware, and this will be limiting for your future stockings. 30g can support fish that might be problematic for pygmy cories due to their tiny size and extremely peaceful behavior. A group of 6 pygmy cories were BY FAR more active in an overstocked 96 liter tank of mine with rummynoses, honey gourami, shrimp, sterbai cories, otos, etc. but they were much more inactive in groups of 16 and 19 in two different tanks that are far less stocked. These guys LOVE the crowd in my experience. Also, they are not amazing at eating in my opinion. Not fast and active as other cories finding and cleaning up the food. When I stocked one of my new tanks with pygmy cory school of 16 first, I had issues for them finding food and tank going messy. I think besides the presence of other fish to make them feel comfortable, small CUC members like borneo loaches help cleaning up too. And, these guys and otocinclus LOVE each other. Mine used to school very commonly. Beautiful to watch, makes both sides feel happier.

They really look great. Love them

scissortail rasboras get big and are quite active. People commonly mistake their size in store and consider them like other common nano rasboras like chilis, kubotais, strawberries, or even harlequins. They are not suitable for a 25g tank really anyway

For the discus part, you better ask about it in simplydiscus forum. They are whole another world and discus only forum would help you better. But, you will be expected to know about your parameters in order to receive better help regarding your questions on RODI and water softener ( which directly affects your tap I assume)

Thats what I do in majority of my tanks. Idk how experienced you are in the hobby, but stability is important for long term fish/tank health, and it might be a struggle for a person to keep the tank stable with RODI. It is considerably easy with reef tanks, because reef salt more or less prepares the RODI water to an ideal reef tank water once you mix the salt. However, thats not the case for the freshwater part and you basically need to do it manually. Like kh, ph, gh… What fish do you wanna keep?

That’s the introvert one Charging its social battery back to school

I have water softener in my home system and I have all my tanks planted, and I keep many different fish snails and shrimp. It gives me a tds around 370 tho, and I use gh+ to remineralize. Im not sure if every system is the same, but it is very much doable in my experience. I also have RODI but I only use it in my reef tank ans top ups or specific breeding tank if I really wanna try anything

The video I saw today was this: (kinda loud music in the background, warning, keep the volume dow)

Today, I saw someone shared a video of his "Marble chocolate sailfin mollies". The fish in the video have red eyes. Yet, they have an obvious coloration going on, rather than the "classic albino" look. Now that I'm thinking, many times, we see so many albino fish with different coloration going on. How does this albinism but colored fish look work? I'm confused. @Odd Duck @Biotope Biologist @Colu Do you guys have an opinion? https://www.aquariumglaser.de/en/fisharchive/poecilia-chocolate-2/ Some other pictures online: How come an albino look "dark" enough to be named chocolate? Or, how come "albino koi swordtails" look very much like normal kois, other than the eye color, while albino cories, bristlenose plecos or bichirs are directly white? Is there a specific situation for the orangeish/red coloration in albinos? Because, yesterday, when I was at my LFS, They had albino paradise fish, and the only color it has other than white was orange. Or an albino oscar keeps the orangish body marks. Orange strains are very common among albino livebearers too. But guppies, for example, have so many colorations going on, even as albino lines. Like the one @Guppysnail got lately. MY albino platinums look like exactly what you expect, but albino silverados are again orange.

I "think" lacking enough natural growth of biofilm/algae to graze on constantly in the tank triggers it. So they can reach other places to find food but the tank has its limits unlike nature