veerserif

Fish successfully caught, bagged, and handed in to the donation table at the swap meet. Thank you for the help folks!

I kept a banana worm culture for about a year before I got tired of it, but it wasn't *difficult*, just kind of tedious. I didn't have the number of tanks required to make it that worthwhile in the end. Starter came from Aquabid. I went with the cheapo oatmeal + cut up deli container method, pretty easy, you just have to be diligent about making new cultures when they start to really climb up the sides of the container. The fish really loved it, for what it's worth (at that time I had honey gouramis, lambchop rasboras, pygmy corys and shrimp + snails). I do still have a BBS hatching dish and I'll do that once in a while but all I've got is a little 8gal nano now. I freeze leftover BBS and treat it like a frozen food for a while. Most live cultures produce too much food for my situation.

Well, there's a meeting of that same swap meet this weekend, so hopefully by then I can post a positive update. Wish me luck getting the fish out of the tank.

Thanks for the fast responses! I took a look at some of the smaller shell-dwelling cichlids (particularly Neolamprologus multifasciatus), and it definitely has a similar profile and fin shape. We also have pretty hard tapwater here so that checks out (I got the chilis from a fish swap meet). Do you all think rehoming is in order? I have zero experience and not much inclination towards keeping cichlids and the tank is really set up for the rasboras. Unfortunately I'm a renter so another tank (especially a bigger one) might be difficult to get going.

Hello! I have a small 8 gallon tank that is currently home to 9 chili rasboras, many snails, and one mystery fish. When I bought the rasboras back in September, there was a tiny baby fry (smaller than a grain of rice) in the bag with them that I decided to put in the tank. Fast forward to now, and I've started spotting this shy fella near the bottom of my tank. This mystery fish started off as a very pale pink color but the body has steadily darkened over the past few weeks. The fins are clear but the dorsal fin in particular has a yellow fringe. Total size is around 2-3cm, or a little over an inch. Behavior-wise, it keeps to the bottom third of the tank and doesn't venture far beyond the central rock and wood decorations in the middle of the tank, and never seems to swim outside of plant cover (the dwarf sag provides plenty of that). It is extremely shy and hides as soon as I get close to the tank, but comes back out if I keep very very still. My first guess is some type of dwarf cichlid but I have no experience keeping them. Provided this guy doesn't grow large enough to threaten the well-being of the chilis, or doesn't grow so big that I'd feel bad keeping it in an 8 gallon tank, I'm happy to leave it as a part of the tank. Hit me with your best guesses.