Phoenixfishroom

Curious if anyone else is keeping these guys. Just got 5 of them and am interested to hear other people’s experience with them. Also curious if people think that 150 gallons is big enough for when they are full grown or if I need to invest in a 200 gallon. here is a picture of them in quarantine with a couple new dorsal band whales. They are all eating well and appear healthy so far. Very cute little guys too 🙂.

Honestly I hate aqueon filters, they just randomly stop running sometimes and you come home to find them burning out the impeller while they fail to self prime (they definitely fell at self priming pretty much all the time). I like the topfin filters a lot I have couple of 110s, and two smaller ones as well. The media compartment is huge, they move a lot of water, and they are easy to clean. They also self prime, much better as long as your water level is high enough. The only thing I don’t like about them is that they don’t sell replacement parts. They will however give you a new one if you call corporate and complain about the impeller burning out and it being ridiculous that you can’t just buy this part somewhere like you can for every other filter…. They have done it for me twice. Since then, though, I have been replacing the ceramic center pole of the impellers with pieces of metal the same size and it has been working really well and having them burn out prematurely is no longer a problem.

There is not a breeding report for this species because they have not been bred in captivity, I am hoping to change that. is worth pointing out that plant catfish doesn’t have breeding reports for every fish that has been bred in captivity, they only have reports from people who are on that forum and care to write one. I have seen other species that aren’t reported, but are known to be captive bred also. When I went to go write a breeding report for my. Synodontis contractus I saw that it was the first one and I know for a fact I am not the first person who has had them spawn. There also isn’t one for synodontis decorus, and I know someone who breeds them. I may have been unclear that what was hoping to find with this post was with someone who has experience breeding p.nudiventris or p.aurintiacus. They are both know to spawn in aquaria but are not the easiest fish to breed. it is likely that my wormlines would require the same conditions and have similar triggers, and also not be very easy to breed, so input from someone who has done, it would be very valuable. ( and a picture of one of my nicest looking ones because I love taking pictures of my fish and this species is so handsome lol)

Were you able to find out about that?

I figure this is a good entry point. I would like to actually have the lights on a year long loop if that is possible, so my daytime lengths can be correct for each tank. Each strip can be programmed individually so I can have the Congo and the Rio negro in one room. once I have the lights down I would want to automate some pumps for tidal flow and rain, sending my phone info about conductivity, salinity, ts from smart meters, and eventually have it controlling water level, temp, conductivity, etc by telling it what to do on a year loop and giving it ways to respond to the meter values. Gonna message you But basically I want to have a bunch of biotope tanks that simulate the seasonal changes to water parameters and daylight hours of the region they represent…. And I want it to happen without me doing tons of extra stuff all the time lol

Are you pretty good with programming? I have been using full spectrum LED strip lights for some of my tanks and I am really happy with it for a bunch of reasons. Since my build style is “lets see how much I can over-engineer this” I want to take it several levels up and get addressable LED strips in full spectrum and color change and use a combination of both strips set into fixtures that I am currently prototyping all wired to a single ardueno or raspberry pi and code them to run a 24 hour cycle with sunrise and sunset, full spectrum daytime, and red/blue night light (I use red for my woodcats at night because they can’t see that wavelength). The thing is I build, I tinker, I do NOT code. I need to bring someone with that skill set into this project and it sounded like it would fit in with your interests

Right?! I have been wanting them for a long time and am not at all dissatisfied with them. I accidentally ordered eight of them…. But I’m not mad about that either lol. I am looking for a 50 gallon lowboy to make a dedicated hillstream loach tank so I can breed exotic hillys. Now I just need to find the black lizard hillstream, those are really cool too. I have not ever actually seen them available yet anywhere except for aquarium glasser. I have been trying to find some people who want to do a group order from there with me, once I pull that together the rare fish will be so much more accessible

Feeding them is not a problem I already had a group of Dora’s pipefish that I got 2 years ago. No, actually none of them went to the same tank. There is a khuli loach tank because I have like 30 of them, there is also a hillstream loach tank, the pipes got their own tank …. I would recommend a tank full of khuli loaches for everyone, they are so great. It is by far the most active tank I have and I could watch them all day!

Got a package today and am really happy with the quality of the contents: Red lizard hillstream loaches, silver khuli loaches, and black line pipefish

Mine are too young but I do know people who have spawned them, they do not receive parental care but are unlikely to get eaten by the parents. To raise the fry you need to have infusora as the first food. Then you can move up to things like micro worms, rotifers, and finally baby Brine.

I ordered 10 of these guys and they are the best looking pipes I ever got in the mail. 9 of them look great and are eating frozen baby brine, rotifers, and calannus for me. The daphnia I have is too big I have to get some hikari daphnia tomorrow. once they are out of quarantine they will go into a 30 gallon walstead style tank with shrimp and daphnia in it (eventually, it took awhile to get the daphnia established in the other Pipefish tank…. A long while, and a lot of daphnia). I thought about adding scuds but I don’t know if they will hunt the daphnia or not. I am pretty comfortable with them because I also have the other doryichthys species, doras Pipefish, I have been keeping those for about 2 years now and I am hopeful that they will spawn soon. There are 2 males and 5 females in that group (and I am always looking for more, my dream is to have like a 60 breeder with nothing but like 30 fresh water pipes in it) My understanding is they become sexually mature at around 2 years. I love them so much and my goal is to eventually find all of the species of freshwater pipes, I would like to have some of the African species like enneacampus ansorgii but I have not ever seen those for sale. I did made an attempt with rainbow belly and all I am gonna say about that is I would be willing to try one more time but I would definitely not order them from the place I got the first batch, they were very small and came looking like they hadn’t eaten in a while. For a minute I thought that a couple of them might bounce back but unfortunately even the ones that kind of started eating never really bounced back. Once they go too long without food and their gut bacteria dies you can’t really save them. Anyway, I would love to hear an update on how yours are doing!

If you want floating plants I would recommend water lettuce if it is a highly lit tank, I also really like frogbit and tigerbit. Lots of plants that people usually plant make good floaters too like hornwort and water sprite. If you don’t have a top on your tank, I put cuttings of Pothos in my tank and hang them over the side and they root in there and they are huge nutrient suckers so they’re great for that. Water wisteria is also a really big nutrient sucker and that can be planted or floated.

No! Don’t do it! It is basically the cancer of aquatic plants, you’ll never get rid of it. It’ll be an all the tanks even if you didn’t put it in all the tanks. My friend even found duck weed in his coffee the other day. There is absolutely no getting rid of it, it’ll cover the whole top of the tank, super fast and then you’ll just be scooping it off and throwing it out all the time because no one else wants it. If I knew then what I knew now there would be no duck weed in my house.

I wouldn’t probably keep zebras in a walstead. They require a very high flow rate and the temperature upwards of 80°. They are messy fish and they require pristine water. So that being said, I wouldn’t put them in a small tank. They also don’t really want a heavily planted tank that’s not their natural environment they want a tank that is more sparse in plants, and very full of rocks and driftwood lots of places for them to crawl into and hide. They also require a very protein heavy diet hence me saying that they’re messy fish, even more so than most plecos because if you don’t have filtration, that’s turning your water over 10 times an hour. The flow isn’t fast enough for them and it’s not keeping the tank clean enough

Shell dwellers, bristlenose pleco, blue eyed rainbow fish, and corydora. I have two lfs that buy from me so I breed blue eyed lemon, super red, and albino BN because regular people still want them you can sell them on eBay and stuff and any ones that you can’t sell. The stores will still take. I just ordered a bunch of snow whites because the stores can’t get them yet and breeding pairs still fetch a nice price. I do well with my corydora similus, because they are at the intersection of popular and difficult to source, and the Pygmys and habros. The more rare corys bring an higher price but are slower to move are harder to move than you would think. Like I have 20 duplicareus fry that I have not had takers on yet.

Are you interested in selling/trading? Messaging you to avoid clogging up the post

So in this case that fitting is, as someone else said, probably brass, however, even if it was copper it would be perfectly fine. A lot of houses have copper pipes for Which means all the way to your sink it’s been sitting in copper, and those people can still have inverts just fine. I recently found a couple of pennies in one of my fishtanks from when my niece was over so they had been there for over a month. the metal doesn’t leach into the water like that, I also have a tank that has crystals with native copper in it and there are shrimp in there too. The whole concept of rocks/crystals/metal fixtures leaching into the water enough to cause problems is pretty much false aside from possibly some mild ph change with limestone or calcite/selenium and issues with certain heavy metals

My ropes are like 5” and are so cute that I ordered 3 more the same size. If you’re looking for stuff in general I can hook you up with the names of places I got them from or order them from my importer

If you are into that upsidedown catfish there are still some available and you can message me. I have never seen them anywhere other than there, and they only get them like once a year. I have 10 other upside down catfish that are really cool but those zebra ones are just so awesome looking, as well as being more active and less shy. I am super excited because I just tonight ordered freshwater pipefish and African butterfly fish. I absolutely adore freshwater pipefish, I have a bunch of Doras and had rainbow belly’s before (am forever looking for more of those) so I will post some more pictures once I have them next week. I could talk about and search for really cool rare fish all day…I only have must have wishlist fish that I have been trying insanely hard to find for years without having any success; nanay nugget corydora, the mormyrid pollimyrus isiodon, and pseudomugil mellis. Recently I added yellow fin corydora, orca woodcats, and spoon face whiptails to the list. My life is incomplete until I find them lol

Oh they are definitely some of my favorite fish, they are not shy but they are very much nocturnal, they don’t care for lights at all so I have the light on that tank only comes on for six hours a day, and at a max of 40%. I have been thinking about removing the live plants and ditching. The light.totally. They are pretty sedentary but they do eat algae so you find them stuck to the glass. They are able to change color, from the dark like the one picture to the light like the other and they seem to be able to do it much quicker than the regular Chubbys. I have two pictures from when I first got them. They were taken like three minutes apart. Where one of them is like yellow in one picture and black in the next picture and it did the whole change in minutes. I didn’t even see it happen it was so fast. I have one that seems to prefer being the axanthic color and is the opposite of all the others in that it is yellow and white most of the time and turns dark when disturbed where the others are dark and turn light when disturbed. When they first catch these things, the stripes are like a bright orange red color it’s beautiful but I haven’t seen any go back to that color and I’m just hoping that I can figure out how to make them happy enough to have that happen. I have six of them right now from 3 different sellers and I am importing 3 more from Canada. They are definitely a breeding meant for a breeding project, I am hoping to be the first person to breed them in captivity. So if anybody knows anyone who has bread the yellow black ones I would love to talk to them. The ones I have range in size from like 3 to 5 inches and are in a 75 gallon tank with just some danios right now. They appear to be sexually mature around 5 inches. They do not appear to be territorial. In fact it kind of seems like they like to hang out together so get like three if you get one. They eat algae wafers, Omega one catfish pellets, bug bites bottom feeder, repashy, and an assortment of frozen proteins. They like a warmer tank I keep it at 80, they like a moderate current. They vastly prefer hollowed out logs over all the other types of caves I have given them. I could only find the one picture. But the one that is dark, there was the light color that the other ones are just a few minutes before. That second picture is the one I have that has the nicest colors If I have a chance of any one of them reverting to the orange color that they are when they find them it’s probably that one. I guess that’s pretty much it. I think they’re great, great enough to buy 9 of them. now that I enjoy these so much I really want like 6 Parancistrus nudiventris. They are hard to find, but I am pretty dedicated to finding things once I decide I want them.

I have a lot of very good connections and am able to get pretty much any freshwater fish I want once I set my mind to doing so. I love oddball fish and I really like the idea of sitting down in front of a tank full of fish that you can’t go see really anywhere else. I got 4 of those p.bandama from my LFS. I just happen to go in there and they were like oh you gotta see these you’re gonna want this. They were 30 bucks each so I only got four of them and I went back the next day to get more and they didn’t have them. They were all gone. I spent the next year trying to find more of these things, and I finally was able to track down the one guy who brings them into the country, then convinced him to skip the distributors and sell to me because I knew more about them than he did (I found the only scientific paper ever written about them and had it translated to English lol.) And that was the beginning of my addiction to large schools of rare, exotic fish… just having them isn’t enough I need 15 of them so I can see them behave naturally. It is fascinating. Those dorsal band whales might be my favorite. People think you should keep mormyrid fishes alone but you should not, they have large brains and evidence suggests they communicate in a form of language with their electric organ. I have 10 of them I bonded with them, they take food out of my hand (some of them do anyway) and they are the reason that I’m building the ridiculous indoor pond because I want to be the first person to breed them in captivity. I am also trying to breed the LDA046, I am about to import three of them from Canada and then I will have nine and I think that’s a significant breeding group. It hasn’t been done, but regular Chubbys have bred in captivity and these are closely related. Because I’m a crazy person I’m also trying to breed the mudskippers. I spoke to a researcher who has done it, and and putting a lot of effort into replicating his techniques. If I’m going to have them, I might as well have them in the most natural environment I can create for them and try to get them to make more of themselves so that we don’t have to take them from the wild.

Thank you, that is good information to have. I do try to avoid keeping the ones that really shouldn’t be pets.

1. synodontis sp. aff. Nigriventris “zebra kutu” 2. Dorsal band whales and a.brichardii 3.-4. Rope fish 6. A.nanolutea 7-9. LDA046 10-11. Indian dwarf mudskipper 12-13 Smudge spot corys 14 parasycidium bandama and bumblebee goby (b.xanthomelas) 15. Duplicareus and Venezuela 16 reticulated and pygmy 17 khulis 20 Pseudohemiodon apithanos (fry) 21 gravid cinnamon khuli 22 p.bandama 23 alenquer tiger 24 ancistrus Wabenmuster

Yes! I snuck some fish that aren’t part of this project in too. In no particular order the dorsal band/torpedo whales, LDA046, a.brichardii, Indian dwarf muddies, parasycidium bandama, reticulated corydora, very young Pseudohemiodon apithanos, gravid cinnamon khuli, ropefish, and zebra kutu s.nigriventris. Now I kind of want to go and post a fish photo album. In the appropriate location…. I definitely have more lol

I just found out these things existed, and they may be the coolest thing I have ever seen. Their care needs appear to be pretty expert level, which isn’t in and of itself a problem, but I would definitely like to speak to some experienced owners with these guys.