doktor zhivago

I've found boiling wood makes it sink way faster but that's not always practical with larger pieces

It's just ai generated garbage. Google is become less than useless

The trumpet shaped objects are stentors

Living creatures come in with your plants. They're all harmless detritus worms and crustaceans and bugs and stuff. You aquarium is alive congrats.

Greenies are one of my faves They get such a cool blue pattern that seems like they can control? I don't know if fish can actually change color like that or if it's just iridescence

It's just wood don't over think it. Give it a boil if you can

Your guppies will naturally keep the size and numbers down. I wouldn't stress

I've never kept sunfish but I've caught a lot of them on ultra light gear. They can get absolutely enormous as far as a tank is concerned. The smaller ones like pumpkinseed or green sunfish (if it's legal they're invasive in some states) or even long ear sunfish may be a better choice.

My scuds are more curly shaped. Those look like some kind of isopod. Completely harmless

Plants and bacteria will use carbonate in the water as a carbon source. It looks like you have shrimp in there as well and they will use carbonate to build their shells.

Mint oil is actually surprisingly toxic to most animal life so I would guess it is the active ingredient. The propylene glycol just allows the plant essential oils to mix with water. I would honestly be surprised if this actually did anything tho. At least at the recommended concentrations.

Buying tanks online can be problematic just due to shipping something both that large and that delicate. You also don't necessarily want to cheap out on the thing holding back many gallons of water from destroying your floors and possibly killing your fish if it leaks. Your local box store would be the best bet for cheaper aquaria as well as being able to easily return and exchange one if it leaks

I'm basically at the same point in the cycle you are with my planted 37 gallon. Ammonia is gone but the nitrites are climbing. I got tons of life in the tank. The plants are growing like crazy. There's some thread algae and a little patch of brown diatoms, and even a lil snail hitchhiker taking off despite the nitrites. I wouldn't stress about your tank. Just keep doing what you've been doing. It's good that things are growing and alive even if they're not the desired species just yet. I'm gonna give it another week or two for the nitrites to drop and then start adding some fish slowly

Lil bro is hangry

The trail is the only way I knew he was in there. He's like half the size of a grain of rice.

Found a hitchhiker in my new planted tank. Aquarium co-op contaminated their plants with snail eggs 😔 (I kid). I named him Steven. Honestly surprised he's surviving my uncycled and now half cycled tank.

I don't think its an issue for the vast majority of people. Captive bred fish and snails would have very little contact or ability to spread parasites with those sorts of complex life cycles. For me the fact that trumpet snails breed in the tank would be a far greater annoyance than the remote possibility of some exotic tapeworm taking over my tank.

Sometimes snails can act as a reservoir for part of the life cycle of certain parasites. However I don't think quarantine of the snails would stop this as the parasites won't usually be symptomatic to the snail.

You might just try emailing fritz and asking them.

Dragonfly larva. It breathes thru it's butt. It's all very unwholesome all around.

Mechanical filtration clears up the dust on the gravel and wood and all the other hardscaping that causes cloudiness when you first put water in the tank. After a few days you will get a bloom of heterotrophic bacteria in the tank due to the beneficial bacteria and plants in your tank being unable to out compete other species of bacteria at first. As the tank matures the bloom will fade on a few days as the bacteria responsible both exhaust the food they need and the bacteria and plants you want taking up more of the nutrients the bloom relies on

looks like a flower

The heart of genetic diversity in the sunfish family, which includes the black bass (smallmouth, largemouth, spotted etc) is here in the south-east. There are literally dozens of species of sunfish, my favorite probably being the redbreasts and long-ears. Up in the mountains in the eastern part of the state where I'm at there was formerly a large diversity of fast water rocky stream fish but most of that habitat has been severely degraded for the past couple hundred years and there's only a few small creeks at very high elevations in the Smokey Mountain National Park that actually maintain the original fauna. In the park itself the trout there are mostly feral wild breeding fish from the stocking regimes that stopped in the 70s/80s (they're usually very small and die around 3-4 years old because of the lack of food in the degraded habitats, the exception being some large piscivorous browns). Many of the tailwaters of dams in the TVA system contain non-native trout like European browns or pacific coast rainbows. The native brook trout have been completely out competed at lower elevations and the ones you catch now are usually stocked rather than wild bred fry. https://smokieslife.org/product/fishes-of-the-smokies/ great book on some of the native species that you can't usually catch on hook and line, lots of the smaller minnows and sculpins and catfish.

i have a peace lily i'm gonna add to the tank eventually but i need to take him out of the pot to propagate and I'd rather wait till it gets warmer outside so i can set him out in the sun to recover. As a fly fisherman I would love to do a native fish extremely high flow tank for brook trout and sculpins and madtoms and stuff but I that's a long term dream as well as possibly having legal issues. I know lots of guys around here raise rainbow trout as bait for stripers but they can get huge compared to the brookies

Not much in there right now. Its only been cycling for a couple days. I think I'm going to swap the hob for a sponge because the noise it makes is driving me nuts I filled my house with plants and I can't keep other pets or have an outdoor garden right now so it was the next best thing