FScalfano

I was considering pea puffers, until I read a bunch of posts calling them murder beans. Sigh.

I have a 200 gallon aquarium with skimmer/overflow circulating through a sump shared with a 75 gallon tank with similar overflow plumbing. I have red mangroves growing in the 75 tank. Till recently, I did not have any fish in the mangrove tank. The larger tank has 4 severums, a breeding pair of electric blue acaras, an albino pleco, eight tetras, two oto catfish, and two hillstream loaches. Recently, I discovered that there were a bunch of fry living in the sump. My daughter, whose eye-hand coordination is better than mine, was able to catch them and I put them in the mangrove tank. I assume these are the result of breeding by the two adult loaches in the main tank. I do not know why they ended up in the sump, but there we are. One of my observations about these fry in the mangrove tank is before they were introduced into that tank there was a thick film of green algae all over the sand substrate and glass. Within a couple of days, this was all gone. I have been feeding these babies pleco and algae wafers as well as spirolina flakes since then. I have been thinking of putting other tank mates in the mangrove tank, maybe something that would not work with the other fish in the main tank. Any suggestions? Despite what some others have posted about these loaches, I only have one small powerhead in the mangrove tank and the current does not seem to be very strong. The main tank has a number of power heads attached to a wave maker controller.

I was reading about raising daphnia for live fish food and it raised a couple of questions in my mind. First, I have a 75 gal tank plumbed in parallel with my community 200 gal tank. The 75 has no fish just some dwarf hair grass (that I rescued from the tender attentions of my severums-a subject of a prior post) and some mangroves that I am growing. Could I use that tank to raise daphnia, considering that the temperature is the same as my community tank (78 F) and that they would probably spread into that tank even without my intervention? Second, as I have a koi pond in my yard, which has been operating for years, and is currently full of green algae, could I just scoop up water or sieve it to collect daphnia and insect larvae to feed my tank fish? Is this safe?

I have given them some pleco and algae wafers, which I had for my daughter's pleco tank. In my tank, there was plenty of green algae for the pleco and loaches, but the severums seem to be somewhat interested in the wafers. I will get some plant weights. Thanks all.

I have coarse gravel in the tank. I was thinking of mixing in some sand. I have never seen the severums touching the plants. All the other plants, swords, Java fern, vallisneria are fine.

I recently planted my 200 gal aquarium with some of the Coop dwarf hairgrass. Something in my tank keeps uprooting it. I have one small pleco, two butterfly loaches, four severum cichlids (small) and 8 long fin tetras (very small.) What can I do to keep whatever is doing this (I never see it happening, I suspect the pleco,) from doing it?