daggaz

As an aside on acclimation, instead of pouring in relatively large amounts of aquarium water into a separate container every 15 minutes or so, you can just poke a few pinholes in the bottom of the unopened bag and leave it to float for a good hour. The oxygen will stay trapped in the top of the bag and keep it inflated, and the water can now softly diffuse together over the entire acclimation time. It's what my local shop recommended to me when I was asking about drip-conditioning for shrimp I had just purchased (and they could have just sold me that equipment!), and I've got a dozen cherries and two big fat healthy amano shrimp in my tank with very similar parameters to OP, albeit lower nitrate because my plants eat it.

"Invertebrates but not shrimp specifically" is like "fish but not sting-rays specifically".

We have a chemical engineering research lab that works solely with hydrogen and I happen to be the safety manager for it... Gotta say, this is the first I've ever heard of infusing water with H2 and then drinking it, and I would be extremely cautious. H2 is very reactive and will attack all sorts of materials that one normally uses in lab settings because they are assumedly non-reactive... stuff like plastic, rubber, metal, it all gets broken down unless you use special materials that are specifically resistant to hydrogen bonding. The same thing is going to be happening inside of you. I would assume that, because nobody is outright dying yet, the concentration of dissolved hydrogen is too low to have any immediate negative effects. If it interacts with your mucous layers in your digestive tract, you arent necessarily going to feel it but that could affect nutrient uptake, membrane irritation and protection, and its almost certainly going to nuke a good percentage of your gut flora. Maybe the net effect of all that is positive? I don't know, but I would be very cautious until careful studies have been done. A quick net search looks like a lot of this is new and not well documented, plenty of anecdotal claims and such. I dont even want to think about the fact that H2 will escape through pretty much any solid material (like a steel cannister) over time, so it is absolutely going to be passing into your bloodstream, too. I would point out that it is generally not advisable to spend long hours in a 100% oxygen tent, and doing so can damage lung tissue and even your eyes, and eventually will kill you through oversaturation. Dissolved hydrogen is going to be way lower concentration of course, but then again, our bodies have evolved substantial mechanisms to deal with molecular oxygen. Molecular hydrogen? Much less so I believe. I just wouldn't do this, not with my health at risk.

Planaria are extremely easy to identify, due to their motion. They will just smoooothly glide across the surface of the glass like magic, with no visible form of locomotion, ie no twisting or snaking, no inching, nothing. They just "go". This is the flatworm way. I'm not sure how they swim in the water column, I've only ever seen them on a surface. Detritus worms will typically twist and spin if in the water column because they cant usually swim with any efficiency at all, lots of times they make a S shape back and forth, that doesn't really get them anywhere. Once on a surface, they will move like snakes or earthworms, and often they will end up partially burrowed with their heads poking out. Leeches, if you get them, do the inch-worm thing when moving on a surface. And when free-swimming in the water column, they swim like sea-snakes with big undulating S waves that rapidly move them forward. On surfaces, they can also hang on with sucker on the back end, and stretch waaaay out with their entire body and wave their head around waiting to latch onto prey. Note that they dont do this partially burrowed, like detritus and other roundworms, its almost always all or nothing. The leech wants to bump into something, whereas the other worms want to be able to quickly retract to safety.

I'm admittedly new to this (so feel free to correct me if I am wrong), but extensive reading gives me the following understanding: 1) You need a lot of plant biomass for a "natural" tank, natural meaning somewhat self-sustaining. You will always be adding food (if you have more than a few small fish) and removing waste, the latter perhaps only in plant clippings, but it must be done. 2) Bio-filtration is extremely important regarding how many larger aerobic organisms (ie fish) you can keep. Surface area is key. This is going to be your filter system, and in a dirted tank, the substrate itself after some time, and the surfaces of all your plants and hardscape. If you have a larger filter, you can do more. So an external cannister or even better, a sump, are going to really expand your capabilities. Another good option is a UGF which has a huge, in-tank surface area and cant ever leak -but you have to be tricky to set one up in a dirted tank. 3) Plants need CO2. Fish need O2. This would seem like a simple situation but its not, due to two problems: a) the equilibrium concentration (natural amount) of the two gasses in water is not anywhere near the same, strongly favoring oxygen. And to a lesser degree b) plants transpire at night, meaning they absorb O2 instead of releasing it. What this means is that if you have a lot of fish, you really need a good oxygen supply. But anything that puts oxygen into your water, will remove excess CO2, and this will start to strongly limit plant growth. So basically, you can have a lot of fish and a few plants, and its not a huge problem but its nowhere near to a natural system. Or you can have a lot of plants, and a few fish, also with no big problems. But in this latter case, as you add fish, you will push things out of balance. If your filtration isn't up to par, you can get too much waste and this will poison your fish and potentially cause an algae and/or a bacterial bloom, also detrimental. If there isn't enough oxygen, your fish will start to gasp, so then you up the aeration, but then your plants start to suffer and algae potentially takes over.. it becomes a tenuous balance. The advice as I understand it is to start with all the plants, add a small amount of fish (well under the 1 inch per gallon rule to begin with), and if you really want a good ecosystem, dont forget microfauna and other things like snails and detrivores. Then when things are running smoothly, add some fish in small amounts. See how it runs. If your water remains clear and the fish aren't gasping at the surface, add a few more. When you run into problems, you either need to rethink your filtration, or cut back a little on the fish. When considering fish, keep to small fish. Its not so much the length of the fish, but its overall mass that is important. Big fat fish poop a lot. Tiny nano-fish are a blip on the bio-load radar. And all of this on the caveat that with a new tank, you're going to have trouble keeping it stable. The tank doesn't just need to cycle, it needs time to become seasoned -where all of the organisms are very well established.

Well my tank is heavily planted, on top of all the hardscape, so excavating is no longer an option. Also not to sure how well my fish friends would like a cloud of sediment and bacteria in their water column. Next time I set up a tank, I am really going to take it slow during the planning-to-hardscape phases. I will also try the Barr "dry-cycling" method; I would love to start with a thick established carpet of foreground plants.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere on these very forums, that dynamite was the method of choice.. 😉

I never thought this would see the light of day, but years ago I did an undergrad study on building super-hydrophobic organic modified films on glass. We used a siloxane bond to attach the modified organic molecules, and found that treating the glass (after very thorough cleaning) in a strong acid greatly increased the bonding rate. This is because the acid hydroxylizes the terminating oxygen groups found on the glass surface, so from Si=O to Si-O-H. The hydroxyl group more readily forms a new siloxane bond. We used piranha solution for maximum results (PLEASE DONT DO IF YOU ARENT A TRAINED PROFESSIONAL), but any strong acid will work. This has the added benefit of further cleaning the surface.

There were never any bodies... so maybe those guys were getting eaten. The shrimp in particular are healthy and suspiciously energetic. Hmmm. Also they weren't in the tank in the first trial. Hmmm... My next thread will be "Help, how do I catch my Siamese Algae Eaters??!" 😄

Serrated bread knife produces minimal burs and is only slightly more difficult than a serrated steak knife.

I really love these guys. I had ten in my planted tank that were doing quite well until the tank crashed and I lost them. After doing a huge 95% water change and getting the tank stabilized, I tried to reintroduce 20 more. But they just started disappearing, like half of them after the first day, another 5 the next day.. and so on. I've got one hardy survivor now. The tank hovers around 7 to 7.5 pH (the water is hard with a lot of buffer). There is a small UGF with a powerhead that gives circulation, but unless they are directly in the first part of the stream its not enough to knock them around and most of the tank has extremely gentle flow and quiet, shady areas which they quickly congregated to. There are less tannins after the water change, but its still got a darker shade to it; the water is otherwise crystal clear. I don't know, maybe they weren't eating enough. I had tiny tiny daphnia in the tank, plus there are a ton of plants with lots of biofilm, and I was grinding up high protein flakes which I had given to the first batch, but this time around they didnt really go for it.. The tank has 5 small glass catfish which are doing very well, and 3 small siamese algae eaters, none of which were harassing the chilis let alone big enough to eat them. It's also got 12 cherry shrimp and 2 amaro's, also all doing quite well. I'd really like to get some breeding, any advice? I love these little guys.

So I just set up a tank with a fertilized substrate (1 to 2 inches) and a 2 inch sand-cap. And I heavily planted it. And the tank did great for a few weeks and then crashed really hard and I had to reevaluate what my system was actually doing and do a big reset: 1) Lights - dont go with low lighting. Get some extra lights from day 1 and put them on a timer. Max 8 hours, then make sure your tank is dark (not necessarily pitch black) in the interim. This is worth EVERY penny. Light is absolutely the key ingredient driving all of the plant-based chemical reactions, so there you have it. We are doing photochemistry. 2) Liquid Fertilizer: Father fish calls this stuff "poison" which is just factually incorrect and entirely dogmatic. FF says to plant the roots into the sand only, and let them grow down as they need. Sure, that's fine in the long run, but unfortunately in the short term your plants are likely going to get outpaced by algae and then your system crashes. Use liquid fertilizer to give your plants a boost in the time while they are establishing themselves. Once that happens, you can slow down or possibly even eliminate water column additives. But until then... my experience is you absolutely need to give your plants that boost. And here's the cincher on this: you absolutely MUST heavily plant your tank from day 1. You need a huge plant biomass, or you are going to have problems. And the more plants you have, the more nutrients they require. So give them a green boost. 3) "Do Nothing" -again, more "naturalist" dogma. If your plants are dying off, you need fix the underlying reasons AND you need to remove a large part of the dying tissue. Otherwise, that triggers more algae and more die-off and you have a positive feedback mechanism that ends up strongly favoring a primordial soup instead of a healthy fish-filled ecosystem. So tidy up your tank and keep a hand on that balance scale, keeping it in favor of your plants and away from excessive algae growth. At the same time, dont try to sterilize your tank of algae - in this respect FF is correct, some algae is good as part of a healthy ecosystem. 4) Carbon. I added rotting woodchips to my substrate. In my haste, I forgot to add a layer of crushed charcoal and wood-ash. I really, really wish I had remembered to do this. Rotting wood adds CO2, but the charcoal and potash is just like putting an afterburner on the process. Plants LOVE this kind of thing. At this point, I am looking at adding a CO2 injection bottle like in the Ocean Aquariums shop in San Francisco, but am unsure if my tank circulation is too high. Worth a try, as while my plants are growing and establishing themselves, its clearly slower going than what I see in higher-tech tanks with increased CO2. That said, at the same time I do like having high aeration, so it gets tricky here to balance things. Again, this is another reason I really wish I had remembered to add a layer of charcoal to my substrate -just under the sand where the plants can quickly reach it. Anyhow. I am new to this, but that's my educated take on it, combined with my own experience so far, running a heavily planted, fertilized substrate + sandcap 50 gallon fish-in tank, including a small (20% of tank bottom) UGF with a powerhead for flow.

Hello everyone! I'm totally new to the hobby. My stepmother used to keep a lot of tanks (fluorescent gravel and plastic plants, but vibrant and healthy fish of all sorts) and we all loved looking at the fish all day. So when my wife asked me if we should get a fish for our all-things-ocean-loving 5 yr old, I decided to go overboard and we now have a 180 liter (47-ish gallon) freshwater aquarium in the living room! It's great, we don't even watch tv in the afternoon anymore. I'm an engineer/physicist/chemist/microbiologist by trade, so the whole "set up a complex life support system for a self-contained ecosystem" was just my cup of tea. I spent a few weeks nerding out on the net, learning everything I could about how to do this, and what what my step-mom could have done better -she always said plants were too hard. I'll post a journal at some point, but my tank is about 6 weeks old and already doing very well. I went with a father-fish inspired heavily planted, fertilized substrate with a sand cap, but I also figured out how to put an under-gravel filter in there, which so far is working splendidly. I have nice circulation, good aeration, and crystal clear water. Plants are growing nicely, and I've even got fish and shrimp that are enjoying their new home. We uhhh... we had some casualties on the way, and I would like to take a moment to give respect to our fishy friends who gave their lives in the pursuit of the Pond. We will miss you, Casper and Casper2, and Bob and Bobalina... .... So also I learned it's a bad idea to name your fish before they get very established. Anyhow, I love Cory's co-op videos (also a big fan of Alexander from Fishtory) and it was natural to come to a vibrant, healthy forum to ask questions and share my experiences. So hi! 😃