daggaz

Mebendazole 😷 Does anybody ever do fruit-fly larva cultures? We grew those in school for various lab projects and they are very very easy to get going. The larva are numerous, small, soft, and will eat just about whatever you want to feed them so its easy to nutrient-load them. Also they are gross.

Do you have enough car-seats for all of your fish? 😄

I don't know. I worry your cories have deep-seated emotional problems stemming from a rough childhood and a subsequent inability to commit to anything of substance in their lives, manifesting in an inability to stay still for any length of time in their tank. I offer focused fish-therapy for reasonable hourly rates. 😂 😀

You could use a fork to kind of till them in. Some will be too deep and that will only help you.

I just use a powerhead [Tim Allen noises intensify]

I redid my big brandy glass infusoria tank, because it was just dark and dank and full of too many worms for my taste. Biggest mistake was I was in a hurry so I tried to use a deep gravel bed instead of a sand cap (has soil in the bottom), and it just flooded the water with tannins. So I drained it all out into my overflow bucket on the balcony (full of life), scraped out the red worms that were building casings on the sides, dredged the bottom of most of the gravel, and added a nice sand cap after rinsing everything off. Then I repopulated it with my other smaller jar, which has just TONS of critters that my fish love. The big jar once had a sizable population of amphipods, but they seem to all have disappeared. Alas, they were hard to find. There is one big one that crawled back up out of the sand, so I am hoping it's pregnant or that there are more of them in there. I really want to keep my scuds going. Then I found these nice glass jars at a big bedding and house stuff store, for ten bucks a pop. So I thought I would build something a little prettier. One of the jars, as an experiment, I gave a little squirt from the life-jar, just to see how the two would develop compared to one another.

Yeah, I was worried as well that in my jungle tank, they would just disappear. I have a vampire fan shrimp or whatever they are called, and he is like five centimeters long and BRIGHT ******* BLUE, and I've only seen him three times since I dropped him in.

Im all in for an undergravel with a powerhead. Its all internal, so no leaks ever, and you have a massive surface area for bio-load. The powerhead/uptake tube is easily disguised, and the entirety of the filter itself is just your substrate, so you arent wasting space and crowding the tank with ugly hardware. Bonus points because the powerhead also supplies circulation. Super easy, super cheap, extremely low maintenance. Everybody should be looking at these again.

Convince your friends that they need The Hobby. omfg i cant stop buying random jars, rube....

All my fish were doing all sorts of foul things like eating all the food with no thought for one another, or procreating all over the place with no thought of the sanctimony of marriage, or murdering and even cannibalizing one another. Gluttony, greed, wrath, and lust were just the beginnings. My tank was a den of sin, and so I did send forth a Great Flood.... but alas...

OK so I just found out there is a LFS only an hour's drive away that actually has these... Does anybody have any experience with them? I'm not super happy that they are from a limited area and hard to breed (very worried about putting undo pressure on local ecosystems) so that's already kind of a negative mark for me. Doubly so as I will apparently not be able to just buy a group and get them breeding, either, so if you want crabs you gotta keep going back to the source for more, and we all know how that ends.. But they are cute. And my little son loves them. So there's that.. Should I get crabs?

Strong LEDs and a timer are relatively cheap these days, definitely get a good setup there, its not worth "saving money" at all, because if you do, you will inevitably lose some plants and end up buying it anyways after a few weeks of suffering. You dont have to buy the priciest state-of-the-art thing, but your LFS should be able to hook you up with a decent kit that wont cost an arm and a leg, but still give you the intensity your plants will need.

You should go for as many species as possible (within your financial limits), because the truth is some of the plants probably just wont do well in your tank. Then you can focus on the good ones. But if you stick to "fast growing and easy to care for" plants, you are in a good spot. Don't forget floaters. They are the easiest and fastest of them all. I really love my frogbit, adds an entire new dimension to the tank and keeps the little fish very happy.

So looking at that, immediately, you need a LOT more plants or you are just going to have algae issues all the time. Try to at least double it. If you really dont want to add more plants, I would actually try to cut ferts down a bit and see what happens, because most likely your limited number of plants cant use all the nutrients provided (especially with limited CO2), and the algae grows. And it grows ON the plants, and fights them. And thats what you see. If it gets worse, then go the other way and dose more (and Cory is probably right what do I know). But I am firmly in the "add both more plants and more ferts" camp, just to be clear. But my understanding of it is, this is really hard to balance with only a few plants, and the more you have, the easier it gets. Its better to have the plants eating all the nutrients in the water column and going hungry a bit, than the other way around. This is because plants can store energy and micronutrients for much longer periods of time than algae can, so plants can withstand "famine" and/or long periods without light, whereas algae just dies out. The other thing that plants do to fight algae, is to directly release hormones that counteract their growth. So just in general, the more plants the better. That seems to be the wisdom from the internet, and its my experience so far as well. So have a lot of plants. Add a lot of fertilizer until your plants grow really well, but you probably still have some algae problems, too. Then cut back a little on fertilizer until your algae clears entirely up. I'll add tho, that with the substrate just being an inert material, it could also be your plants just aren´t getting enough food. You have a lot of stem plants, you could definitely try adding more root tabs (keep the food out of the water column as much as possible if you are staying with this low number of plants!).

Just make sure Shiba that you buy a stupid amount of plants. Really just kind of overdo it, you can always trim them or even remove some of them later, but you need a big amount of plant biomass to get things going smoothly. And extra lights on timers. Dont forget to make a journal and post some pics! 🙂

Show a picture of your entire tank, please. Also, what is the substrate? As far as ferts go, have you tried changing the dosage? Sometimes it seems just a slight adjustment makes a BIG difference. For me, I got a big improvement simply by adding ferts... but then a while later, I got what you could call a perfect adjustment in terms of algae, by reducing that schedule by half. So its about finding that sweet spot. CO2 will regulate how much of the other ferts your plants can actually use. More CO2? Your plants will need more fertilizers.

I didnt use an under-matte, it just didnt make sense to me. I did make sure to use a very stiff, firmly supported piece of plywood and I made sure it was absolutely level before putting the tank up. I also made the legs of my aquarium stand with reinforced, adjustable feet, so that I could level it out further if the floor began to settle from the weight. That should be more than enough levelling. Really can't see what a foam matte is going to do, even if you have some horribly wavy surface, the matte will still create pressure points in the aquarium bottom. The solution is always going to be having a level surface in the first place. And if that surface is just totally off-level, a matte is never going to level out the rest for you. Your aquarium is still going to end up tilted... and now with a matte glued to the bottom apparently. Glad I didnt go for it.

Hey, cool thread. Thought I would toss my hat into the "organic soil tank" ring (as Streetwise puts it). I did a bunch of different things: Father fish style heavily fertilized soil with a 2-3 inch sand cap. Big load of rotting wood for a "hybrid" style walstad CO2 production layer. And a plastic tray for an isolated under-gravel filter as the only filtration system. My tank is a bit over 50 gallons (180L) and current residents are: about 20 chili rasbora (hard to find and count) 20 CPDs 11 norman's lampeye fish 6 kuhli loaches 5 glass catfish 3 siamese algae eaters 2 hillstream loaches 1 albino bristlenose 1 giant vampire shrimp 2 amano shrimp about 10 cherry shrimp (also hard to find and count) which are now breeding! and probably two nerite snails but I havent seen them in a looong time. Oh and I've got probably a dozen species of plants, I lose track. Is that lightly stocked? I don't know, I am definitely going to add a bunch more chili's and will top it off with some kind of flashy central fish at the end, maybe a honey gourami or two. So, its my first tank. I've got an educational background in various stem fields that helps support what I am doing, but for the most part I just read a lot online, watched youtube, and picked out what I felt made the most sense and went for it, hence the mish-mash of various techniques. I think Streetwise hits the nail on the head when he says the biggest concern is how you can move it if you ever need to. I built a custom stand (hey im a carpenter, too!) and the top is an easily removable 7/8" heavy plywood flat that can support the weight, though I would empty the tank of water first of course. I don't really think these tanks are "hard to balance" however, the entire point is that the living ecosystem you create ends up creating its own balance (which itself is a hell of a misnomer - balanced ecosystems are extremely dynamic and a non-stop murder-spree). As far as pH goes, your fish are more tolerant than you probably believe and most systems are going to come out somewhere close to neutral in the first place. This tank for example, has a load of gardening lime in it as well as a bunch of peat and leaves, and my tapwater is super hard, and the pH is only about 7.5 and neither that pH nor the KH seem to bother the fish much at all. The point is, most of the substrate ingredients themselves, have a pH that is somewhere close to neutral. If you aren't adding loads of volcanic salts to your soil, you are probably going to be just fine. I just want to say, other than not buying better lights on a timer, not using some initial liquid ferts to help plants get started, and not buying enough plants IMMEDIATELY, the tank went off without much of a hitch. Had one early crash, solved with a big water change and fixing the forementioned mistakes. My tank is now totally thriving, you can check out my journal if you are curious. I'll add some more pictures too (this is an older one), but recently I did some infusoria infusions to up the biodiversity of microflora, and I've been away from home so I've only been feeding every two to three days. Last time I checked in, every single bit of algae, including the old dead stuff clinging to the bottom plants, was gone. The water is super clear, but has some tannins so is sporting a nice blackwater look. With my UGF and powerhead, I have the option to put some charcoal in the uptake tube to lighten the water color, but I quite like it like this so... (my crappy phone camera really doesn't do the tank any justice). I am definitely happy with the tank, and my family LOVES it. Best purchase in a long time.

So I got my infusoria cultures going. A little bit of everything, the big jar on the left has a lot of different worms as well as amphipods, the one on the right is pretty heavy on copepods, daphnia, and seed shrimp. I got a little foam water gun for like a dollar, and ripped the foam off; inside is a big plastic syringe that is just perfect for transferring water and organisms between containers. You just suck 'em up and squirt 'em out! 😄 Then I added that to my fish tank. About 80% of the little spots in the close-up pictures are alive and swimming. The rest is just detritus, mulm, and a bit of algae. Into the tank it went, and checking back in a couple days later, my water was nice and clear and my fish are thriving, but now I can see copepods swimming around in the frogbit. Success!

Tell that to Pinchy the prized Maine lobster. Rest in peace, Pinchy, you were delicious. 😢

Yeah ok, must be just normal algae then with a really beautiful deep blue-green color, because it definitely doesn't stink. Thanks, good to know.

That's a big exception, given that is exactly how the physical principal of evaporation works and why everything from animals to modern refrigeration uses it to keep _cooler than ambient temperatures_ so long as you have excess water to spend. As long as humidity isn't in the upper nineties, a fan ABSOLUTELY will work (leave your window open). And I seriously doubt you can empty a significant part of 20 gallons (in 8 days) in the process, but you might want to run it for three days in advance and measure, and top it off just to be sure. Oh wait. You're in Chicago? Yeah you might be screwed on that humidity bit.

I introduced a big glass of green water / infusoria that was absolutely ALIVE. I'm pretty sure half of you would faint. Can't wait to get home again and upload pics to my journal. PS the tank looks great!

Is it even always necessary to eradicate it? I've got a planted tank and there is some blue green algae that started as a patch in the gravel, and now grows quite heavily on the driftwood. It will colonize the tips of leaves and will cover a dying leaf, but otherwise leaves the plants alone. It looks quite lovely and my shrimp are constantly eating it. It just doesn't seem to be such a big problem... 😕

If you want to have plants, you should watch some youtube on the topic: cory and aquarium coop have a lot of good videos, alexander from fishtory also knows what he is doing. but essentially: 1) you need some kind of substrate they can live in (for most plants, there are some very slow growing species that feed primarily from the water column, and then there are floaters which always grow fast because they are at the surface). this can be small pots of substrate or normal gravel both with extra root tabs for fertilizer, a commercial aqua-soil (highly recommended by a lot of people but can be pricey), or good old fashioned dirt of varying compositions (cheap and easy but harder to control). You should also regularly add some kind of liquid fertilizer at least in the beginning, to help your plants get started. CO2 is optional, but it definitely makes a huge improvement (I dont have it yet but my tank has other means of producing CO2). 2) you need a LOT of fast growing plants in the beginning, you want to really pack the tank with them or you will have problems. sorry but im terrible at remembering the names, however this is easy to find in forums also here. definitely gets some floaters tho and in fact, if you are overwhelmed with all of this, you can pretty much always put floaters in regardless of your tank setup and get a lot of the benefits of plants with the minimum of work. beware of duckweed, however, unless you want to have it forever (the larger forms, like frogbit, are fine. its all about ease of removal). 3) you should buy some stronger lights and get a timer. this costs a bit of extra money but is definitely worth it. If you do that, your plants will most likely grow and outcompete most of the algae. If you dont, you can quickly end up in an algae nightmare and all your plants can die before they really get started. It might sound a bit overwhelming, but in all honesty its not. And man do planted tanks look fantastic. An additional benefit of plants is that they compete directly with algae (once they get growing), in part by taking all the nutrients that algae would otherwise consume, and in part by producing hormones that directly interfere with algae growth. Im pretty sure Cory sells them. Buy his stuff! His "Easy-green" liquid fertilizer is also widely praised.