daggaz

Thanks. Wasxavtypo. 😄 pH in carbonated water depends on the level of carbonation. Most brands aren't too harsh, you can definitely use it without harming the plants (see reverse respiration) tho you'll want to check and see if it gets it low enough to interfere with cycling. I wouldn't bother, my point was that dry cycling is going to be more than enough CO2.

Carbonated water is just CO2 dissolved in water. Plants can definitely absorb it. How long it would remain at a high concentration in your setup, I couldn't tell you. The dry cycling method does what you want: set up a new tank, plant a slow growing carpet, fill only to the lowest level of substrate, let the plants establish themselves with leaves in air for max co2, flood once carpet is full and roots are well established.

My LFS has a four big tanks with rows of potted (rockwool) plants each with a little plant tag with name, ease of care, and pricing number. They replace the plants regularly. They also have two coolers full of TS. Pretty dead simple. And one of the tanks is "buy 6 for 20 bucks" and two others are "buy ten for 15% off", so it's quickly tempting to load up on plants.

What exactly are we looking at here, what does it do?

Most tonic water these days doesn't have quinine in it, which is a strong medicine after all. It's just artificial flavoring now.

Pretty sure he means having low temp or low pH will slow your bacterial growth down, and having both low at the same time is bad. The converse is also true, to an extent.

Omg that's perfect. My local LFS is often sold out of chili's, and when they do get them they are absolutely _tiny_. But they have tanks of three other well fed cousin species.

I can't seem to grow bacopa very well in my tank. The entire plant just melts. I wonder if its the hard water (KH 16), but it's a shame as it smells so wonderful.

My lotus only sends up surface leaves. Either they are curled up and unfurl near the surface, or they open early but the stem still keeps growing and they (rather quickly) reach the top anyhow. I have to cut this plant back an astonishing amount, or it quickly blocks all light in over half of the entire meter long aquarium, despite being planted way off in one corner.

Nitrifying bacteria is literally everywhere. You can take a bunch of old sticks that have been laying in the (preferably moist) soil and toss them in your aquarium, and toss in some mulm and leaf litter material from a local lake or stream along with some of the water, and you will RAPIDLY accelerate your cycling process. This is free. You can remove the sticks or whatnot later and no it wont hurt your fish. On the contrary, having a wide variety of microorganisms sets up a competitive ecosystem, and this almost invariable tends to keep harmful pathogens in check, as opposed to attempting to sterilize everything (you cant) and creating a perfect environment for a run-away population explosion of species X. Hospital studies have shown this, looking at bacterial surface contamination in rooms with open windows and no cleaning solutions beyond regular soap, versus sealed rooms using stringent anti-bacterial agents: there is more bacteria overall in the former, but there are less of each species versus the latter, and the worst species tended to dominate in those latter rooms. So I wouldn't buy bugs-in-a-bottle, if I were you. Waste of money at best. Regardless, cycling just takes time and it pays to be patient. You should think about if you want plants or not. In my opinion, plants are great: they are beautiful, they provide food and shelter for your tank and surface area for more nitrifying bacteria, and they consume nitrates which means you need to do less water changes as otherwise you have no other way to get rid of them. Plants complete the nitrogen cycle. If you do want some plants, then you start to inform your decisions about everything else about your tank, starting with the filter. I really like the undergravel filters. They work, they cant leak, there is minimal noise and you dont actually need to clean them beyond stirring up the gravel on occasion. And they are DIRT cheap: you arent buying replacement material all the time (which is actually a really bad idea as you will be removing your bacterial colony when you do). Cory has some great videos on them, he likes them as well. You can also set them up in only a section of an aquarium, for example if you want have a dirted tank or use aquasoil for plants : check out my journal for an example. You are gonna want to add fish later, after you have cycled. You can do fish-in cycling but most likely you are gonna kill your fish or harm them, and its not so fun when your fish die especially when you are just getting started. Your filtration level, including possibly with plants, is going to strongly determine how many fish you can end up with. So I would worry about the fish, last.

This sounds SO familiar.... 😄

Weird. I dont know any humans who dont rise to the bait of, having gone through the trouble of posting a thread, and having gotten responses from other humans, immediately responding and trying to build a connection. Why, you haven't even liked a single post here, let alone quoted one and responded in a rational manner. And yet, you have posted several other threads since this one.. Isn't that ODD? Weird.

I dont know how to, either, so it's cool, bro. No. My tank is getting on 6 or 7 weeks old, was rapidly cycled, is heavily stocked with fish and is heavily planted, and has only had a single water change. My plants (and fish) are thriving. And this is a dirted tank, with a purposely anoxic (if you believe that) soil layer.

Tannis are an umbrella term for ubiquitous organic chemicals compound found in many many many plant species. Yes, they have a softening and antimicrobrial property. But as said, you can get them just about anywhere, and its not the end all is all of parameter control. Its subtle. Especially if you already have hard water.

Just putting this out there... but why not try whatever dried leaves you have available? As long as its a non-aromatic plant without obviously strong medicinal properties (shoot for neutral), how much difference is there realistically going to be? Cellulose is celluose... I use oak leaves in my tank. Fish love them. Free.

I gotta add though, it's a bit strange that you measure acidic pH AND high KH. Sure it's correct?

The user's name is arabic for "princess", they visited a japanese AI site and are willing to pay to remove a watermark (or are sophisticated enough to remove it digitally), and they have an extensive vocabulary that overlaps almost entirely with other users in the thread while simultaneously exhibiting an almost total lack of grammatical understanding, including basic sentence structure, that violates not only english but also arabic and japanese. Google translate does better than that. Much better. What demographic is this? Fails the turing test, sorry.

So this pic has exactly one hit on image search, and it's a watermarked AI generated image on an obscure japanese page for AI art. 長い黒髪と青い目のアニメの女の子の生成 ai | プレミアム写真 (freepik.com)

wait how do you see the fish?

I'd suggest putting a simple question posed in a semi-complex grammatical context as a prerequisite for forum membership. You have at least one bot training here already, and its going to be a rapidly growing problem as the technology, and access to it, advances. I use a computer programming forum where, for example, in order to gain membership, you read a paragraph where there are sentences randomly interjected about birds and how the forum loves them, and finally it asks you to "please type in the common name of your favorite species of flying animal in the second field and to please act like the other humans here so we can tell you are not a robot." And that seems to do the trick. For now. DUN DUN DUUUUN!!!!

Does not compute... 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00101100 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00101110 00001010 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00101100 00100000 01111010 01100001 01100100 01101001 01100101 00101110

murder beans... and you are worried about the tetras? well it could be funny if they upset the tentative balance and the whole tank devolves into insofar bloodshed.

Thanks! 😃

Going to second the notion that you may be overthinking this, and don't need to do nearly as much as you are suggesting to keep happy fish. They are for the most part, far more tolerable of parameter adjustments than one may be led to believe. Going for only native plants, and trying to recreate a specific look is cool, but you are definitely overthinking things when asking "certain types of wood and rocks that are most appropriate to a South American biotope." There are thousands of specific biotopes in South America, if not more, all depending on how you want to define a biotope. And things like wood species is going to matter very little. Rocks in particular are a geological phenomena that are going to be largely globally distributed. But all that said, getting a bunch of blackwater fish together and putting them in a blackwater tank is certainly something you can do and do well. Check out youtube for videos on blackwater. But the basics you will be going for is lots of wood and leaf litter, lots of tannins, and soft water that is otherwise exceptionally clean -that means have very good filtration. But blackwater is just one kind of biotope from South America. Maybe you want to do a muddy amazon tank full of live piranha and some capyabara on the banks, or anything in between. I am curious by the way, out of all the biomes in the world you chose South America. What would a person from another continent think when they saw your tank? What if there was a turtle in there, but it had fallen on its back, and the heat from the lamp was slowly killing it. What do you think they would do?

Do they actually eat the wood? I've seen conflicting reports... My local fish shop feeds them potatoes. They cut off a big chunk and throw it in, and the plecos eat it down to the skin. Is good fish. Like potato.