daggaz

If a fish cries underwater and nobody can see its tears, was it ever unhappy?

It's very high in silicates so be prepared for diatoms.

Today I taught the kids how to glue hardscape together with superglue and cotton balls. Then we built new houses for our bottom dwelling community.

Well I was definitely teasing; they're small but not -that- small. If you buy live daphnia, there's usually a ton of micro sized juveniles in with the adults. My nano fish gobble 'em up and leave the big boys to the catfish. My CPDs also ignore bloodworms.

Thought as much. Your tanks look fantastic; I'm strongly considering upgrading.

Theres a few videos of them eating mosquito larva. So for small fry, yeah it couuuld happen but would you even notice? Like Guppysnail says, as long as your tank isnt choked with them.. Hail hydra!

Can they interbreed?

And here I am trying to convince my wife to throw the television out once and for all and go for wall-to-wall aquarium in the living room. "Baby, we can grow our own food.."

Theeeeeee ffuuuutuuuuuurre isss nnoooooowwwwwwww.....

I really want to try this, but I am worried their eggs will slip through the silicon-oxide molecular network of the glass and fall out of the tank.

So on a scale of 1 to 10, where would you rate C02 injection? Or you know, feel free to use whatever descriptive metric is actually useful to you.

Yesterday was my birthday, so I took the wife and the kids to the beach and we spent some hours picking up neat stones and little pieces of driftwood to use in the tank. Our fish need new apartments as the community is rapidly growing and not everybody can find a home. Housing prices are way up, construction is slow; it's a rough market in there. So we filled a sack up with rocks, had dinner, and watched a bonfire at sunset. Today I'll sit the kids down at the kitchen table and we will try to puzzle the new homes together. We got as many flat rocks as we could find, and I am going to try the superglue/cotton ball construction method. I'm sure the kids will have a hoot, they'll probably want to build fish houses every weekend for a while. I don't know how natural the houses will look, but that's ok. It'll be fun. I can try to make a more aesthetic tank later, but for now, my fish will have to enjoy their new Fred Flintstone style neighborhoods. My plan is to build some units, maybe a highrise or two, and tuck them into some of the empty gaps between the plants. I'll add some rock piles, too, for the shrimp.

I had the exact same problem. Other fish were fine, but my chili's rapidly vanished. Wish I could tell you more. 😕

Keep in mind that they don't have four seasons; they have wet and dry. I'd bet most fish are caught late in the dry season, when streams and pools are low.

Any issues so far or things you would have done differently?

Picked up a CO2 liquid "meter" and installed it last night. C02 was 3ppm when the lights went out. Tank is totally dark all night, then there is dim external light from about 5am onwards, slowly increasing but the tank is still pretty dark at 8am. At this point, after 10 hours of darkness/dimness, the CO2 had risen to around 12ppm. That's great, and explains why my plants are growing well, but not outright exploding like in a high tech tank. This tank has no CO2 injection, a powerhead that provides minimal surface agitation at the moment, and a small airstone. I put the airstone in because I had gasping fish at one point, even after fixing my powerhead problems and getting a more robust agitation. The tank produces CO2 from the dirt substrate and especially the added cellulose materials. It regularly bubbles CO2 from the substrate, tho some days are more bubbly than others. It's particularly cool right now, and there's no heater so the water is also cool, and this slows down the bacterial breakdown of cellulose. So it's not very bubbly and we still hit 12ppm. I'm excited to check again later this summer where hopefully we get some much warmer weather. I'd like to try it without the airstone (which pushes CO2 down towards the normal equilibrium of 3ppm), but again I'm cautious for my fish. Especially with all those plants transpiring at night while CO2 levels are also rapidly climbing.

Congrats on the tank! If you stick to nanofish I don't think the shape difference is going to make a huge difference. Maybe just don't get super swimmy fish like zebra danios, but honestly those would probably be just fine in there. I'd also like to hear what you are thinking.

Yeah I was going off poor memory and smell, as soon as I saw "cyanoacrylate" I said "doh!", having researched the chemistry before. Point is kind of the same: once they dry they're usually not water soluble, so how much of the material is ever really going to leech out into the water column? Micrograms? Nanograms? If that can kill a fish, there would be a lot more warnings about the stuff already.

Hail hydra. There, I said it.

Yeah that's honestly a good attitude. Who really knows what it was. Nobody, that's who.

Maybe but they don't sell coop in Europe. I checked already for easy-green.

Thanks, Cory! You and Dave Bogert (who highly recommends you again) were big inspirations for me to try it out. I've got like 50 fish and 15 shrimp now, I can dump a whole bag of live (soon to be dead) food in there, nothing makes the water cloudy or the ammonia spike. I'll post more pictures soon, but my tank is absolutely teeming at this point. I am VERY happy with the results, so far. PS please open shop in Northern Europe 🙏

He's perfectly tropical. That's in the US?? Are you in Florida?

If there are contaminants, what are they? If they don't know what they are, how do they know there are contaminates? Then worry about your fish.

The penchant for exotic leaves in this hobby really tickles my cynical sense of humor.