Miranda Marie

Is this in centimeters/is that a 40 gallon tank? The measurements are confusing me.

I know people say guppies "should" have company, but I have always just experienced them picking on each other *constantly* unless there is a large group of them. I've sworn off having anything short of 10 of them at one time. It stresses me out to watch them constantly fight, and the fighting tends to stress the fish, too. So my advice would be, if he seems fine and isn't constantly hiding/stressed, adding 2 more is likely just going to add to the little dude's stress rather than relieve it. 3 guppies, in my experience, is not a good number. I'd personally just let him live his life out with his rasbora friends. You don't have room (or the desire, it seems) to add a bunch more, so he'll likely be happier alone.

Thanks! He's quite the grump, but he looks very pretty. 😆

Happy New Year! We are ringing in the new year with a cookie baking party. All 5 kinds of gluten free cookie dough have been mixed up and are chilling, and the first batch just came out of the oven! I also spent some time this morning hanging with my fish and feeding them a slightly more varied diet for the occasion. Sensei Fish also wishes everyone a wonderful year to come.

Here's a picture from today (the ones posted yesterday were from when he first arrived). He is definitely warming up as time goes. He'll now request food by swimming in circles at the corner closest to my bed until I am summoned to do his bidding.

This is technically only my third. I'm hoping he'll be the one that breaks my chain of iffy luck with them LOL. They're such fun fish with huge personalities though.

That sounds both amusing and annoying in equal measures. I haven't had this problem, mainly because my shrimp eat dead fish faster than I notice them to take out.

Unfortunately, the amount of water turn over doesn't affect how much beneficial bacteria that have grown in the filter to handle the bioload. It takes time for the bacteria colonies to grow properly. So I'd definitely give it a couple weeks for the ammonia and nitrite to go to 0, and then pick one of the species to introduce and then monitor the levels with the increased bioload. In the long run, it will be a lot less water changes and stress for both you and the fish.

The newest member of my fish friends has been with us for about a month now, and he certainly has some personality. His shipping box ended up having most of the "live fish" label covered up, so it came in pretty rough shape. We got him out right away and into quarantine, and I discovered for the first time that betta fish can glare. The little dude looked at me like he was trying to curse my family tree. I was definitely blamed for the rough handling LOL. As a result, during the first week or so, he would play dead any time he saw someone looking at him or moving around the room. And I do literally mean playing dead. He'd be swimming around the tank acting completely normal if we were across the room; as soon as we tried to approach the tank, though, he would go completely limp and float to the top on his side, then lie there motionless until you left the vicinity. He's slowly warmed up to us, though. He likes my sister, especially, and will play with her by following her finger and such. He still looks at me like I am his sworn enemy, but at least he has stopped playing dead and accepts that I am the person who feeds him. We have come to a grudging understanding, where he still hates me and always will but at least I bring peace offerings. He has gone through all the quarantine meds and parasite treatments and is ready to go to his forever home as soon as I get a replacement for my ammonia test kit (it has somehow gone missing...) His tank is the Ikebana bowl, and it is fully cycled, but since I am testing soil in the bottom of the bowl for the crypts (with a thick cap), I want to be able to keep an eye on perimeters for a little while. The test kit is on the way and should be here next week. I'm waiting to see if he gets mad when I move him to his new tank, because the only hiding places are in the plants in the crypt bowl, and he seems *very* partial to "holes". The quarantine tank has a diver's mask, castle, and abstract tower and he loves sitting inside them with only his nose sticking out. We will see if he is appeased by the thick forest of plants or if he curses me until I break down and add the diver's mask to his otherwise aesthetically pleasing home. All that to say, he's quite the personality and we are all very fond of his grumpy self already. We've started just calling him Sensei Fish because none of the names we tried to give him stuck. He just looks so old and grumpy! So Sensei it is.

I would not suggest ordering all of them at once. Your tank is still not reading as cycled (there should be *no* ammonia or nitrite of any kind once your tank is properly cycled, both of those are very toxic to fish). So I would wait until you consistently have 0 of both those readings and then slowly add one of those species at a time. Adding that many fish all at once is asking for a large ammonia/nitrite bloom which can result in fish death. It's always best to stock tanks slowly and make sure your cycle is keeping up with the number of fish the tank has in it.

I would not suggest ordering all of them at once. Your tank is still not reading as cycled (there should be *no* ammonia or nitrite of any kind once your tank is properly cycled, both of those are very toxic to fish). So I would wait until you consistently have 0 of both those readings and then slowly add one of each of those species at a time. Adding that many fish all at once is asking for a large ammonia/nitrite bloom which can result in fish death. It's always best to stock tanks slowly and make sure your cycle is keeping up with the number of fish the tank has in it.

I'm lucky since we live up in the mountains and use almost exclusively woodstove heat in our home, power or no power. Power outtages from blizzards aren't too uncommon, but they don't generally faze us because we are used to them. We have a generator to recharge things as needed and know how to quickly store up water in the case it is out for days. (As soon as the electricity goes out, run all the water from the pipes into your bath tub and/or any large drink containers before the pressure in the pipes dissipates.) We've gone a week+ in the past with no power and not had issues, and this year I upgraded to Aquarium Co-Op's dual air pump with battery pack to simplify things. That way in the case of an outage, when we run the generator twice a day to get the fridge cold again, it can be topped up some without the need for messing with external battery packs quite so much.

I'm going to second what Flipper said. Go with something easy like eco complete and just do that. Aquasoils are finicky for newbies and as one who took the plunge too early, they cause so many frustrating algae issues if you don't know what you're doing. I would tell my newbie self not to go that route back then if I could, because it was just way too much. Balancing the aquarium became so hard and complicated when I was starting out. Start with easy plants, easy substrate, simple light and learn from there. Getting fancy too soon just makes the hobby frustrating and overwhelming.

Understandable! Thanks again.

My current 20g is more an ecosystem than a "scape" per se (though I do like how it looks). It can go months without a water change and never see a change in perimeters. The fish are all very happy. I'm just frustrated with the struggle to get my plants looking nice without spending a fortune! 😆 The goal is always to have enough plants and a stable enough environment that it doesn't rely very heavily on constant water changes once the initial set up phase is over. I find it fascinating that tanks can take so many different forms. It definitely keeps the hobby interesting!

I'll definitely be updating my journal as I go! It'll probably be a little while as I'm hoping to slowly buy the supplies needed throughout the winter and tackle it in the spring! 🤞 I'm no master aquascaper but I'm hoping if I plan well enough, it'll turn out pretty.

Oh dear. I can definitely see how that would be a problem!! LOL. Luckily, I am more a meticulous planner who has to be absolutely set on something before moving ahead with it, so I should hopefully only be buying one set of supplies! 😆 I definitely feel you on receipts, though. I always lose mine! Thank you!! This is really helpful. The plan as of now would be to do soil in the corners where the islands will be, capped with pea gravel (which I already have). Then if I decide to do sand in the other parts of the tank (undecided), I would only do them in the negative space where I won't be planting/using hardscape. If I use a thicker layer of pea gravel to give the islands some more height, would I need a thicker layer of soil as well, or would I still only use an inch at the base?

The plan is to only have the soil (or aquasoil) where I will be planting. I'm hoping to do a double island scape (or that's what I am currently leaning towards...) and confined by the borders of that (probably some form of rock). Then sand or gravel everywhere else as to hopefully remove the risk of quite so much of an algae bloom while still providing enough nutrients. And yes, I'll definitely be capping regardless of which way I go this time! I wish I had known to cap the first time around but alas, we live and learn. If I do go the aquasoil root, I have already found some nice coarse mesh bags (with no metal) I could use, but I'm still leaning towards trying soil or worm castings at present... I have a while to research and change my mind though if I decide to go the other route. The other odd thing is that my sword plant never grew at all with aquasoil. It stayed the exact same until the aquasoil stopped working and I began giving it root tabs (it devours 4 root tabs per month now and still struggles to not have nutrient deficiencies!) At this point, I'm just willing to try things to attempt to get success that isn't hinging on feeding 12 root tabs to this tank every month with minimal success in the plants actually looking nice...

I have dirt in the bottom of my ikebana aquarium bowl for now as a "test". Thus far, I am already seeing explosive growth. I have used aquasoil in the past and ran into horrible algae issues because I had no idea that it probably should've been capped. The tank was an algae farm for several years until the aquasoil became useless, and I've been struggling through with root tabs since. I wouldn't mind doing an aquasoil base instead of soil, but in my experience, aquasoil runs out and needs recharged/changed just as fast as soil would. The nutrients only lasted in either for so long. I do know that my ikebana tank will be much easier to handle when it needs replaced (all the soil and plant substrate is contained in the bowl, so it will be very easy to remove and replace). With the 29g, I am hoping to use shallow dishes of some kind where the soil would be localized in a double-island scape and hidden by said shaping, but we'll see. Either way, even if I get 2-3 years out of the soil, it will save me so much money that I'm willing to deal with changing it after that. I can't keep spending this much money on root tabs. It's costing me so much. 😭 And even with the root tabs, my plants constantly look sickly and I struggle to keep enough nitrate/nutrients in the aquarium to make them look nice.

In a few months, I'm going to upgrade my 20g long to a 29 gallon and am researching the possibility of doing a dirted tank. Right now, root tabs are eating me out of house and home (for some reason, rooted plants grow much, much better in my hard water...) and I'm hoping doing a thin soil layer beneath a nice cap of sand or gravel might help mitigate the cost for a while. That said, I'm going to be doing a ton of research and slowly buying things for the new scape/tank over the winter, and would love some advice or resources that any of you have used before! Thanks in advance, and happy Almost-New-Year!

Can't imagine it would hurt anything, other than looking a bit dirty for a little while until it dissolves.

Yep. Mine does this regularly. Clean the impeller/impeller chamber really good and it will almost always start up again.

I've had awesome luck with Aqua Huna. I'm 5 or 6 orders in and have never had DOAs. I live in the middle of actual nowhere, so they take about 4 days to get to me, but the shipments are always very well packaged and the fish come healthy and good quality. Just remember that, like always, you should quarantine regardless of source.

And this is why we read all the way to the *bottom* of aquarium plant listings before buying a plant online... LOL. I wanted a cute medium sized anubius for my aquarium, to add some interest to the less heavily planted side. So I popped online to look. I found a leaf shape I liked, saw it said it was a "mother plant" so it could make babies, and thought, "Aww, how cute." Clearly, I was having a blonde day and didn't think, "Oh, I bet a mother plant is larger." The thought never even crossed my mind. I guess you live and you learn. 😆 (Cat for comparison LOL)

Hmm. Perhaps you could try dropping one in and then dimming the light/turning it off and watching to see if they go for it then? Maybe they're still feeling shy.