Brandy

They do look a little tucked up. I would feed often and try to get weight on them. If they don't fill out, do a round of paraclense.

Rams do this. As long as they are facing off, rather than one constantly chasing while the other is running scared, they will be ok. They are likely to be the same sex I would guess, but it is just a guess. To decrease (but not eliminate) the activity, add more decor/plants to obscure lines of sight and open spaces, but they will still find a way to spar.

How about, Instead of ammo lock or prime, you get some plants in the tank? Even just pothos, with leaves out the top, and roots in. It won't cycle your tank, but it will serve the purpose of sucking up excess ammonia without chemicals. Once it starts to grow you should see ammonia levels drop, and you can drop the chemical use to zero. You can control climbing pH by using distilled water if necessary, and falling pH with dechlorinated tap water. Just as suggested, also try to get some material from an established tank. Then STOP changing water. Top up only. Feed every other day, about 5 pellets per betta. For like a month. Maybe even 2. Maybe even forever--because the plants are going to suck up so much ammonia and nitrates that basically it won't matter at all, and you will have to feed more and possibly even start fertilizing them just to keep them growing. Basically, even with your air scrubber, if you add gravel from an established tank, the water itself would prevent the "sanitizing ions" from affecting your cycle. Water is a pretty good ionic barrier. I think you may have less bacteria in the air to seed the tank, and bottled bacteria is notoriously unreliable. That said, once you introduce live bacteria below the water's surface it will do fine regardless of what is going on elsewhere in the house, but if you are removing 3g from a 5g tank every few days, you are killing off all the bacteria that was on surfaces above the waterline for however long it took you to refill--even without the air scrubber that is true.

I mean, kinda... I use really high light and a contrasting background. I have a tendancy to cull by putting everything I can catch in a dip and pour or similar container, and then putting it in bright light and sorting one by one to two other containers--keep and cull. If I see an obvious cull like a rilli pattern, or a super light shrimp, I just cull it directly to the acara tank. You don't really have to hurry to cull until your females are big enough to have visible saddles.

@kammaroon is totally right!

Start slow. The guppies/mollies and the cardinals typically want different water hardness, so you may want to check yours and aim for the middle. You can put in a group of small scchooling fish at the same time and they will do better than just a few, but don't put in the whole community at once.

C'mon, there is always "pico"...

I think it is some kind of bladderwort. It is sometimes considered a pest in mosses. You should be able to remove it manually.

Yes, you can treat with IchX and Maracyn at the same time. If you don't see Ich, you can treat just with maracyn and wait to see if the ich recurrs, but ichX also helps with finrot sometimes as it has an antifungal effect.

Feed less. Like snails more food = more breeding. They can eat exclusively algae and biofilm, or they can eat small amounts of fish food, veggies, etc. No, you don't need either. At the most you could add an airstone, but even that is not necessary. Do small weekly water changes and you will be fine. Start with 4-10. Provide wood, plants rocks. More surface area the better. I would say with good water changes, feeding, and some live plants you can probably house 20-30/gallon. As a teen, you may want to breed them as fast as possible, actually. If you put them up on a local site like Craigslist you can easily sell them for a dollar or two each, and use that as fish money!

I am not a rainbow fish expert but the rule of thumb is that animals of different genus do not typically hybridize--though there are exceptions, which always makes me wonder if they aren't actually misclassified. I would agree that they are not likely to hybridize. IF they did, offspring would likely be infertile and visibly different from both parents.

I think a 40breeder would be ok. They seem to appreciate a vertical space more than horizontal, though of course the caveats of water quality vs. bioload and bigger-is-always better apply.

I managed to pull one THROUGH a siphon tube once. His fins were never the same, and it hurt to look at him. I am sorry.

So...I agree with everything said here. Scuds are harmless. However, just as some people don't like snails, some people, like my kid, are super creeped out by scuds--to the shudder level. If one of those people were reading this and wanted to know how to get rid of them in a shrimp tank, I would say remove your shrimp colony to a second, bare bottom tank, where you can feed them and temporarily house them. Then put a predator fish in the tank that will eat the scuds..and unfortunately any remaining baby shrimp. Something like a dwarf cichlid or dwarf loach. Then take the predator out and return the shrimp colony to their new scud free home. This of course works better for someone who has multiple tanks.

Blackline rasbora aka red tailed rasbora? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackline_rasbora

If you don't want it I'll take it. I agree with what @mikrogeophagus says in principle, but the face of the glass toward the stress (water pressure) is sound. The thing has good silicone and is holding water. I would not put it in a gymnasium, and I would avoid vibrations (maybe don't install this in your RV?) but in a normally quiet adult household this would not concern me overly. In the bedroom of rambuncious twin 10y.o. boys I might hesitate. Really it comes down to risk tolerance. I would weigh the potential for slow leaks and cracks (higher than a brand new tank) against the cost savings (100%) and consider if the cost of the new tank is worth the potential cost of failure TO YOU. I live in a 5th floor apartment. Yeah, catastrophic failure of 80gallons is going to cost me more than an 80 gallon tank, but I judge it as an unlikely outcome. A crack? I will be home, hear it, bail and salvage everyone, it would be highly inconvenient, but probably not a huge problem on my cement floor.

meh, the duckweed would have happened anyway! 🤣

I have tried tetras from a LFS, big box, and direct shipped. It all depends on the LFS. If your LFS is the CoOP, and they QT and medicate, then it is crazy worth it, as the dieoff likely happened in THEIR QT. The higher price represents their loss rate as well as the extra time and care. If you don't have that, buy cheap and expect a long QT and potential heavy losses.

So, my GBR spawned in the substrate last night in a dark corner. So far they are being really good taking turns guarding. But I am tempted to pull some...Because it is a sickness with me, lol. Lucky for me the serving spoons belong to me. I immediately thought of this thread when I saw it. Crazily, I was cleaning and gravel vaccing last night, and they kept hanging over that area. I did not even think of it. I am surprised the have any left.

Interesting how this has struck a chord. I will never become an urban fish farmer on a large scale, that is for sure. However my skills are varied, and I can forsee a time when I am nearing retirement and I can just do what I want and the various things will give me "enough" to make it. My grandfather worked his whole life in the timber industry, and was incredibly good at what he did, sought after, commanded a high salary for someone who left school in the 6th grade to support his brothers and sisters during the depression. By the end of his life, with careful saving and investment, he died quite wealthy (he also saved and reused paper towels, so he was not living the high life, lol). My grandfather also had a huge and varied skill set and was good at nearly anything he set his hand to. I am fortunate to have that adaptability from him. He retired in his early sixties and took up his first love, painting. By my teens he was making more painting than he had while working. He became locally famous. Posthumously his art is featured in several museums. Not that I think he would care--He just loved painting. He really lived his whole life, every minute. I kinda hope one day I will be able to say the same. Honestly, my story arc has been a modern retelling in many ways, so I wouldn't be surprised, at the end of my life, to be able to say I did it. I think the fish just remind me that is what I really love--making things. I do have a dream research job, but as I move up I spend less time at the bench than I would like and more time mentoring and managing people (a bit like Cory spends less time in his fish room than he would like). It is satisfying but stressful, and in an uncertian pandemic, doubly so. It is good to have reminders of who we really are along the way, bright spots that help us remember why we took up this heap of work to begin with and where we are headed.

Yeah, Cory did a video (link in the thread above) where he got rummy nose in 2 big batches from the same vendor a week apart, and kept them in identical tanks, fed the same food, same filtration, same water, same meds. One batch had minimal losses and thrived, the other was decimated, and the difference was just shocking. It is my experience with the common tetras in general that if they make it thru the first few weeks they are nice and hardy, but some just arrive too stressed to make it, and they decline and die rapidly. They don't take to shipping well at all, and unless you are in the tropics they are unlikely to be locally raised. Of all the fish to quarentine, a big batch of tetras is the most critical in my opinion.

My grandfather had a built pond with a waterfall below his deck stocked with farmed rainbow trout. He bought fingerlings, fed them up, and in the summer we kids would fish off the deck for dinner. It was as big as a small swimming pool. I keep picturing that, but with a window in the side, that you could see from inside the house. In my fantasy-land I have a window running the length of a room looking out into an outdoor underwater world. I actually think I could DIY that if I built a house. That might sound crazy, but I watched my grandfather build his, and I am pretty capable. My family are all builders of one sort or another. My tastes are just a little less conventional.

Maybe if I get rich I will just do it as an outdoor thing, with a viewing window, lol.

This is normal. Females are fatter than males, and tho they may be spawning, likely eggs and fry would be getting eaten. Also they eat like piglets--no off switch. If you keep putting in food they will act ravenous every time. It is just their normal state. So take care not to overfeed the tank, and if you have other fish gauge the amount of food by how long it takes them to stop being interested, not by the tetras.

@Bill Smith definitely set the tone for high end DIY!! It encouraged me to try more things and I have loved using his ideas as my MTS has advanced...I am grateful for the post-mortem, as I hope to have an outdoor pond set up perhaps this fall, or maybe next year. Guppies will be on the list, and platies also seem like a fantastic idea, but my ultimate goal is a year round white cloud and cherry shrimp pond, where I have been secretly dreaming of working with @WhitecloudDynasty's long finned golds.