Jump to content
Watch our video on the rules of this forum.

Brandy

Moderators
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,760

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    24

  • Feedback

    0%

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Brandy

  1. Brandy
    yeah, you have to search your email.
  2. Brandy
    Mine does stuff like that too. I do think some of it is that it wants a TON of potassium, which my water has very little of, and that it has to adapt. The plantlets seem much more robust, but I have also heavily started supplementing with potassium.
  3. Brandy
    I also wonder about this. That seems high enough to be a corrosion issue for pipes.
  4. Brandy
    You are going to see the algae thrive at first when you add nutrients. Your plants are deficient tho. If you continue to add nutrients the plants will catch up and start gowing. You will need to hold the line with manual removal for probably a week or two while they catch up. Hang in there and it will work. It is like weeds in the yard, they are quicker on the uptake at first, but eventually a healthy lawn will crowd them out.
  5. Brandy
    The only case where I have done any real acclimation was when I had fish shipped from a very hard water/high pH area to my very low pH soft water. I dramatically increased my water hardness in advance in their new home, and slightly raised the pH. But as the fish were heavily stressed when they came in after a long shipping, I tested the bag water, determined I was close enough, temperature acclimated them and then netted and added to the tank--Over the next months I have been dropping the TDS and pH slowly with small weekly water changes. Most of the time I am very likely to plop and drop.
  6. Brandy
    I have cleared scutariella with 4 weekly single doses of paraclense/praziquantel. One dose will clear visible external parasites, but you have to wait for molts to get all the eggs.
  7. Brandy
    I would get fewer Otos. Maybe 3 tops, and you will still need to target feed them. They can be hard to keep fed and while it seems like a lot of algae, they eat a LOT of it. I know they want a school, but they will shoal with other fish, like the corys, and starving is more detrimental than isolation. I think a school of small fish would be very doable...I wonder if chili rasboras would work with honey gouramis? They are so tiny I think you could have many of them--like a crazy school of 10-15+. Alternatively I think you could do 8 black neon tetras or ember tetras, and of course neons, they are always a good choice.
  8. Brandy
    As I recall from keeping rabbits, the urine is very "hot" with lots of ammonia. The pellets not so much, but most rabbits use the same location for both activities. I think your best bet would be to make a mini test with a single liter of water with a single pellet. Test the water after 1 day and 2 days. Compare to ammonia, nitrate, nitrite levels in a container of water with a sqirt of easy green or a conventional root tab.
  9. Brandy
    Well, if you are wanting to keep them alive, you can just let them hatch, and feed them...You will need to do frequent water changes, and remove any dead eggs or fry as soon as you see them. I don't know that a Blood parrot dad is going to eat the babies, but I don't know that he wont. Fish eat fry in response to stress, moving him to an unfamiliar tank might provoke that, or it might not. But the 5 gallon will stay cleaner without him, and I don't think the fry require him, so I would leave him out. I learned most of what I know about pulling eggs from watching ACO videos of @Dean’s Fishroom and @Fish Folk's videos, so that is a good place to start I suspect.
  10. Brandy
    I do not notice a lag. I would expect to see a high level of nitrate within an hour of dosing, then see it taper off over days. If you doubt your test kit at all, remove a single cup of tank water, put a full dose in, stir, and test that. If that cup doesn't have off the charts nitrate, something is wrong with your test.
  11. Brandy
    I know a lot of people find they are super agressive, in my case they are very very well fed and I think that is helping, but I also think they are young. The day may come when everything changes, but so far they are really just death to any snail in the tank, and the baby brine leftovers I sometimes put in. I can tell I have a male and 2 females, but the male is not in breeding coloration (no dark stripe yet) and so I assume that may up his agression level if and when he matures. He has gotten larger, but they are still pretty small. I also would love to breed them, but I think it will be a long shot for me.
  12. Brandy
    I had some brighty K that was given to me--waaay too rich for my blood. I bought Seachem potassium.
  13. Brandy
    You can absolutely vaccum it out. detritus itself is not a problem, particularly in a planted tank. It can be unsightly, and some people hate the look of it. The sponge filter is enough to keep fish healthy. You also don't need a microwave or a dishwasher either--but some people swear by those too. I think your best bet is to try it, it is the cheapest option. Then if you don't love it, try a more expensive option. I hated the mess maintaining a canister filter made of my house. I like my sponges because I can neglect them and they still work, this fish will live. If life gets busy, I can do a straight water change now and then and have a healthy tank no matter. I am not going to be overwhelmend by the maintenance. For me the trade off is that I have to fiddle around doing gravel vacs more often now to maintain the same appearance, but I don't mind.
  14. Brandy
    This is a really valid point. Sponge filters do a great job keeping water quality high and oxygenated, but they don't polish water or pile mulm up neatly in a bin for you like a HOB. When I switched my 29g display from a canister to 2 sponge filters, I was SHOCKED at the amount of mulm that suddenly appeared everywhere. Luckily with my substrate that really is not a big deal, but I would feel otherwise in some tanks.
  15. Brandy
    You are right that your nitrites need to come down. But your nitrates need to go UP. I would just start by trying to hold the nitrates at 20ppm, and see if that amount of easy green solves most of the other problems. I have seen that staghorn in my tanks likes high light low nutrients. I would therefore fertilize more and stick with the lower light setting until your plants start to grow more.
  16. Brandy
    Personally I think in this case it is more about the water flow than anything. If you have 2, regardless of size, there will be fewer dead zones.
  17. Brandy
    I have used it in tanks with day old fry. It did not kill my fish.
  18. Brandy
    So interestingly, my pea puffers ignore my neocaridina shrimp adults. They may eat juveniles, but I haven't seen it. The shrimp colony eats the snail remnants, and I just toss in a handful of snails when my other tanks get overrun.
  19. Brandy
    You can suse the plants to gauge the amount of fertilizer. Start with the reccomended 1 pump/10 gallons/week. Do that for 2-3 weeks. If your plants look very happy, good. If they look pale and weak, move to 2x/week, and wait 2-3weeks again... Observation is not as exact or precise, but it is effective. However, I would suggest at least some test strips, if you ever have a problem, they are a good way to figure out what might be going on. Tetra and API both have strips that are reasonably accurate to ballpark what is going on with water quality, and you can cut strips in half lengthwise to get more tests per package.
  20. Brandy
    Currently they are in a 12 gallon cube. the little ones are about the size of a pumpkin seed. The big ones are about 1.5 inches. The plan is to split the little guys across multiple small tanks and return the bigger guys to the 40 breeder if mom and dad will allow. Getting them to sellable size is going to be a challenge, but they are growing fast and well on a diet of unlimited live BBS. I have introduced crushed flake and they have accepted it, but I am leaning heavily on the BBS. This is not sustainable, so I need to move them soon.
  21. Brandy
    I get 18-24h hatch generally. my house is warm, and I keep a light on the hatchery during the day to keep it warmer. When the brine starts to hatch you will notice the water looks golden orange. when you pull the airline in about 5 minutes my brine settles. I dont use an airstone, just an open line, and I also put the light at the bottom, both to get more heat on the hatchery (heat rises) and because the brine will actively swim towards the light.
  22. Brandy
    So here we are with the 2 batches of fry heavily overstocked in their tiny grow out (daily 50% water changes, fry soon to be divided). The parents spawned again last night and thankfully not one egg remained by 10am today. In the middle of the pic you can see a 2 month old against his one month old siblings. Hard to catch in the photo, but the 2 month olds have the beginning of orange tips on their dorsal.
  23. Brandy
    Nitrogen cycle 101: waste makes ammonia--think of urine. Ammonia is very poisonous to fish, but it is fertilizer to plants and food for some types of bacteria. The bacteria that eats ammonia makes waste (again think of urine) that is nitrIte. NitrIte is still toxic to fish, but it is stil fertilizer for plants and food for some OTHER types of bacteria. The OTHER bacteria eat the NitrIte and make NitrAte as waste. NitrAte is still fertilizer for plants, but much less toxic for fish. What you are doing when you cycle your tank is growing colonies of these two types of bacteria. They multiply fast, but not instantly. You feed the first type, and it starts eating, the second type then start eating, and if you imagine how they are eating and multiplying you can see that you wont convert every single ammonia molecule to a NitrIte molecule instantly. It is a process and there will be overlap. Once your colonies of bacteria are big enough they eat continuously and you wont be able to measure ammonia unless you do something like drop a whole can of food in there at once. Then we say the tank is "fully cycled".
  24. Brandy
    get a little net with super fine mesh. It will make your life sooo much easier. https://www.amazon.com/Carefree-Fish-Aquarium-Stainless-Extendable/dp/B07VC36H7Q/ref=pd_lpo_199_t_2/136-9594325-1777816?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B07VC36H7Q&pd_rd_r=a4ddfe61-5f09-4359-b52e-dfdcb3db7a8e&pd_rd_w=dItQW&pd_rd_wg=9xmH0&pf_rd_p=16b28406-aa34-451d-8a2e-b3930ada000c&pf_rd_r=BF352SD82C8RBY5RQNA7&psc=1&refRID=BF352SD82C8RBY5RQNA7
  25. Brandy
    Yeah long term would be no...but if your QT was recently set up it might not have much biofilm or algae.
×
×
  • Create New...