Brandy

You just have to have patience and wait-- the wood will stop eventually. Until then purigen helps, but water changes are the real solution in my opinion. You can overwhelm purigen in a few days, and there was not enough purigen space in my canister filter to keep up so I gave up and waited it out. Took a couple months.

I think all this advice is great, but just to rule out anything wacky, I would take a flashlight to your tank late at night, at a couple different times. See if you can catch the eating creature. Just in case you have another player sneakily hiding by day. It is an old gardening trick.

I definitely have fish nighmares. My partner thought it was a sign I should get out of the (clearly stressful) hobby...until I started telling him all the nightmares I have featuring HIM! Now he just thinks I should write screenplays.

You can probably move him, he is exposed and going to be treated either way. He may be bored/stressed or there may be another factor at play--we do have to be careful that we don't anthropomorphize animal behavior too much. It isn't that I don't think they can feel, just that their feelings arre unlikely to be aligned with ours, due to their dramatically different enviroment, intelligence and social structures. Because of that, I would double check the parameters of both tanks, and troubleshoot any OTHER factor that might be making him uncomfortable other than loss of tankmates, and if you move him and the behavior doesn't go away it may mean something else.

I mean... it seems clear to me. After you finish growing out fry it is the perfect time to get a pea puffer...

I find that my larrge pore ACO sponge do need cleaning less often, but the fine ones do more mechanical filtration....until they clog. I get the best of both worlds by running one of each on some of my messier larger tanks. Arguably a HOB would do the mechanical filtration better.

I have a small tank on my counter top in my kitchen. It is about 35" off the floor, and it is a 29 gallon tank, so only 18" deep. but the height of the tank is too much for me at 5'6". I use a step ladder, or the counter itself. I only really need to do that for replanting things or something, the gravel vac and long handled scraper blade can reach for me for routine stuff. I have a 40 breeder on the floor below a window, it has its own issues (hard to start a siphon, but still), but it is much easier to reach. even then, reaching the bottom in the back can be a stretch for me with my puny little arms. Comfortable to reach is pretty nice, but you spend less time scrabbling around in the substrate than you might think, so for me it is not a big consideration. If I had space, I would love about 100-125gallons as @MartyO says, as a big display tank, but that would also be my max. The big deal with a big tank is don't move house. They are heavy and akward to move. Any bigger than that and you get worried about getting them thru doors.

I have the same situation--very soft, acidic, unbuffered water at the tap, dramtically different parameters from tank to tank. I think this is a great PSA: never assume you know what is happening with your water, CHECK.

Hah, or just wait 5 minutes...:) If you build plant it, they will come.

You might also try vinegar. It should help dissolve hard water stains, but it might need to soak a bit. You don't want it IN the light, so a damp paper towel can help contain it.

Don't give up hope. I bought some fish from an ebay seller that were lost in transit for 10+days. They were skinny and stressed, but alive--not one DOA. Aqua Huna has an excellent reputation, and knows what they are doing. Hopefully the fish are packaged in such a way that you will be similarly lucky. Edit to add: Have high value frozen food on hand--something they will have trouble resisting. It was hard to get mine to eat at first. I would probably plop and drop, but don't assume they are in high ammonia--if they were fasted before hand, they may be ok.

Did you try a UV sterilizer yet? I had this ONE tank. Like you it was cloudy and brown. In my case I suspect I contaminated this tank with water from a live food culture. The water quality was great, but it was ugly and clearly the whatever it was had become the dominant active culture. I decided since it was free floating, I would try the UV sterilizer on it. It worked and did not recur.

Like @Daniel, I use cycled media or gravel from another tank, throw everything in (lightly stocked, lightly fed, WITH live plants, especially fast growing floaters) and just let it do it's thing. I have tried Seachem stability, and I do keep prime handy in case of a big ammonia spike, but I find I rarely need it. Cycled media is pretty great, and even "sensitive" fish seem to do well with this method. However, that means you have to have some cycled media--this is a little like starting sourdough from scratch, it is only hard the first time. Personally I think plants are the real magic--they don't mind ammonia, and they will keep your tank healthy while the bacteria gets established. When I started my first tank from scratch, I put in a bunch of live plants and waited until I had healthy new growth, then I added fish slowly. I never did see the "normal" ammonia curve, too many plants just sucked it up.

Put a bunch of solid black fish on it, the sort that are hard to photograph on a darker background. Make the hardscape sort of mid century modern white sputnik shapes with an island of valisnaria in the center, arranged in a rimless cube tank on a chrome stand in the middle of a monochromatic ultra modern room. It would still be the antithesis of what I normally try to create, but that is the only type of thing I can imagine, other than the typical "kids room" tank, where it clearly needs a castle and a unicorn and a guppy named Gloria.

Well, sadly I must report the score... Guppies: 0 Hydra: 9000 They, peck and recoil. Each guppy has tried a few times and then started avoiding them. Even my giant forever-hungry momma. Amusingly, the puffers come out to investigate...like "hey, whatcha doin'?" The guppy turned around and followed one, at 4x his size he was like "Woah, woah, I'm out!" I will just starve the tank of brine, it is not essential.

Ooof, I am out on both counts! lots of plants and lots of tanks! 🙂 But if I get an honorary mention, my only complaint is time, and water on the floor. I dream of a fully plumbed in system that can run to every room in my house. I have a really, really cool refill system built off this post here (thanks again, a thousand times, Bill!!): But I need to rig some kind of pump system to move water out (due to distances and elevations involved), and I do still like gravel vacs. The python has not worked for me, so I am still stuck with buckets.

Those tips are always welcome!! I think it is very worth remembering in discussions like this that our water is all different. My water is pH 6.6 or less at the tap, with 0kh and 0gh. I basically have RO water...or rainwater, which actually is where most of our water comes from here. It is "fresh" and "good", but if I put fish directly into it many of them would go into shock. I tend toward keeping a lot of SA fish, because of this. We all have to work with what we have. If I want to keep something that expects Texas water, it takes many inputs to make my water acceptable, and adding a bunch of my soft water frequently throws that off in a dangerous way. As @MJV Aquatics says, there is no such thing as too much fresh water, assuming the source water is good. But "good" is different things for different fish, and my clean, rainwater sourced water is not the best thing for guppies or african cichlids.

See, this is the thing, I don't have calcium in my water. I don't really seem to have anything in my water. I already have to tinker a lot to get a balanced system, add coral, check pH constantly...This may be why I am pretty convinced this can be done in the first place. If I had hard water I would have the opposite problem, worrying about building up minerals in my tank thru evaporation, and I would have to choose plants even more carefully, to strip minerals out of my water. You do have to watch a lot of things to get it really working. But that is the FUN of it!

You can bleach or boil equipment according to it's material. Rinse well after bleach, or let dry completely. I believe levamisole is shrimp/fish/invert safe when used at the dosage recommended by select aquatics. You should, unfortunately, treat all tanks in my opinion...at least all the tanks any infected fish spent time in. You should vacuum where you can reach, and do 2 treatements, 2 weeks apart. I do not think you will need to uproot your plants, in fact they will help. You need to be prepared for an ammonia spike. This is a result of dead worms or other suceptible microorganisims. This will be alleviated by vacuuming, water changes, and if necessary, dechlorinator.

@Angelfishlover I think a betta and shrimp could be ideal candidates for this effort as both are low bioload creatures. It will take a while to acheive and you will want your test kit handy, and you will want to be sure you are replacing calcium for the shrimp in some way. If this were my goal, I would start a tank with many plants, at least 10 gallon, and get the shrimp extablished next, with lots of hiding places inaccessible to the betta. Once they were multiplying, then I would add the Betta. I would be diligent in testing parameters and monitoring health. I think it would take me a solid year to get everything well established enough, but I suspect I could do it. I am tempted to try just to demonstrate how fabulous that could be.

I don't think the goal is to cheat fish or be lazy. I think the goal is stability and balance. At least that is my goal for some of my tanks. A goal I have not totally acheived, and one that I regularly disrupt with thoughtless actions (see my recent hydra issue, which has totally destabilized my previously nearly balanced tank, all brought on by my helpful addition of too much good food). But by keeping that goal in mind, I guide my actions to more and more healthy choices for the fish--a stable environment is the goal, and stable is healthy. In some cases frequent water changes are required to maintain that stability, such as overstocked grow out tanks. In my display tanks I strive for more plants than fish, which I find beautiful (but impractical to catch fish from) which incidentally makes those tanks lower maintenance. I think this is a possible and acheivable goal. Even an admirable one. The 16 tetras in the 200gallon tank (slight exaggeration) will be living their best life, the tank will be beautiful and plants will thrive...it may need maintenance in terms of plant removal and fertilizer addition, instead of water removal.

"He" didn't lay eggs...🤣

@Shmaty's pic has a defined head, and it is really bright red, so I think that is a bloodworm/midge fly larvae. @Gaara's pic does not have a defined head, is paler, and I think is a small leech. I had them in one of my tanks--have not seen them in a while, but assume they might still be there. neither is an intestinal parasite--callamanus are red, but I think typically smaller and rarely (if ever) seen alive out of their host.

I vote night needs to be a moonless, starless, black hole. I think, you have light on your tank that the algae can use that the plants cannot. I would normally also say you need more fertilizer. Maybe the fertilizer and blue light were a bad combination, or maybe you can add root tabs strategically? (pardon small tangental side rant) I do not understand the light manufacturers obsession with blue "night time" light. I live near the sea, and numerous fresh bodies of water, I have been swimming in all of those at night, and I can assure you, nothing like that happens at night. The water is ink black, and you can barely see. Pools. Swimming pools are blue at night. This is exactly why I have not opted for this light.

I have watched neocaridina shrimp ignore freshly hatched live baby brine, but then eat it once it is dead. I strongly suspect they are not hunters by nature, but true detritovores. I would assume any egg consumption would be incidental--like the possibility that otocinclus might occaisionally hoover up a newborn shrimplet--it is not their goal, it just got in their mouth. The only thing I have ever seen from them that looks like attack is when they will ride a snail, scratching at his shell--and I add calcium and that behavior goes away. However, that is ONE kind of shrimp. As @ererer points out, "shrimp" is a pretty broad category. I have seen an amano, supposedly a great algae eater, ignore algae and drag down small neocaridina, and half grown guppy fry. I would not trust an amano with eggs.