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
    That I should be so lucky--I got them yesterday. I think their companions might have a feast, but I will keep my eyes open.
  2. Brandy
    Lol, having just bought corys in a school of 6 for the first time, I am seeing this and LOOOVING it. I also am very glad the search feature exists, and that this post was so well named that I could find it. Mine do forage some of the time and look like a little fleet of roombas. They also are absolutely fearless. This makes me very happy. I wish all fish were bold. I think I am developing a fish "type" that I love--"happy" and not fearful or reclusive.
  3. Brandy
    Undoubtedly they came from the plants. Mostly we tend to agree that snails are beneficial (someone will be sure to disagree lol) as they clean up algae and spilled food. Some people find them unsightly. Your options are hand picking them when you see them as you just did, traping them (generally only partially successful), or adding a fish, such as a dwarf chain loach, that thinks they are a delicious snack. Personally I am very happy to have snails in all my tanks. They eat dead plant matter and wasted food that my lazier fish ignore, and let me feed fry tanks heavily without worrying that I will end up with rotting food. I also have a few fish that think they are a treat. My pea puffers eat almost exclusively snails, and my cichlids love it when I toss in a handful that have gotten too big for the puffers.
  4. Brandy
    blood worms. It started with frozen, but even just the water out of the tanks I had fed was enough to have my face swelling and my skin and throat itching. Even being in the room while someone else fed it to a tank 6 feet away. I am very careful to avoid that ingredient, though I am not positive that dried would cause the same reaction. 10-15 years ago it did not affecct me, this was new this year.
  5. Brandy
    Now I need to smell some... I can verify that it doesn't actually TASTE like cilantro!
  6. Brandy
    I feel like Hikari vibrabites are a good size for most of my mid-sized fish, but all the little ones (guppies) get Fluval Bug bites flakes. I also have Hikari Cichlid Gold for the Acaras. None of these are particularly cheap, but I found out I am wicked allergic to some of the ingredients in other food. I am sure they work fine for the fish, but I would like to not die, sooo...I read labels religiously and if there isn't a clear list of ingredients I just assume it is a nope.
  7. Brandy
    That's it. We can't be friends anymore. Lol, I think guppies look weird and bloated sometimes. They aren't a svelte streamlined torpedo for sure. It bugs my BF I think, and I kinda see why. But mixing and matching colors is so gratifying that they become addictive. I actually feel meh about a lot of fish initially. They grow on you somehow.
  8. Brandy
    If you really went crazy with them, you can gravel vac. The thing is, the gel caps disintegrate fast and even if you fish out the remnants you may leave the fertilizer behind in the substrate.
  9. Brandy
    Never mind!
  10. Brandy
    Not "bored". "Board veteran" I think. Tho by that time they might also be bored!🤪
  11. Brandy
    @Fish Folkwhat did those jugs hold originally?
  12. Brandy
    I like this idea, especially the way you have the jugs set up, but this is waaaay too daunting for me. @Daniel's story of his son wishing for broken legs to avoid having to take care of betta jars seems a cautionary tale! I am looking forward to living vicariously through you on youtube, tho!
  13. Brandy
    So no further losses, bbs hatching issues sorted out, everybody is getting bigger... This morning the parents were looking at a rock intently. I went to clean a 10 gallon, came back, and caught them in the act! Male is easy to determine now, with longer dorsal and larger size overall.
  14. Brandy
    So I think Cory nailed it. I lowered the airflow and immediately the hatch rate is back up. I suspect that cooler temps at night plus the boiling level of airflow was at least slowing my hatch, and also pushing eggs up on the side of my container, where they may have dried out. I am back to a beautifully gold hatch, and my fish thank you all, especially the fry.
  15. Brandy
    Plecos. PTSD from childhood. Those common plecos get huge and totally freaked me out as a kid.
  16. Brandy
    Hi all. Using ACO bbs, aquarium salt and baking soda. 3x in a row my hatch has largely failed. I had incredible success previously, and suddenly am getting less than 10% hatch...over a 24h window. I actually looked really closely at the floating "shells" It is about 50% dead hatched brine. I am flummoxed. So they hatch and...die? Why? Baking soda and salt have not changed. I changed out my nano air pump for a new one...can the air flow be too high? Or temp? It is about 80-81...provided by a incandescent bulb, that is only on in the day. I suspect it gets cooler at night.
  17. Brandy
    Makes me kinda wish I had stuck to my original GT plan, rather than being seduced away by electric blue acaras. I do love them, but they are probably about as interactive as the angelfish. Though the male is very aware of where I am when I get near the tank.
  18. Brandy
    Hmm, that looks a lot like the floating "bio balls" that came as media in a filter I had once.
  19. Brandy
    Doo eeet!! Easiest way to scavenge nitrate...There was a cool old mom and pop hippie run LFS in oregon in the 90s that had all their tanks rigged on a filtration system that had the water hydroponically growing various houseplants in PVC troughs at the back of every rack. I miss that place soooo much. At the time I could barely believe it was worth it--now I KNOW it saved them tons in terms of water changes.
  20. Brandy
    I can't say how they did it, but if it were me I would use a ball made of styrofoam and glue the moss to it. A ping pong ball might also work but if it punctured it would sink. I do know @James Black is right about the fishing line.
  21. Brandy
    While I am not the boss of how easy green is made or produced, anything that is non-toxic to shrimp, snails, plants, fish, and amphibians, I would consider very likely safe for the MUCH less sensitive large mammal like a human. Most things we use on food crops are NOT fish or invertebrate safe.
  22. Brandy
    Oddly, it arrived round... and I do like it. It is fairly flexible, and could probably be bent to suit. I have successfully used a plastic bottle shrimp trap, built much like a minnow trap, and that is great, but honestly, I like the net better. It is neater and more precise, and they get smart after you catch the whole colony a time or two. If you do try the yogurt container, consider standing it up vertically and then lifting quickly.
  23. Brandy
    You will need your temp higher, I would shoot for at least 80deg, mine are at 82. Mine do not bother my otos at all. I have a few cherry shrimp in the tank and they have survived due to heavy plant cover. If they can find one they will eat it, especially a young one. If you have enough cover and food, the shrimp will breed anyway. I doubt they will care about the schooling fish, and your schools will be tighter because of them. They are opportunists in my experience, eating the shrimp that nearly lands on their face. They will chase a school for about 5 minutes before they decide the fish are too fast and too much effort to eat. From that moment on, they ignore it.
  24. Brandy
    @Mmiller2001 Nice! I like that he gives specifics of the dosing, and yeah, because he is starting from RO his water IS basically mine, and he is adding a TON of stuff, and running a very high tech system. I will give it a closer read because that is a great resource, but it sounds like he really did choose plants that liked what he wantted to do--perfect advice for anyone. Thank you for posting this!
  25. Brandy
    This is all good advice, especially about the lights and budget. Also the part where "your mileage may vary". I agree you don't HAVE to use root tabs and I originally resolved not to. I also discovered later that some plants do so much better with them that tucking one in now and then is very worth it to me. You can skip the root tabs, but they are also a tool that can sometimes help. The tank which has no tabs in Mmiller2001's pic may have more minerals in the water than I have. Or they planted it less than a week ago. Note the tidy evenly spaced planting in the foreground with bare substrate between. That is not a tank that has been set up a long time with this scape. It might be a tank that had fish for a long time and had lots of nutrients built up in the substrate. But to me that is a freshly planted scape, and though beautiful, would take significant effort to maintain in this format.
×
×
  • Create New...